Twenty Years of Serendip, The Berkeley Seti Effort: Past Results and Future Plans

Abstract

The Berkeley SETI effort has been ongoing for more than twenty years. During this period we have carried out extensive SETI searches, but of at least equal importance, we have been on the forefront of instrumentation development, the development of interference rejection and detection algorithms, and educational efforts. Our instrumentation has evolved from a 100 channel spectrometer (SERENDIP I) to our latest machine (SERENDIP IV) with 168 million channels. In addition to supporting our SETI work, our hardware has been used by NASA for RFI surveys and to check the Mars Survey relay transmitter. Our designs have influenced several of the major SETI hardware systems, and a SERENDIP III system is currently being used in the Ohio State SETI group. Our hardware has also been incorporated in pulsar instrumentation at NAIC (Arecibo), NRAO (Greenbank) and Bonn, Germany. We have just completed a 4 year search at the world’s largest radio telescope at Arecibo. We covered 93% of the observable sky at least once, and 44% of the sky at least 5 times, with a sensitivity of ~ 3 × l0−25Wm−2. We collected and analyzed information from over 1014spectral bins and logged and analyzed over 2 × 108signals of potential special interest. We have developed extensive analysis programs to identify and remove interference and to search for signal characteristics which are expected from an extraterrestrial signal. Our algorithms were successful in removing all but 0.01% of spurious RFI in the Arecibo data set. We have involved over 30 undergraduate and graduate students in our effort, and 5 Master's theses have been awarded for work on the SERENDIP project. Our next effort will use our SERENDIP IV hardware at Arecibo Observatory to carry out a 21 cm survey of the Arecibo sky.

Status of the UC-Berkeley SETI efforts

“…During these twenty five years, SERENDIP's sensitivity has improved by a factor of ten thousand and the number of channels has increased from one hundred to more than one hundred million. 6,7 The latest SERENDIP sky survey, SERENDIP V.v, began in earnest in 2009. Observations are ongoing.…”

A New Major Seti Project Based on Project Serendip Data and 100,000 Personal Computers

“…Seti@home is a "piggyback" survey based on the Serendip IV survey, which itself is a piggyback survey operating on the 305-m Arecibo telescope. Serendip IV, which will begin operations on the newly upgraded Arecibo dish in 1997, is described (along with its predecessor) by Bowyer et al (1997) elsewhere in this volume. The basic idea is that a separate Serendip receiver and data processor "rides around" on the Arecibo feed platform as normal radio astronomy is carried out.…”