Project Phoenix - SETI

Project Phoenix ran from February 1995 until March 2004. It performed radio observations of over 700 Sun-like stars within 200 light-years of Earth. Although 700 is a fairly large number of stars, remember that this is only a very small fraction of the whole Milky Way galaxy which has 100 to 400 billion stars and is a total of 100,000 light years across. The SETI search listened for signals at frequencies between 1,200 to 3,000 Mhz. The channels were 0.7 Hz wide, i.e. over 2 billion channels were studied. The project listened for 100 to 550 seconds per star per frequency channel. No evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence was found.

Phoenix began observations in February 1995 using the Parkes 64 meter radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia. This is the largest radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere.

From September 1996 through April 1998 the project returned to the Northern Hemisphere and used the 42 meter telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.

From 1998 to March 2004 Phoenix used the 305 meter Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. This is the world's largest radio telescope. It is a fixed dish built into the Peurto Rican landscape. Each Spring and Autumn there was a three-week observing session.

The signals were processed and verfied in real-time using techniques pioneered by Paul Horowitz of Harvard University. The 76 meter radio dish at Jodrell Bank, UK, was used as a secondary telescope to detect and eliminate interference.

During the entire 9 years of the project no evidence of eti was found. However much about the search for ETI was learned and the scientific papers are still being written up.

Pheonix was privately funded by the non-profit SETI Institute. The SETI Institute now plans to continue searching for ETI through the new Allen Telescope Array Project (ATA Project).

Incidently, the Pioneer 10 space probe was used by Project Phoenix for calibration and testing. Pioneer 10 was launched in March 1972 to study the outer planets. The mission ended in March 1997 but continues to emit a very weak signal. This signal is only a few watts in power, i.e. the strenth of a flashlight, and at over 10 billion Kilometers away the signal takes 10 hours to reach Earth. Yet still this signal could be easily detected by Arecibo. Pioneer 10 continues to travel towards teh constallation of Taurus. It will reach a star in that constellation in 2 million years time.