In 1993, the United States Congress stopped funding for a project which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, had embarked upon in the previous year. The Microwave Observing Program, MOP, had been conceived as a long term project which would address a major problem that had been faced by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) investigators to wit: if a particular search was tightly focussed on a particular area of the sky, it necessarily failed to observe any other part of the sky thereby running the risk of missing any possible transmissions that might come from the rest of the sky; however, if the search was more broadly based, then there was the risk that it would miss out on a transmission from a particular point simply because it was not focussed upon that particular point at the time the transmission came.
MOP was designed to tackle this problem. Firstly, it was intended that by means of a “targeted search” it would examine some 800 specific nearby stars for evidence of any radio transmissions of interest; and, secondly, it was also the intention that by means of a broader “sky survey” it would carry out a general search of the entire sky in case any desirable signals came from some other place than the targeted locations.
Following the cancellation of the NASA program by Congress, SETI enthusiasts were quite understandably upset; however they were determined that this laudable program would not go down the drain because of political indifference and ways were sought whereby the program could be continued. One of the outcomes of this determination on the part of SETI enthusiasts is the SETI League.
The SETI League (www.setileague.org) is a membership funded non profit organisation with well in excess of a thousand members, both professional and amateur radio astronomers under the directorship of Professor H. Paul Shuch, the man who developed the first commercial home satellite receiver.
Pioneering the conversion of ordinary 3-5 metre TV dishes to radio astronomy grade dishes, the League is dedicated to carrying out the sky survey portion of the previous NASA program (the targeted search portion of the project is undertaken by the SETI Institute (www.seti.org), another non profit organisation, under the name Project Phoenix). Under the auspices of its Project Argus (named for the hundred eyed Cyclops that guarded the garden where Hera’s, queen of the gods in ancient Greek religion, golden apples grew), the League is building and coordinating the operations of a worldwide network of small amateur built radio telescopes that will carry on the all important sky survey.
Since 1995, when the league was set up, well over a hundred amateur radio telescopes have been installed in more than 20 countries worldwide with more expected to come online in the coming months and years. The idea is to eventually have enough radio telescopes all over the globe so as to carry out a continuous, real time survey of the entire sky.
