SETI smart-phone app could help find E.T.

Consumer Reports News: March 10, 2011 03:36 PM

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setiQuest Explorer could help experts find
out if there's other intelligent life in the universe.
Photo: NASA.gov

Is there intelligent life out there in space? Your smart phone may help scientists answer that question. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute will soon launch an app that anyone can download and help SETI figure out if we are not alone in the universe.

The app, called setiQuest Explorer, is designed to work with the Google Sky app and the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a huge complex of satellite dish antennas in California designed to pick up radio signals from space. Users of the SETI app are assigned certain sections of the starry sky to take a look at. Tapping on a celestial target brings up images of black-and-white dots--the visual representation of the radio signals being captures by the ATA in near-real time.

If SETI smart-phone watchers spot a pattern within the dots, they can compare it to a set of patterns representing known causes--say, interfering signals from an Earth satellite. If the pattern is unidentified, users can then tag the image as "unknown." And if a number of app users see and report a similar unfamiliar pattern for that same section of sky, SETI experts will conduct a more detailed analysis.

This isn't the first time SETI has turned to "crowd-sourcing"--using a large, diffused community of lay people for a specific task. The SETI@Home project, run by the University of California at Berkeley, uses the processing power of idle computers worldwide to analyze outer space data. But while such distributed-computing networks are great for crunching raw-numbers data and spotting known patterns, they can't discovering unidentified patterns as the human eye and mind say SETI experts.

The SETI app, for smart phones powered by the Google Android OS version 2.2 or later and computers with Adobe Flash Player 10.2, is expected to be available later in March. An iPhone app will reportedly be ready by this summer.

--Paul Eng

SETI app taps your smartphone to hunt for E.T. [CNET]
The SETI Institute website [SETI]
The setiQuest Explorer [SETI]

—Paul Eng