Quest for aliens comes Downunder

Jill Tarter, one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, is giving a lecture in Auckland today.

Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence is an unforgiving task, but the woman who inspired the creation of Jodie Foster's character Ellie Arroway in the movie Contact seems to take it in her stride.

Dr Jill Tarter is the director at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) in Mountain View, California.

She is speaking at an open lecture at Auckland University of Technology today about her job of pulling signals out of cosmic noise in the universe.

Tarter is not just a heavyweight in astronomical circles, she has also been selected by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential and powerful people - and she is determined to find alien life.

She travels around the world to present lectures and papers at scientific conferences and her awards are impressive.

They include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Women in Aerospace, two Public Service Medals from North American Space Agency and the 2001 Tesla Award of Technology at the Telluride Tech Festival.

Now she is most excited about the Allen Telescope Array telescope which, when complete, will be one of the largest and most powerful telescopes in the world.

It used to be known as the One Hectare Telescope and is a joint effort by SETI and the University of California, Berkeley.

Co-founder of Microsoft Paul Allen and Microsoft's former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold have provided initial funding for the telescope, which can be operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Tarter said the new telescope uses 350 6m dishes, which are widely separated and aligned with the rotation of the Earth, which helps to distinguish between what is here and what is far away. It will make possible large, deep radio surveys that were not previously feasible.

The telescope's features include hydroformed antenna surfaces and a feed covering the entire range of frequencies from 500mhz to 11.2ghz.

It will permit an expansion from Project Phoenix's stellar reconnaissance of 1000 stars to 100,000 or possibly one million nearby stars.

Every dish which makes up the telescope is 6m in diameter, so the telescope will be 2100m in diameter.

Half of the telescopes in the central core could be located in the Western Australian desert, and the central plateau in the North Island is also another possible site for telescopes, said Tarter.

Why is the Western Australian desert such a good location for a telescope?

"The lack of people, literally," she said. "We pick up a lot of radio pollution, garage doors opening, radios, and spend quite a bit of time distinguishing and filtering out the signals using special-purpose processing equipment."

Tarter is not shy to reveal one of the main reasons for her trip - SETI needs more money to finish building the telescope. It has been a struggle to fund the cost telescope at US$50 million ($82.6 million), but Tarter said using old methods would cost US$300 to US$500 million.

"We are using technology from the telecommunications industry and manufacturing industry, which has pushed the cost down," she said.

The construction of the telescope began after Paul Allen gifted US$13.5 million to the project. The institute named the telescope in his honour.

So, have there been any sightings of ET yet?

"There have been no announcements of ET technology," said Tarter.

Over the past 15 years, SETI has picked up a handful of industrial signals which it could not explain, but has since discovered they were not from distant stars.

Tarter is also dedicated to mentoring young people about scientific literacy, particularly girls and young women.

When Tarter first went into the space research field, she met a lot of "cultural bias".

She is disturbed by the confusing mix of religion and science that the Bush Administration is pushing.

"This cannot be tolerated in the future because our world is getting so technically complex."

A book about Tarter aimed at young readers, called Looking for Life in the Universe, explores her work and the idea of extraterrestrial life.

Tarter's lecture is at the AUT lecture theatre at 4pm today.