Word: physicist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...earphones in astonishment after hearing four telltale beeps. Pure fiction, say scientists--and not only because of her hokey headset. When extraterrestrials finally make themselves known, they may not use radio at all. Instead, they're just as apt to signal us with beams of light. Says physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.: "It's foolish to try to guess what an extraterrestrial civilization might use. You ought to try all available technologies to detect...
...though there have been some tantalizing false alarms. Not only can suspect signals be elusively faint, they are also hard to separate from the universe's hodgepodge of natural noises. Given that, many scientists have begun wondering about entirely different kinds of extraterrestrial smoke signals, especially lasers. Says Harvard physicist Paul Horowitz, a veteran of many SETI radio searches: "Lasers are an interesting alternative...
...number of other teams in what is starting to look like OSETI mania. At Princeton, physicist David T. Wilkinson will soon begin surveying nearby stars with a detector similar to Horowitz's. At the University of California, Berkeley, extrasolar-planet hunter Geoff Marcy is re-examining his data for sharp spectral lines that might indicate a continuous beam of light intended as a low-power signal. Another Berkeley team, led by SETI veteran Dan Werthimer, is looking for short, powerful laser bursts in a series of automated observations of 2,500 nearby stars. Later he plans to turn to invisible...
...with solar panels for electricity, all danger could have been averted. But Saturn receives only a hundredth of the sunlight Earth does, and the solar panels needed to supply Cassini at that distance would have to be far too large for such a mission. Other than plutonium generators, says physicist James Van Allen, discoverer of Earth's radiation belts, "there is no practical source of electrical power for spacecraft that go to the outer planets." Controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory report that Cassini, having already flown more than a billion miles, is in excellent shape. All systems are operating...
...Saturn receives only a hundredth of the sunlight Earth does, and solar panels needed to supply Cassini at that distance would have to be far too large for such a mission. Other than plutonium generators, says physicist James Van Allen, discoverer of Earth's radiation belts, "there is no practical source of electrical power for spacecraft that go to the outer planets...