Posthuman Blues

Planetary Society Will Open World's First Dedicated Optical SETI Telescope

The new telescope will be the first dedicated optical SETI telescope in the world. Its 72-inch primary mirror is larger than any optical telescope in the U.S. east of the Mississippi river.

Under the direction of Harvard University physicist Paul Horowitz and his team, The Planetary Society's new telescope will conduct a year round, all-sky survey, scanning the entire swath of our Milky Way galaxy visible in the northern hemisphere.

"This new search apparatus performs one trillion measurements per second and expands by 100,000-fold the sky coverage of our previous optical search," said Horowitz.