Tarter
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The 14th Joseph and Sophia Konopinski Memorial Lecture in Physics at IU is scheduled for Tuesday, March 9, at 7:30 p.m. in Whittenberger Auditorium of the Indiana Memorial Union in Bloomington.
Jill Tarter, director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
Research, will speak. The title of her lecture will be “Life,
the Universe and SETI in a Nutshell.”
Those who remember the 1997 film Contact, based on the 1985 best-seller of the same name by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, remember Jodie Foster’s role as the heroine astronomer who, against all odds, detects an alien broadcast.
But Foster’s character was not directly based on Tarter. “Carl Sagan wrote a book about a woman who does what I do, not about me,” explained Tarter. “He did his homework, and thus included many of the ‘character-building’ experiences that are common to women scientists studying and working in a male-dominated profession.”
As a graduate student at Berkeley, Tarter became involved in the beginning stages of a small search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations using the Hat Creek Observatory telescope. That project, SERENDIP, underwent many stops and starts and overhauls and provided a natural introduction to the newly formed SETI Program Office at NASA Ames Research Center, where Tarter was a resident associate. She later served as project scientist for NASA’s High Resolution Microwave Survey, until its termination by Congress in October 1993.
As such, she had the opportunity to meld together old and new engineering skills with a knowledge of the observable universe, in order to conduct and plan for thorough observations of the sky through a set of narrow band and pulse sensitive filters never before systematically employed by astronomers.
In 2002, Tarter was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science and a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences
in 2003.
Update:
Conversation
online—ET, are you there?
UFO sightings, moon walks, Mars roving, perhaps even, alien-inspired
prehistoric art, fascinate and fuel our sense of wonder about
the possibilities of intelligent civilation on other worlds.
Jill Tarter, research director of the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence Institute (SETI), the March Konopinski Memorial
Lecturer in Physics at IU Bloomington talked with colleague
Caty Pilachowski, the inaugural Kirkwood Chair of atronomy
at IU. Listen to their conversation:
http://www.homepages.indiana.edu/031204/text/conversations.shtml
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