Subject: Re: SETI Re: [ASTRO] Encounter 2001 "Cosmic Call"
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 09:53:43 -0500
From: Yvan Dutil 
To: seti@sni.net

FOR RELEASE: 9:20 a.m. CST, January 9, 1999

Astronomers Get Ready to Call E.T.

Physicists are announcing today that they have designed a message to
be broadcast in the direction of nearby stars in order to search for
extra-terrestrial intelligence. This project is being presented by Dr.
Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas from the Defence Research Establishment
Valcartier, near Quebec City (Canada), to the American Astronomical
Society meeting in Austin, TX.  This is the first time in a quarter
of a century that such a cosmic call will be attempted. This experiment is
promoted by the Encounter 2001 project, an international spaceflight
project which is planned for launch into interstellar space in the year 2001.

The complete message is about 400,000 bits long and will be transmitted
three times over a 3-hour period in the direction of the four selected stars.
Then, it will be followed by a series of greetings from people around
the world. The transmission will start on March 15 1999.
This message is much larger in size, duration and scope than
the one sent by Frank Drake on November 16th, 1974 from the Arecibo
observatory which consisted of only 1,679 bits sent over a 3 minute duration.

Finding a transmitter for this task was not easy; the project will use a 70
m (230 ft) Ukrainian antenna equipped with a 150 kW transmitter
broadcasting at 5 GHz (6 cm). Using this antenna, any civilization within
100 light-years
which has access to a radio-telescope with an area of one squared-kilometer
will be able to read the message. The artificial nature of the message
should be able to be detected by similar instruments at distances up to
10,000 light-years. A radio-telescope of this size will be built on Earth
in the near future.

The message itself has been designed using some of the principles of
interstellar communication proposed in the early works of Hans Freudenthal,
Frank Drake and Carl Sagan. Mathematics and physics have been used to
define the message, so that it will be clear and based on universal
concepts.  For example, the hydrogen atom can be used to describe
quantities such as mass, electric charge and length. To these basic ideas
were added simple notions of
astronomy, biology, geography and cosmology. Easier concepts and ideas are
at the beginning while the more elaborate ones appear at the end of the
message.
Any true communication is not complete without an answer. Therefore, the
last page of the message invites anyone who reads it to reply, sending
information about themselves.

The message has been built to minimize the loss of information due to noise
introduced into the signal during its interstellar flight. To minimize the
risk of confusion, a set of characters was created which are fairly
different from each other. Redundant information is included to allow
cross-checking of the message. The addition of a frame around each page of
the message, and the inclusion of page and section numbers will also help
the translation process.

For many years, most research projects dedicated to the Search for
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have scanned the sky trying to
detect any signals sent by extra-terrestrial civilizations willing to
communicate with us. So far, the sky has remained silent. All these
searches have been passive: what is proposed now is to send a
message in order to catch the attention of an extra-terrestrial
civilization.

In order to maximize the probability of detection, the direction of
the transmission has been carefully chosen to include stars similar 
to our Sun, and to limit the degradation of the signal 
as it travels through the vast reaches of interstellar space. Fortunately, 
there is a region between the spiral arms of our galaxy where the signal 
can be transmitted over long distances without too much degradation. This
region is situated between 50 and 90 degrees of galactic longitude,
which corresponds roughly to the region of the sky called the "Summer
Triangle".  Four stars, clones of our Sun, have been selected from the list 
made by the SETI institute.  These target stars are located at distances 
between 50 and 70 light-years from the Sun.



Target List

Names       l    |b|    a (J2000)       d (J2000)       Type    D(Lyr)   V

HD190360    67   1      20h03m37.41s    +29d53m48.51s   G7V     51.8   5.73

HD190406    57   8      20h04m06.23s    +17d04m12.64s   G1V     57.6   5.08

HD186408    83   13     19h41m48.95s    +50d31m30.21s   G3V     70.5   5.99

HD178428    50   4      19h07m57.32s    +16d51m12.24s   G6V     68.3   6.08

Table headings: l and |b| are the coordinates of the target star in
galactic latitude and (absolute) longitude, while a and d give the Right
Ascension and Declination of the star in the J2000 coordinate system.  The
star's spectral type is given next; for comparison, our Sun is a G2V. The
next column gives the distances to each star in light years. The last
column gives the  Visual magnitude (brightness) of each star.

For More Information:
    Dr. Yvan Dutil       (418) 844-4000 ext. 4319     Yvan.Dutil@drev.dnd.ca
    M. Stephane Dumas    (418) 844-4000 ext. 4309
Stephane.Dumas@drev.dnd.ca

You can also visit the web site of the Encounter 2001 project:

http://www.encounter2001.com/main.shtml