seti@home launch on 17 May

Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Fri, 14 May 1999 16:52:25 -0700 (PDT)

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

[...]

May 17, 1999. Launch! We will release the Windows and Mac versions at 8:00 AM PDT. We made a snapshot of statistics from the beta-testing period, and reset all totals to zero.

[...]

SETI@home is a commensal SETI sky survey at the National Astronomy and Ionospheric Center's 305 meter radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. The sky survey covers a 2.5 MHz bandwidth centered at 1420 MHz, as many researchers have suggested the 21 cm Hydrogen line as the most likely band for intentional interstellar transmissions to be lurking. The survey covers 28% of the sky (declinations ranging from +1 to +35 degrees) with a sensitivity of 3E-25 W/m2. SETI@home observations will span a total of two years, during which most of the sky will be observed two or three times. Observations began in October 1998.

Much of the SETI@home data analysis is accomplished using distributed computing with the help of hundreds of thousands of participants and their internet connected computers (Sullivan et al 1997).