
SETI Telescope
In E&T’s second International Year of Astronomy feature, we discover that destinations for future space missions may be decided not by agencies like NASA, but by groups of ordinary people engaged in citizen computing.
Question: what kind of person does it require to detect gravity waves in the universe, or calculate the 46th prime number? If your guess is a doctoral-degree holding scientist or mathematician, you are incorrect.
We live in a world where cutting-edge technical research can be done at home. Now, with nothing but a computer with an Internet connection, any user can participate in over 50 ‘citizen-science’ projects around the world. They are for amateur astronomers, ordinary people, groups of volunteers, or even anonymous users.
I found this article on the SETI@home website.
You can access the entire article at The Institution of Engineering and Technology
The only thing I would add is that I like to participate in these projects by using a computer running Linux rather than Windows. The reason is that Linux has a lower overhead for the operating system so more of your resources go into doing the actual calculations required to get the job done.
Posted by The GNUinator
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[...] People’s Astronomy on this blog for some amazing things that volunteers are doing. See Introduction to BOINC to see [...]