SETI’s Allen Telescope Array is back online, thanks to the U.S. Military. According to SETI, the United States Air Force is deeply interested in a “formal assessment of the instrument’s utility for Space Situational Awareness.”

With the help of 2,700 independent supporters and a new deal with the U.S. Air Force, the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array is back online. Yes, U.S. Air Force is teaming with SETI to scan the newly-discovered “Earth 2.0″ for intelligent life.

By “Earth 2.0″ I of course mean “Kepler-22b.” (Earth 2.0 sounds a little more awesome, but maybe such a title is premature.) For those that haven’t heard the news, this is the exoplanet that NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered orbiting in its sun’s “habitable zone.” It could have a surface temperature close to ours, and hold liquid water — and maybe, just maybe, it could have similar biological life. (Again, such claims are premature — we’ll have to wait and see what comes of this discovery.)

SETI has jumped on this recent discovery, and so has the US Air Force. It makes sense when you consider that the U.S.A.F is the same branch of the military that managed Project Blue Book and, more recently, a secretive spaceship.

From The State Column:

“This is a superb opportunity for SETI observations,” says Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. “For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars, and know that those stars actually host planetary systems – including at least one that begins to approximate an Earth analog in the habitable zone around its host star. That’s the type of world that might be home to a civilization capable of building radio transmitters.”

The deal comes just months after the The Allen Telescope Array, a set of telescopes used by the organization, lost funding from the University of California, which cut funding to the program due to budget constraints.

The telescope array consists of 42 20-foot-wide telescopes located some 300 miles north of San Francisco. Originally funded largely by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who donated $25 million to the project, the ATA had to go into hibernation after state budget cuts affected the project’s funding.

The SETI Institute said it will also use the additional funds to focus its attention over the next two years on pointing its telescopes at the top 1,000 habitable planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler.

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Category: UFO Phenomenon · Tags: extraterrestrials, Kepler, SETI, space