Jill Cornell Tarter, a 1965 Cornell alumna and the director of the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix, spoke at the dedication ceremonies for the upgrade of the Arecibo radio telescope (shown in the background) in Puerto Rico on June 14. Frank DiMeo/University Photography
Some people just think big.
The radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory is the largest in the world. Its dish is 1,000 feet from rim to rim and covers the equivalent of about 18 acres, or 26 football fields. If the Washington Monument were set on the dish's aluminum surface, its point would just about reach to the top of the support structure for the dome of the Gregorian telescope, perched with other instrumentation 450 feet above the reflector, and about 1,300 feet above the ground. It is the planet's most sensitive ear to the sky.
As director of the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix, Jill Cornell Tarter, a 1965 Cornell alumna, scans the skies using the Arecibo radio telescope and two smaller ones in the continental United States looking for signals that indicate life exists on other planets. But she wants a larger ear. Something on the moon would be nice. Until then, how about 30 Arecibo-sized radio telescopes arrayed in the karst regions of western China? They would give her 1 million square miles of collecting area to try to find that elusive signal, the one that says, "Hey, Earth! You are not alone."
Tarter has always dreamed big. As a student at Cornell in the early 1960s, she was brave enough to be the only woman among 300 undergraduate engineering students. She wanted to be the first woman to walk on the moon.
"I applied to be one of the people chosen for the first corps of astronauts," she said recently in an interview at the Arecibo Observatory, where she was participating in the June 14 inauguration ceremonies for the upgrade of the Gregorian telescope. "It was one of my biggest disappointments not to be accepted."
Maybe thinking big, and acting on the cutting edge of her era's technological frontier, is in her genes. Tarter's family tree extends "five greats- and a half-uncle" to Ezra Cornell. She is descended from the Cornell founder's half-brother. When she sought admission at the family institution, she applied for a named scholarship available to Cornell's descendants -- only to find out the scholarship was only for male descendants.
"I think someone's consciousness was raised when I applied," she said. Two days after the first scholarship rejection, a letter came from the admissions department informing her that she was selected to receive a Procter & Gamble Co. scholarship, the first time that engineering scholarship was awarded to a woman. "Everyone was redeemed," she laughed.
It wasn't easy being the only "girl engineer," but it was good training for her later career in the male-dominated science world. Tarter described a character-forming experience:
"I was an only child," she said, "and my mother was very protective. All my clothes had little labels with my name on them. One day, I was sitting in a very large engineering lecture and threw my sweater over the back of my seat. I heard a little titter behind me, then snickers, then a wave of laughing behind my back. The professor stopped the lecture and asked what was going on. The guys had seen the label on my sweater; where it said '100% virgin wool,' my mother had sewed my name, Jill Cornell, over 'wool.'"
Tarter sighed. "I thought if I could make it through that day, I could make it through anything."
Tarter was supported by the engineering faculty, she said, especially Trevor Cuykendall and then-dean of engineering Dale Corson, who helped her keep her Procter & Gamble scholarship when she decided to get married in the summer of her junior year. The company thought she would never use her education if she got married; Corson went to bat for her with P&G management, and Tarter kept her scholarship.
After Cornell, Tarter went to UC-Berkeley for a doctorate in astrophysics. After that, she took a National Research Council postdoctoral position at the NASA/Ames Research Center, doing further research on brown dwarf stars, on which she had done her thesis. At Ames, she met scientists beginning to do work on the NASA program to search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
"I fell in love with SETI," she said, and has been searching for signals ever since.
"'SETI' is a misnomer," Tarter explained at a June 13 symposium held at Arecibo to describe scientific work to journalists. "We can't find intelligence per se, but we can look for technology. If we can pick up radio signals, that remains the strongest argument for intelligent life on that planet."
Carl Sagan and Frank Drake did the first search for extraterrestrial life at Arecibo in 1975-76, examining signals from four selected galaxies.
"They found billions and billions of signals," Tarter said -- to laughter from her audience -- but no signs of life.
In 1978 Harvard astronomer Paul Horowitz did the first ultra-narrowband "magic" frequency search, using a tape recorder and computer to look for radio frequencies that he assumed intelligent beings would configure to account for our Doppler, with no results.
From 1979 to 1981 Tarter used the Arecibo radio telescope to do a targeted search, collecting signals from 200 stars very much like our own -- yellow, middle-aged and mid-sized. She found nothing.
Drake, Tarter, Horowitz and many others are still looking. In 1986, Drake and Tarter formed the SETI Institute to coordinate research and put funding to best use. But in 1993, because of political pressure from conservatives who thought that looking for life on other planets is a waste of public money, NASA pulled its funding from the SETI project. Now the SETI Institute is funded with private money, and Tarter heads its Project Phoenix, which uses two widely spaced telescopes (one in West Virginia and one in New Mexico) to gather data.
She is serious about building more radio telescopes. There is a proposal being developed by Chinese scientists to build 30 "Arecibos" in that country, she said.
"It would be tremendous for China," Tarter said. "They have the labor force. It would bring roads to underdeveloped areas and be a real economic benefit."
Tarter is serious about Lunarecibo, the radio telescope on the moon being proposed by SETI scientists, as well. She said that, eventually, it will be necessary to place radio telescopes on the side of the moon away from Earth because humans are polluting this planet's radio spectrum at all wavelengths, with ever-increasing numbers of signals emitted by instruments from telecommunications satellites to cellular phones.
"The moon is really a gem for us," she said. "With Earth never in our sky, we could block out all the pollution." Once built, the Lunarecibo could be an unattended, robotic operation.
To fund her plans, Tarter and her colleagues are trying to raise $100 million in the next couple of years. They have $20 million now.
"This is perhaps the more appropriate mode of financing science and exploration that may go on for generations, rather than dealing with a yearly congressional cycle," she said. "Build a private-public partnership on large capital projects of benefit to both parties."
Tarter believes that the public is supportive of her work.
"There are certain segments of the American public that are still eager to dream," she said. New discoveries like pulsar planets and the Martian meteorite with possible evidence of microbial life keep public interest high. So do science fiction movies, and it was time to ask the big question: Is she really the model for Ellie, the star character in Contact, the movie based on Carl Sagan's book?
She hesitates. "A fair answer," she said, emphasizing the adjective, "is this: Carl wrote a book about a woman who does what I do. She's about my age. He and Annie [Druyan] met with me and talked to me when they were working on Contact. Basically, he did his homework. He understood the social, psychological and personal filters that a woman my age in science had to go through to get there."
There are parallels between Ellie's fictional life and Tarter's, including one fact she said is common among women scientists -- having a supportive father, who died young. "We tend to say, 'I'm going to do this for my dad,'" she commented.
Tarter met Jodie Foster, who plays Ellie in the movie, when the Contact crew filmed at Arecibo in January. They met in the Gregorian telescope dome suspended high above the reflector dish.
"She's a fantastic person -- intelligent, gracious and very, very smart," Tarter said. "I've talked with her several times. She wanted to know what astronomers are like, and do they have big egos." More laughter.
The movie may inspire big dreams in a whole new generation. Tarter still hasn't let go of hers.
"There hasn't been a woman on the moon yet," she said. When Lunarecibo is built, she wants to be there.