Optical SETI Gets a Major Upgrade

The Planetary Society Optical SETI Telescope in Harvard, Massachusetts just got a major upgrade of its electronics.  The telescope, which has been operating the only all-sky optical SETI survey since its opening in 2006, is run by Harvard University Professor Paul Horowitz and his team.  The telescope scans the sky every clear night with a 72-inch primary mirror, looking for laser pulses as short as one billionth of a second that could be transmitted by distant extraterrestrials.  When observing, it has been able to process 1 terabit (trillion bits) of data every second, that’s as much as in all the books in print every second.