Just when SETI@home is celebrating its 10th anniversary, its older brother, Project SERENDIP, is getting a general makeover. In June of 2009 Dan Werthimer will lead a group of 8 students to the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to replace the aging SERENDIP IV system which has been idle for the past two years. Once the brand new state-of-the-art SERENDIP V is in place, the project will go back online and return to searching the skies for a signal from an alien civilization.

If SETI@home is now a respectable 10 years old, Project SERENDIP's roots go back much further. The first SERENDIP was built at U.C. Berkeley in 1979, and collected data from the radio telescope at the Hat creek Observatory in California. Since then the project's hardware has been upgraded repeatedly: In 1992 SERENDIP's 3d generation was installed at the Arecibo radio telescope, the largest and most sensitive in the world. Five years later, with help from The Planetary Society, this system was replaced at Arecibo by SERENDIP IV, which continued in operation for the next 8 years. And now SERENDIP V is set to take over and continue a long and persistent search that began three decades ago.

As SERENDIP was upgraded repeatedly over the years, each new generation represented a quantum leap over the capabilities of its predecessor. SERENDIP I, for example, could look at 100 channels at a time, which seemed pretty impressive back in 1979. But its successor, which began operations in 1986, could look at 65,000 channels at a time, and with SERENDIP IV the number was up to 168 million! Such exponential growth is unheard of in most scientific fields, but is not unusual in SETI, which is always on the lookout for new cutting-edge technologies for scanning the skies. (Read more about this project here)

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