Earth Messages to Exoplanet: Ready for Friday Broadcast

A total of 25,880 text messages will be broadcast into space, transmitted 20.3 light-years to Gliese 581d. That world is the outlying planet in the Gliese 581 system, and orbits its parent star every 66.8 days. It may be covered by a large and deep ocean and is the first serious "waterworld" candidate discovered beyond our Solar System.

The effort was carried out as by the Australian magazine, Cosmos, to celebrate Australia's National Science Week and the International Year of Astronomy. The initiative was done with the support of NASA, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), and the Australia's Science Minister Kim Carr.

In total, messages from Afghanistan to Alaska, from Morocco to Macau - in fact, from all 195 nations and even non-nations like Antarctica and Vatican City, are to be shot into space, noted Wilson da Silva, editor-in-chief of Cosmos magazine.

This form of "radio waving" to another world will take place on Friday from the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla in Australia.

The 70-meter dish will transmit the messages, encoded into binary. The broadcast will take two hours. The messages will be sent at 7.145 Gigahertz at 18 kilowatts in the direction of Gliese 581d, the exoplanet that was only recently discovered to be in its star's habitable zone.

The signal is equivalent to using the combined transmission power of 300 billion mobile phones.

NASA engineers will aim the big dish at azimuth 87 degrees at an elevation of 17 degrees.

That's the location of Gliese 581 when the messages will arrive in that location...around December 2029.

To monitor this dispatch to the target planet, go to:

http://www.hellofromearth.net/

By Leonard David