back to article SETI searchers: We still haven't found what we're looking for

Stand down, one and all: there's not even cool new science in this week's “alien signal”, let alone a SETI success: the signal seems to have come from "terrestrial origins". The odd signal turned up over the weekend: an 11 GHz picked up by Russia's RATAN-600 telescope. The original observation, it was thought, might have …

  1. K
    Alien

    Cover up..

    I know it was ET, they promised to call after giving me a good probing!

  2. Mage Silver badge

    Hah!

    Much as it would be nice to detect Aliens, I did say this couldn't be them, though I didn't mention the passing mil-sat option.

  3. Baldy50

    Cloaked?

    I don't think a launch into orbit would be missed by government agencies, so someone must have known it was up there apart from the Russians.

    1. Sgt_Oddball
      Black Helicopters

      Re: Cloaked?

      You say that but once it's up there we don't yet have perfect global coverage of the skies for all countries so there are dark spots where the sats can move away from initial orbits and be lost to trackers.

      If the sat is sufficiently insulated from reflecting radar (al la stealth tech) and infrequently communicates through radio waves or uses line of sight laser comms then it's quite easy to do this. Just ask the Americans and their X-37s.

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Paris Hilton

        Re: Cloaked?

        Are there actually any examples of stealthed satellites? Or actual use of laser comms?

        The X-37 doesn't look very stealthy, that special ferrite coating will be ablated on re-entry...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Cloaked?

          Inter-satellite laser communications are used routinely, check out TDRSS

    2. Tom_

      Re: Cloaked?

      Don't forget that it's fairly common to deliver multiple satellites to orbit from a single launch vehicle.

      Additionally, a secretive satellite may not have a direct link to the ground at all - instead communicating via laser link to other, non-secret satellites.

      1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

        Laser?

        They did pick up this satellite by radio though?

        I'd also call it extraterrestrial although of terrestrial origin (unless it belongs to our alien lizard masters after all).

    3. The Man Who Fell To Earth Silver badge
      Black Helicopters

      Re: Cloaked?

      Everything with a radar cross section larger than about 2 inches is tracked by NORAD. So the only way the US would not know about it is if the Russians had stealthed it to a radar cross section smaller than that. And that would be pretty hard to do, given how communication antennas work unless they were retractable, or could be turned outward, etc. So you can bet a lot of governments knew about this satellite.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well, they would say that wouldn't they...

  5. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Alien

    It's a conspiracy!

    Yet another hit by P.U.T.I.N. who controls Trump who controls White Supremacist Farmers and Suburban Mysoginistic Racists who are listening to Talk Radio on shortwave which captures Alien signals beamed from Dark Satellites which hypnotizes them into following the Illuminati Voices to vote for Lizard People so Hillary will win!

    1. Alister

      Re: It's a conspiracy!

      @ D A M

      Nice!

      Now go and have a lie down in a darkened room bunker...

    2. Alistair
      Windows

      Re: It's a conspiracy!

      AMFM has hacked DAM's account!

    3. Terje

      Re: It's a conspiracy!

      FNORD

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It's a conspiracy!

        Bless you.

    4. Yesnomaybe

      Re: It's a conspiracy!

      You forgot to mention chemtrails. They are pretty much conclusive proof of (Insert favourite delusion here)

  6. kain preacher

    I heard in the early 70's we actually were able to call aliens. Three days later they blocked our number .

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. bpfh
    WTF?

    "Soviet" military satellite?

    If the Soviet Union fell apart back into Russia in 1991, how long has this "Soviet" piece of hardware been orbiting above our bonces unawares?

    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Re: "Soviet" military satellite?

      Movie tip for this weekend: Space Cowboys

    2. Rich 11

      Re: "Soviet" military satellite?

      At least 25 years, at a guess...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "Soviet" military satellite?

        If the Soviet Union fell apart back into Russia in 1991

        You have to know that the Soviet Union has been officially reconstitued inside the Beltway Bubble Reality. The pig-disgusting neocons have been feeling idle as, under the Peace President, the War on Stuff has wound down hasn't been mentioned much in the papers so they couldn't bloviate hard enough on Sunday morning TV and show that they are being strong for Israel (which incidentally goes from strong to stronger, I fear the brownshirts will be officialized soon). Does anyone really read Commentary anymore? Unfortunately Obama has been feeding them Hope and Change and the occasional bombing run so they have latched onto a new, ahistorical enemy and haven't died a deserving, horrific death post-Bush. Now that Hillary has official declared herself open to immodest whoring for their crazy plans, it's GO time again.

      2. dshan

        Re: "Soviet" military satellite?

        Most satellities only operate for around 10-15 years at most, I find it hard to believe an old Soviet-era military satellite is still operational after 25 years. Even if its electronics was still working it'd surely have run out of station-keeping propellant by now. It might be a rogue I suppose, there are several old Soviet nuclear-powered military radar satellities orbiting out of control, some leaking coolant as I recall, but I don't know if any are still transmitting after all this time.

        I don't think they're hiding real alien signals or anything, but there's something fishy about this "old Soviet" satellite explanation and I want to know more details. The Russian scientists sat on this signal for over a year before the news leaked, supposedly while runnning checks to rule out things like military satellites, yet only a few days later it's all dismissed as just that. It's all rather odd.

        1. Alan Brown Silver badge

          Re: "Soviet" military satellite?

          "Most satellities only operate for around 10-15 years at most"

          They tend to go a lot longer than that. One which was mislaunched in 1964 and ended up sitting at (IIRC) L2 only died in the early 2000s.

          Comsats tend to end their life due to running out of manouvering fuel, not electrical failure. Now that ion engines are common that could mean a 30+ year lifespan

  9. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    The US Space Command tracks all large objects and lists their orbit parameters.

    But you'd need to know where it's on it's orbit and wheather on the signals line of site at that moment.

    That's a pretty large job.

    Odds on bet was it was not alien.

    Still, next time....

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Wait a second...

    "The odd signal turned up over the weekend"

    Yet the original article stated:

    "Hence even though a signal in the 2.7 cm wavelength (11 GHz band) was spotted for four seconds on May 15, 2015, the SETI Institute's Seth Shostak only goes as far as to say the signal is “interesting”.".

    So not the signal but mentioning of the signal turned up over the weekend. But here's the part I don't understand: initially this information was withheld from the public, apparently because of its nature and origin. It was treated as classified and was only studied and seen by specialists (or so I assume). Surely one of the first things they would do is to rule out the obvious, such as "rogue" satellite signals? Or is that kind of reasoning a little too obvious for the elite?

    And then of course also what SETI itself told us: that it's quite uncommon to wait so long with the disclosure of this information.

    Are they trying to defuse alien conspiracy theories before they happened or to actually fuel them?

    But even so, I find it highly peculiar that the select elite specialists who were given access to this information apparently couldn't manage to rule out the obvious within one year...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wait a second...

      Good thinking.

    2. You aint sin me, roit
      Alien

      Re: Wait a second...

      "Shall we admit to having contacted aliens, or shall we admit to a super stealthy spy satellite that suddenly, and rather loudly, announced its presence to the world..."

      Can't see Putin admitting his spy satellites are rubbish... my money's on the aliens!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Wait a second...

        Instead of crying "Roswell, ROSWELL!!!" (while being carried away) (apologies to Jose Chung's From Outer Space):

        "Tunguska! TUNGUSKA!!" (while being carried away)

  11. Terje

    The probably checkd that, but if the satelites orbital parameters were not listed in any of the official sources. then you would have to look at the signal itself looks, ie interesting.

    1. Crazy Operations Guy

      Spy satellites don't have predictable orbits anyway. They tend to hang out in a stable orbit most the time, but if needed to look at something specific, they'll have their thrusters fired to put them into a sling-shot orbit to get as close to to their target as possible while traveling as fast as possible as well. The sling-shot is calculated so that the satellite would return to its previous speed and altitude, although on a completely different orbit. This is to prevent it from being tracked, or even seen (they tend to be in a high-enough altitude where even the most sophisticated telescope would have difficulty even getting a hint of where it is). The only way to know where it is at all times is to work for the agency that controls it.

      Procedures like that burn quite a lot of fuel and greatly reduce the life of the bird, but spy technology changes rapidly enough that the on-board devices are obsolete right around the time the satellite runs out of fuel and is de-orbitted. Plus they have more than enough cash to launch fresh ones whenever they need it. This is part of the X-37B project, where they can re-fuel and upgrade components on the spy satellites in-orbit rather than having to launch a fresh one (which allows other countries an opportunity to find it, a rocket launch isn't exactly covert, after all).

  12. Bucky 2
    Coat

    Crap. I'll have to pay up.

    My money was on the break room microwave.

  13. Andrew Jones 2

    Signal detected by Russian astronomers, withheld for over a year, and then it is claimed it originated from a Russian satellite.... yup - that's not suspicious at all....

  14. Conundrum1885

    My data point

    I speculated on Facebook about 8 months ago about using Sky LNBs for SETI, as well as faster all-sky scanning.

    My original idea was to use a Pi Zero for this, and surplus unused outputs on LNBs (common, have two here) so multiple scans can be run out of phase at the same time even with the existing Sky+ box in standby by modulating the input voltage via constant current shunts.

    If any one detects a suspicious blip not corresponding to a known mapped-out channel it gets logged and the Jansky reading, timing etc recorded to its memory chip.

    Every 24/12/6/etc hours these do an upload cycle which could be a very small affordable amount of data even over 4G, but a large repeating signal would generate an immediate visual indication and send a data packet to the server(s).

  15. tr1ck5t3r

    If you dont advertise your presence, how can you expect to be visited?

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