Jill Tarter steps down as director of SETI

For more than three decades, astronomer and extraterrestrial life visionary Jill Tarter has been the public face of the sometimes controversial, sometimes lauded search for signs of intelligent beings throughout the cosmos.

A founding member in 1984 of the nonprofit Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research, Tarter has led the group’s expansion and evolution as the broader science of astrobiology has blossomed.

To her great disappointment, she said last week, SETI has not detected the kind of compressed radio signals from afar that nature cannot create but intelligent beings can. Nonetheless, she said she is beyond delighted about how the search for life beyond Earth has become so much more sophisticated, more promising and more mainstream.

Yet Tarter and SETI announced Tuesday morning that its longtime director will step down from that post and turn her efforts to fundraising to keep the organization afloat. Tarter will hand over the director’s reins to Gerry Harp, an expert in quantum mechanics who has been an innovator in using the Northern California radio telescope array that SETI partially owns and has helped run.

Why the move now?

“When we started SETI, we had two goals in mind,” Tarter said, “to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and to create a center where that search could continue into the future as our technologies, our understandings and our computing powers increased.

“The search is more robust now than ever, but the center is struggling financially. It needs somebody to spend all their time raising funds so the Center for SETI Research itself can be around to understand that signal we are confident will be sent.”

Tarter, 68, was the obvious choice to lead the fundraising effort. Well-respected and honored in the scientific community, she is also known in popular culture as Ellie Arroway, a young woman obsessed with extraterrestrial life, played by actress Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie “Contact.”

Tarter has also long been involved in outreach programs such as SETI@home, which encourages computer owners to help process SETI data on their machines, and has been the principal investigator for two elementary, middle and high school curriculum projects on “Life in the Universe” and evolution funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation and others.

The immediacy of the financial threat became clear last year. SETI and the University of California at Berkeley jointly operated a sophisticated radio telescope array built with $30 million donated by Microsoft founder Paul Allen and others, primarily from Silicon Valley. The array went into operation in 2007 — a dream come true for those involved in the SETI effort.

But the 42-dish array, which sits on federal lands in Northern California, had to be put into hibernation for six months because of a lack of money. SETI has been short of the $3 million a year it needs to operate the center and the array. The shortfall was in large part caused by cuts in the California state university system and diminishing donations. The Allen Telescope Array resumed operations last year after sufficient donations came in and additional money flowed in from the Air Force, which funded a study into whether the array could be used as part of its system to track satellites and space debris in low-Earth orbit.