SETI Astronomers Launch New Campaign to Eavesdrop on E.T.

A coordinated signal-searching campaign began this month to mark the 50th anniversary of Project Ozma, a 1960 experiment that was christened the world's first real attempt in the search for extraterrestrial intelligenceastronomer Frank Drake of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. Drake is also famous for devising the Drake equation, which predicts the number of alien civilizations with whom we might be able to communicate.  – or SETI. Like Project Ozma, which got its name from a character in L. Frank Baum's series of books about the Land of Oz, the new search is called Project Dorothy. Project Ozma was conducted by

The new search includes some particularly promising targets for extraterrestrial intelligence, including stars with known planets, which modern telescopes were only recently able to detect. The scientists are aiming for stellar systems where planets are thought to orbit at roughly the right distance from their suns to hold liquid water and thus, possibly, life.

"Project Dorothy vividly demonstrates just how far SETI has come in the past 50 years," 
Space.com