Smallscreen News
National Geographic Channel Beams WOW! Reply Into Space! (VIDEOS)
By April MacIntyre Aug 15, 2012, 20:16 GMT
The massive dish at the observatory is an astonishing accomplishment in human technology - you\'ve seen it in countless documentaries, films and television shows. After collecting your tweets during the June 29 premiere of Chasing UFOs, we started working with Arecibo Observatory to define exactly what the Wow! Reply will be, where it will be sent and every other scientific detail we could imagine. Here are those details in response to some of the most common questions we\'ve received:
NEWS ALERT: Transmission Accomplished -- National Geographic Channel Beams WOW! Reply Into Space!
Time to celebrate the 35th Anniversary of WOW! Signal:
National Geographic Channel and Arecibo Observatory Beamed crowdsourced WOW! reply message on Wednesday, Ausgust 15.
WOW! Reply transmission complete from Arecibo Observatory!
The massive dish at the observatory is an astonishing accomplishment in human technology.
After collecting your tweets during the June 29 premiere of Chasing UFOs, NGC started working with Arecibo Observatory to define exactly what the Wow! Reply will be, where it will be sent and every other scientific detail you could imagine.
Celebrity Videos from Stephen Colbert, Jorge Garcia, Miss Universe and others as well as 20,000+ Twitter Messages Part of Transmission
The video of official transmission of crowd-sourced reply to mysterious WOW! Signal, sourced by National Geographic Channel and beamed from Arecibo Observatory into space went down on Wednesday, August 15th, for the 35th anniversary of the WOW! Signal.
Arecibo has selected Hipparcos 34511, Hipparcos 33277, and Hipparcos 43587 as the transmission targets, the latter of which is known to include a planetary system.
Links to select celebrity messages here including:
· Stephen Colbert:
Jorge Garcia:
· Leila Lopez:
The collaboration between National Geographic Channel and Arecibo Observatory is part of a bold social experiment: a long-overdue response from earthlings to the mysterious senders behind the Wow! Signal, an unexplained 72-second transmission from space detected by SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) exactly 35 years ago.
More info about the WOW! Signal:www.thewowreply.com.
Arecibo scientists have “gone the extra mile” to increase the chances of intelligent life receiving and decoding the celebrity videos and crowd sourced tweets.
In particular, each message will have a repeating-sequence header attached that will let the recipient know that the messages are intentional and from another intelligent life form. Additionally, the transmitter used yields a signal roughly 20 times stronger than that of the most powerful commercial radio transmitter.
The WOW! Reply program was launched in conjunction with National Geographic Channel’s new series, “Chasing UFOs,” a documentary-style program investigating the mysteries and debunking the myths about aliens and intelligent life on other planets.
