Project Ozma was a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) experiment started in 1960 by

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

astronomer

Frank Drake Frank Donald Drake (May 28, 1930 – September 2, 2022) was an American astrophysicist and astrobiologist. He began his career as a radio astronomer, studying the planets of the Solar System and later pulsars. Drake expanded his interests ...

, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank at

Green Bank, West Virginia Green Bank is a census-designated place in Pocahontas County in West Virginia's Potomac Highlands inside the Allegheny Mountain Range. Green Bank is located along WV 28. Green Bank is home to the Green Bank Observatory and is also close to the ...

. The object of the experiment was to search for signs of life in distant

planetary system A planetary system is a set of gravitationally bound non- stellar objects in or out of orbit around a star or star system. Generally speaking, systems with one or more planets constitute a planetary system, although such systems may also consi ...

s through interstellar radio waves. The program was named after

Princess Ozma Princess Ozma is a fictional character from the Land of Oz, created by American author L. Frank Baum. She appears in every book of the Oz series except the first, '' The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' (1900). She is the rightful ruler of Oz, and Baum ...

, ruler of the fictional

land of Oz The Land of Oz is a fantasy world, magical country introduced in the 1900 children's novel ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by William Wallace Denslow, W. W. Denslow. Oz consists of four vast quadrants, th ...

, inspired by L. Frank Baum's supposed communication with Oz by radio to learn of the events in the books taking place after ''

The Emerald City of Oz ''The Emerald City of Oz'' is the sixth of L. Frank Baum's fourteen Land of Oz books. It was also adapted into a Canadian animated film in 1987. Originally published on July 20, 1910, it is the story of Dorothy Gale and her Uncle Henry and Aunt ...

''. The search was publicized in articles in the popular media of the time, such as ''Time'' magazine and was described as the first modern SETI experiment. Drake used a radio telescope with a diameter of to examine the stars

Tau Ceti Tau Ceti, Latinized from τ Ceti, is a single star in the constellation Cetus that is spectrally similar to the Sun, although it has only about 78% of the Sun's mass. At a distance of just under from the Solar System, it is a rela ...

and

Epsilon Eridani Epsilon Eridani ( Latinized from ε Eridani), formally named Ran, is a star in the southern constellation of Eridanus, at a declination of 9.46° south of the celestial equator. This allows it to be visible from most of Earth's surfac ...

near the 1,420 MHz marker frequency, the equivalent of wavelength of 21 centimeters which corresponds to the energy of a photon emitted from a hydrogen atom during "spin-flip" transition. Both are nearby Sun-like stars that then seemed reasonably likely to have inhabited planets. A 400 kilohertz band was scanned around the marker frequency, using a single-channel receiver with a bandwidth of 100 hertz. The information was stored on tape for off-line analysis. Some 150 hours of intermittent observation during a four-month period detected no recognizable signals. A false signal was detected on April 8, 1960, but it was determined to have originated from a high-flying aircraft. The receiver was tuned to wavelengths near 21 cm, which is the wavelength of radiation emitted naturally by interstellar hydrogen; it was thought that this would be familiar, as a kind of universal standard, to anyone attempting interstellar radio communication. A second experiment, called Ozma II, was conducted with a larger () telescope at the same observatory by Patrick Palmer and

Benjamin Zuckerman Benjamin Michael Zuckerman (born August 16, 1943) is an astrophysicist and an emeritus professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCLA. His recent work focus primarily on formation and evolution of planetary systems around various type ...

, who intermittently monitored 670 nearby stars for about four years (1972–76). They examined a 10 MHz bandwidth with 52 kHz resolution and a 625 kHz bandwidth with 4 kHz resolution. The spectrometer was centered on the 21 cm hydrogen line in the rest frame of each observed star.

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