Jill Tarter, with the Allen Array Telescope behind her.
Credit: SETI Institute
It's pitch black in the dead of the night, deep in the tropical rainforest of Puerto Rico. Nested in a limestone terrain of natural sinkholes and ravines, and silently watching the skies, is the Arecibo Observatory, the world's largest radio telescope. It's waiting to capture the first signal from an extraterrestrial civilisation.
Inside, Jill Tarter, the research director of the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), moves rhythmically between workstations, keeping pace with Brazilian samba playing from the loudspeakers.
"It is possible to do unusual things very late at night, when there are very few people around," says astronomer Seth Shostak, one of her colleagues from the SETI Institute, who prefers to take the earlier shifts at telescopes.
For six years, Arecibo was the home of the non-profit institute's Project Phoenix, the most comprehensive and sensitive search for extraterrestrial intelligence ever conducted, which scanned about 800 nearby stars for a sign that we're not alone.
Tarter would usually sign up for the graveyard shift to take the pressure off her team and inspire them to work harder.
During the night, dancing to samba helps to alleviate boredom and keep her spirits high through the nigh, she says. And in many ways, her solo samba no pé reflects the nature of SETI thus far: a passionate but improvised dance.
After more than 30 years in the field, Tarter has been awarded two Public Service Medals from the U.S. space agency NASA, was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004, and is also credited with coining the term 'brown dwarf' for the half-planet, half-star objects.
She was (at least partly) Carl Sagan's inspiration for the character of Ellie Arroway, the SETI researcher played by Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie Contact. And in 2009 she won the TED Prize, given by the U.S. foundation best known for its conferences and online video lectures devoted to "ideas worth spreading".
Searching an infinite and ever-expanding universe for other civilisations is not a career path for the faint hearted. Designing a project that might detect alien signals is a devilishly difficult problem; trying to convince political leaders and funding agencies to support it - well, that's all but impossible. But for Tarter, SETI is not a side project or intellectual hobby; she is the first person to dedicate an entire career to it.
"Jill is willing to devote her life to SETI," says Shostak. "That's a very daring thing to do. Not only has no one else at the SETI Institute done that, but no one else in the world has done that." And, at times, Tarter has been the lone beacon to guide the nascent science through troubled waters.
