Today is an exciting day. After months of preparation, we are putting out the first two sets of data in the public domain. This is the data we have collected from space through the Allen Telescope Array, in our search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

There is additional information in the public announcement. This blog tells you how to access the data.

As I see it, any science experiement has two aspects to it -

1. Experiment design and data collection, and
2. Data analysis, feeding back into step 1

After today, you will have access to the data, and later this year, you will have access to the software we use to look for signals in this data. We hope that you can analyze this data in different ways, and come up with signals we may have missed. Just keep in mind, the data can't avoid capturing a large amount of terrestrial signals, so not every signal you see is from extra-terrestrial source.

In order to see the data, you will need to sign up. Go to the top right of the page to do so. Once signed in, you can access the data through the following path:

Home -> Join the quest -> Data/API's

Click on one of the sets of data to either get information about the data, see our plots of the data, or download the raw files. We have divided up each set of data in three chunks of about 2 GB each, to make downloading easier. Concatenate the three chunks, and you have the original file. For those of you who are curious and want to see what the data looks like before downloading the entire 2-6 GB, there is a sample file for each data set, containing one second of observation.

We have also added forum capability to the website and invite you to participate. Alice and I are going to be active in the forums, so feel free to post your questions, suggestions, gripes, whatever.  Right now, the functionality is basic, but we will organize it soon.

As always, I am available at avinash@setiquest.org.

Avinash