Russia's Millimetron to Search For Astroengineering

It is probably the most seductive urge for mankind: search for extraterrestrial life. There are many ways to look for life; from digging into the Martian dirt with robotic landers looking for pre-biotic compounds, to building vast radio antennae to "listen" out for distant communications either leaked or transmitted deliberately from a distant star system from a developed, intelligent civilization. However, despite our best efforts, we appear to be the only form of life for hundreds of lightyears around. It is eerily quiet out there…

Although we appear to be drawing blanks so far, it doesn't stop us from trying to work out what we should be looking for. In the quest to find a vastly advanced alien civilization, a forthcoming Russian space telescope hopes to bridge the gap between science fiction and science fact, attempting to find evidence (or lack thereof) of observable attempts of astroengineering by an alien race…

www.universetoday.com...

Although the Kepler spacecraft is just as exciting, this is surely a science-fiction fan's dream come to life.

However, I doubt we will find clear signs of astroengineering. For all we know, aliens could be using natural celestial objects in space as weapons, platforms, or what have you.

Still, it would be eerily amazing if we detected evidence of a Larry Niven Ring world or Alderson disk around a star.

Just don't hold your breath, it won't be launched until 2017.

Great find! S&F. I'm looking forward to the Kepler mission and this seems a proper step in the same direction, but even more advanced. Space exploration missions would be a much better expenditure of resources than the defense (war) department. Even better yet would be to teach society to take care of our own very valuable and only home.

The Millimetron will be looking for other things as well. Here is a list of the science objectives from the Russian site:

1. Molecular content and physical conditions in the atmosphere of planets and their satellites.
2. Asteroids and comets.
3. Dust component of the interplanetary medium, Van Allen and Oort belts.
4. Spectral polarimetry, mapping, rotation and variability of stars of different kinds (from giants, WR stars, cepheids, dwarfs, neutron and quark stars, galactic black holes).
5. Planets and dust envelopes of stars, detection and investigation of star, planetary system and even single planets formation & evolution regions, submillimeter masers, search of life in the Universe.
6. Content, structure and dynamics of the most cold gas-dust clouds.
7. Structure and dynamics of the matter near supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center.
8. Dynamics of the Galaxy using radial velocity and proper motion super high precision data.
9. Dynamics and masses of galaxies in the Local Group.
10. Distribution of Dark Matter inside our Galaxy and in the Local Group of galaxies.
11. Structure and dynamics of gas-dust component in galaxies and quasars, merge of galaxies, bursts of star formation. Megamasers.
12. Structure and physical processes in galactic nuclei, cosmic ray acceleration.
13. Structure and dynamics of clusters and superclusters of galaxies, distribution of dark matter inside these objects.
14. Extended structure near radio galaxies: synchrotron emission and scattering of the nuclei emission.
15. Dynamics of galaxies collision.
16. Early galaxies: detection of galaxy’s birth event, search of their further evolution, including evolution of dark matter and gas-dust content.
17. Extragalactic supernovae and cosmology.
18. Gravitational lenses, as natural telescopes.
19. Chemical evolution and cosmology.
20. Syunaev-Zeldovich effect at submillimeter wavelength and cosmology.
21. Hubble diagram and cosmology.
22. Angular dimension – redshift dependence and cosmology.
23. Proper motion – redshift dependence, relic proper motion and cosmology.
24. Superluminal motion – redshift dependence and cosmology.
25. Spatial fluctuations of CMB at submillimeter wavelength an cosmology.
26. Physical processes during the explosion due star’s merging, observing expanding shell for determination of cosmological parameters.
27. Search of pre-galactic objects, investigation of early stage evolution of the Universe, from the time moment of recombination (recombination lines) to the beginning of stars and galaxies formation, search of primordial black holes.
28. Evolution of matter and vacuum, dark matter and dark energy state equation, inflation relics, worm holes, multi element model of the Universe, additional dimensions of space.
29. Gravitational emission in the Galaxy and in the Universe.
30. Astroengineering activity in the Galaxy and in the Universe.
31. Construction of high precision astronomical coordinate system.
32. Construction of high precision model of the Earth’s gravitational field.

www.asc.rssi.ru...