The SETI Institute has posted a big set of videos of presentations from a conference on the topic of “Communicating Across the Cosmos“:

For over a half century, astronomers involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have scanned the skies for signals from distant civilizations. Would humans be able to decode information-rich signals from another planet? Could we create a “universal language” that would be meaningful to an independently evolved civilization? To help answer these questions, on November 10-11 the SETI Institute will convene a multidisciplinary, international workshop at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. Speakers from six countries will draw on disciplines ranging from astronomy and mathematics, to anthropology and linguistics, as they debate the best ways to create meaningful messages. While the two-day workshop is closed to the public, all talks will later be posted on the SETI Institute’s Youtube channel.

Here’s a video of a panel summarizing the conference discussions:

And here is a talk by Seth Shostak :

The TESS  (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) project is developing a follow-on observatory to the Kepler mission to look for planets around other stars using the transit method (i.e. the dimming of the starlight when a planet crosses between the star and the line of sight to earth.)

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an Explorer-class planet finder. In the first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey, TESS will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, orbiting a wide range of stellar types and orbital distances. The principal goal of the TESS mission is to detect small planets with bright host stars in the solar neighborhood, so that detailed characterizations of the planets and their atmospheres can be performed.

TESS will monitor the brightnesses of more than 500,000 stars during a two year mission, searching for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. Transits occur when a planet’s orbit carries it directly in front of its parent star as viewed from Earth. TESS is expected to catalog more than 3000 transiting exoplanet candidates, including a sample of ∼500 Earth-sized and ‘Super Earth’ planets, with radii less than twice that of the Earth. TESS will detect small rock-and-ice planets orbiting a diverse range of stellar types and covering a wide span of orbital periods, including rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars.

Today NASA announced approval for the mission to continue to the next step in design and development. If eventually approved for launch, it would go to space in 2017.  NASA’s TESS Mission Cleared for Next Development Phase | NASA

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A panel discussion at last summer’s SETICon 2 event that examined the question, What Can SETI Learn from Kepler?

The panel included:

Geoff Marcy – an astronomy professor at both UC Berkeley and at San Francisco State University. Together with his collaborators, he has discovered over 250 extrasolar planets. 

Martin Still – Still began his role as Director of the Kepler Guest Observer Office in August 2009. His scientific interests lie in the study of accretion, compact binary stars, black hole physics, gamma-ray bursts and exoplanet detection and characterization.

Seth Shostak – Senior Astronomer, Seth is an enthusiastic participant in the Institute’s SETI observing programs. He also heads up the International Academy of Astronautics’ SETI Permanent Committee ….and is the host of the SETI Institute’s weekly science radio show, “Big Picture Science.”

Douglas Caldwell –  Physicist Doug Caldwell is an expert on one of the most promising schemes for finding small worlds far beyond our solar system: looking for the slight dimming of a star caused when a planet crosses between it and us.

Moderator:  Andrew Fraknoi – Chair of the Astronomy Department at Foothill College and Senior Educator at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.