SETI Program at the Medicina INAF Radioastronomy Station: Past, Present, Future

In these last year, new Earth-like type exoplanets have been discovered. These could be suitable to sustain life and maybe able to evolve in a technological civilization as happened on the earth. SETI program for 40 years is looking to verify such an existence through observations in both the radio and optical bands. At the Medicina radio telescope, the SETI program started in the middle of the 90s, exploiting a high-resolution spectrum analyzer, with many million channels, given by the University of Berkeley. We observed in a piggyback mode for ten years, in the period 1998–2008, for 73.000 h of operation. During these observations, we searched for a “Doppler-shifted” monochromatic radio because we thought that ET would have sent such a signal to flag his presence into space. Many suspect signals were received, but no one has been verified in further observation as requested by the Post Detection International Protocol. From 2008 till now, the SETI program didn’t continue, but research activities will probably start soon with new post-processing algorithms implemented on a commercial fast Personal Computer.