The
Space Sciences Lab is a
space research laboratory at
UC
Berkeley.
Where
SSL is located up the hill from the main
UC Berkeley campus, next to
Lawrence Hall of Science and
Tilden Regional Park. It has a beautiful
view of the
San Francisco Bay.
History
SSL was initiated in 1958 and began operations in 1960 on the main UC
Berkeley campus. As the program grew it quickly needed more space (hah,
punny). In 1962
NASA granted building the modern site which opened in
1966.
Groups and Projects
SSL has projects in
astrophysics,
astrometrics,
astronomy,
cosmology,
and even
distributed computing. Most research is experimental; most do so
by building and sending
satellites into space. Such projects go through
phases of building a proposal and obtaining
NASA funding, building
prototypes and the actual spacecraft, launching and data gathering.
Scientists and engineers study topics such as the Earth's
atmosphere, the
origin of the
Solar System, our
Sun,
Mars, the
cosmological constant,
supernovae,
gamma-ray bursts.
Berkeley's SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) program is also
housed at SSL. SERENDIP (Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from
Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations) searches for radio signals from ET
using Aracibo Observatory. The wildly successful SETI@Home project takes
this data and sends it to home users to analyze in the world's biggest
distributed computing project.
More info:
- http://ssl.berkeley.edu/
- http://seti.berkeley.edu/