Project META (Megachannel ExtraTerrestrial Assay)wais a SETI program, conducted from 1985 to 1994 by the Harvard SETI group, using the Harvard-Smithsonian radio telescope.

 

META was an all-sky search which covered much of the northern sky, between –30 and +60° declination, in drift-scan mode, looking for narrow-band signals near the 21-centimeter line of neutral hydrogen. It overcame the deficiencies of its predecessor, Project Sentinel, by employing an 8.4 million channel Fourier spectrometer of 0.05-Hz resolution bandwidth and 400-kHz instantaneous bandwidth. META was funded by the Planetary Society, through a $100,000 donation from Steven Spielberg, and by grants from NASA and the Bosack-Kruger Foundation.

 

During its nine years of operation, META identified several dozen candidate events, but none of these were repeated at subsequent observations.¹ In 1995, META was superseded by Project BETA, although META II, META's sister program in the southern hemisphere, continued. Project META II used a radio telescope at the Argentine Institute of Radio Astronomy near Buenos Aires.

 

Reference

1. Sagan, C., and Horowitz, P. "Five Years of Project META: An All-Sky Narrowband Radio Search for Extraterrestrial Signals," Astrophysical Journal, 415, 218 (1993).