06-07-2015, 06:18 AM
Well, this is interesting. I will quote from the following discussion:
JadeStar Wrote:We use Arecibo and other such radars take pictures of near Earth asteroids.
When we do this we are not intending to signal anyone and the transmissions are typically a one time affair as different asteroids have different trajectories so we aren't repeating these transmissions to the same areas of sky.
SETI essentially could have picked up a blip of another planet's asteroid avoidance radar. If that were the case, SETI would likely never see it again.
However it's also possible that such a transmission was some other type of radar which only sweeps that area of sky on an infrequent basis. An example of this would be our radar studies of Venus or Mars.
"Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people." -- Edward Robert Harrison