Archives March 2023

Part Party

As you know if you’ve been following LaserSETI for a while, we’ve got 10 new instruments we’re building and there’s a lot that goes into them.

It takes 27 days of continuous 3D-printing to make all the parts for just 1 instrument–assuming the printer ran continuously, which it can’t unfortunately.

After months of printing steadily, the LaserSETI team convened to clean and check all the parts we’ve printed thus far. There’s a lot!

Parts printed, and now cleaned, for future LaserSETI instruments

If you’re like me, you like numbers: It took 6 people 4 hours process them all which, with 120 parts, works out to 12 minutes per part. More importantly, this is 43% of parts required for the next 10 instruments, although only 35% of the print-hours it will take. That’s great because there’s less overhead in printing larger parts!

Good night, Hawaii!

It seems things are slowly returning to normal on Haleakala. The power has been more stable <knocks on wood> and this is the second night in a row of those gorgeous clear skies. We’ve got a lot of observing time to make up!

Live view from IFA1

We’ve also got an exciting announcement coming up about data from Maui. More on that soon!

Brief but Good!

No less than 75 days after a large storm hit Maui, we heard from the instruments on Haleakala today!

The storm knocked out both power and fiber to the summit and it’s been a long and bumpy road getting power and connectivity back. The turmoil caused all sorts of secondary damage: breakers, generators, routers–all had to be replaced as problems were discovered sequentially. Sometimes temporary repairs had to be undone and redone. Sometimes replaced components had to be replaced again. We’re very grateful to the tenacity of the IfA team, as well as the workers at MECO and Hawaiian Telecom.

Screen capture of telemetry from IFA1

As you can perhaps read from the graphs, tonight the humidity was 100%, a strong indication you won’t be seeing any stars. But, as a system test, we observed anyways for a short period and–happily–everything performed as expected. Unfortunately, utility power was lost again, near 10pm local time.

We were only online for a handful of hours, but it’s so nice to know that, after a 2.5 month sabbatical and torrential ice storm, everything is still in great shape! Fingers crossed for more stable power from here on out, and getting back to the science!