All posts by eliotg

[TL;DR: exciting astrobiology news at bottom]

One of the things that’s so great about the era of science that we’re living through, is the steady pace of amazing discoveries–almost to the point that they’re predictable. Exoplanets, the Higgs boson, the age of the universe, gravitational waves, and many others were foreseen and experienced regular progress until their ultimate discovery.

These areas of science are foundational to SETI, but I think the connection is deeper. Everything we’ve learned about the universe suggests the possibilities for abiogenesis elsewhere in the universe are endless. But simple life doesn’t build transmitters or starships. And, as essentially a brand new technological civilization on the timescale of our star, galaxy, or universe, our ability to predict how and how often other civilizations might evolve could not be more limited. We have no exobiology, exospychology, or exosociology–only physics and chemistry which are universal by definition.

Hopefully that explains why I’ve said for a while now that I view the search for technosignatures as in a race with astrobiology. I picture it like the children’s story of the race between the tortoise and the hare. Astrobiology is the tortoise, making regular progress but always painful to wait for the next instrument or discovery. It’s not actually slow, it’s really amazingly fast that we get to watch a fascinating science unfold in real-time, but it’s hard to wait for things you’re excited about! SETI, of course, is the hare, the rabbit that makes rapid spurts of progress. Who knows when and how a signal might be found and, reliant on unpredictable private funding, technosignature projects–like LaserSETI!–show up irregularly and take as big a bite out of the problem as they can.

And so that’s the background which makes NASA’s announcement of observations of “habitable zone” exoplanet K2-18b an exciting step for the astrobiology tortoise. Using a technique called transit spectroscopy (see Update at bottom of post), which measures starlight passing through the planet’s atmosphere while it’s between us and its host star, they’ve identified a chemical composition that indicates it’s potentially a water world. And, especially tantalizing, there’s also hints of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) which, on Earth, is only produced by biology. It’s “the most abundant biological sulfur compound emitted to the atmosphere” and so makes a credible candidate for the first biosignature gas we might detect.

Stay tuned because it’s too early to say if this DMS is a real or just a trick of the noise in the limited data they’ve been able to collect thus far. After all, we can point the telescope wherever we want, but we can’t make the “K2-18 year” to happen any faster to produce more transits!

Would I be disappointed if astrobiology beat SETI to discovering other life in the universe? Absolutely not! The most interesting scientific discovery of my lifetime will be amazing whoever makes it, and it will only hasten the search for technosignatures and answering the other half of the question, “are we alone?”

Update: Here’s a great illustration of transit spectroscopy:

We didn’t get as much time on the sky this week than normal, as we had work going on at both observatories, RFO and IfA. One was planned, the other not so much.

At IfA, our maintenance was unplanned. IFA2’s sunshade stopped working, which is scary because the sunshade protects from the Sun potentially damaging the shutter on the FLI science cameras. You can see the problem below, using our internal “PiCam”: the polycarbonate gear started to slip around the motor shaft.

We recent started a project to detect the the sunshade position using computer vision to catch exactly this sort of problem automatically but, since we currently check every morning, we caught it manually. Fortunately, Team LaserSETI member Doug Hagan who’s local on Maui, was able to make the long drive up Haleakala and close it by hand.

Speaking of cameras, the horz-cam on IFA1 had started misbehaving transiently. We tried remote diagnostics and troubleshooting but eventually we had to admit it wasn’t succeeding. So we’ve sent a new camera (and a new gear) to Doug, and he’ll be replacing both shortly.

Meanwhile, at RFO in California, they’re upgrading the roof surface of the observatory which our instruments sit directly on top of. We worked with observatory team to come up with a plan for them to coat the the whole roof without disturbing the position of the instruments.

If you’ve been reading the news recently, it won’t surprise you to hear that our instruments on the summit of Haleakala, Maui, have been offline for the past couple days.

The good news is they came back online this afternoon, and seem to be in great shape. In fact, I would assess-timate the high winds even did a good job cleaning the windows.

Of course, that’s the easy part of this post. Our knowledge of the enormity of the tragedy from the fires on Maui grows day over day, and wrenches our hearts ever harder. People, businesses, history, nature, all gone and without warning.

Personally, I haven’t heard from everyone I know there, but each one I do hear from is a gift. It reminds me all too much of the firestorms that struck California in recent years–not “just” a fire, but a fast-moving “natural” blowtorch that creates its own weather as it decimates everything in its path. I keep thinking about a sign that hangs in my mother-in-law’s house, and she was kind enough to take a picture of it for me.

If there’s anything you can do to help the wonderful people of Maui recover, now or in the future, I hope you’ll act on that opportunity. The best resource I could find on ways to help was here.

All the life we know of clings to the thin skin of a giant rock flying through space. I think we should take care of each other.

The hard drive in RFO2 has given us trouble before. A year ago, we swapped out the disk, the enclosure, and even the computer itself. For a while, it was smooth sailing, but then started acting up again.

So, after replacing the disk and enclosure again, we tried the power and data cables. That was an improvement, but still not 100%. And since we can’t observe without the hard drive, anything less than perfect isn’t good enough.

We’ll be headed up to Ferguson again soon, this time with a new idea in hand, to try to put this trouble maker to bed once and for all: a solid state disk. Smaller capacity, but completely different performance, electrical, and other characteristics.

Since RFO2 wants to be an attention-hogging snowflake, here’s the work from its perspective. LaserSITTIE is, by far, my favorite piece of maintenance equipment. There’s nothing like sitting when we previously had to bend over the instrument, or kneeling on it instead of the often-sweltering roof.

Many of LaserSETI’s parts are challenging to print, simply due to the required function of the part and the limitations of Fused Deposition Manufacturing (FDM), aka 3D printing. We’d worked out most of the kinks in the original design of the parts, but one has been giving us trouble.

This is the bracket that holds the “horz-cam” but also, underneath in the bay visible above, holds the router that connects all the various computers that make LaserSETI operate and analyze.

The near side is where all the ethernet cables plug in, so obviously can’t be a solid wall. The highlighted support pillar is large enough to grow into the camera bracket higher up, but small enough to not cause a problem with the cables below. But sometimes, if everything below didn’t print 1000% perfectly, it became a long lever arm that got pushed around by the print head and eventually broke off.

It’s a large part, taking 75 hours of machine time and about $15 in raw plastic. So a print failure more than halfway through is a frustrating waste of time, money, and effort. And it’d happened one time too many times. There are a plethora of factors, mainly the printer and type of thermoplastic, but many variables aren’t realistic to control precisely, such condition of the machine, ambient temperature and humidity, feedstock humidity and other imperfections.

We’d tried fixing it “the right way” by printing a support pillar on the side, meant to be broken off once the print job finishes. But it wasn’t getting a solid enough connection to the model and too often failed in its one job.

As the saying goes, “if you want something done right, do it yourself.” So we carefully crafted a brace from scrap wood, it fits tightly, and we’re expecting this will get the job success rate up, from maybe 65% to more like 100%!

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!

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!

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!

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

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.

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!

One of my favorite aspects of SETI work is the scientific breadth required. While no one can be an expert in everything, every corner of human knowledge has the potential to affect SETI theory or practice.

So while this video does discuss spectroscopy, I hope you’re now in the muod for some mind-bending atomic chemistry that’s admittedly only peripherally related to LaserSETI.

After watching the video, in case you’re wondering: yes, it technically is an isotope of hydrogen since its atomic number is the same. Its nucleon count, however, is zero. If that seems odd, just wait, it gets better. Since there’s a third type of lepton, there’s not one but two hydrogen isotopes of nucleon count zero. 🤯

If your head is hurting by this point, perhaps you should drink a nice, cold glass of dihydrogen monoxide.

We lost power at RFO from about 8am to 5pm today. Everything came back online as expected, however, and we’re observing now.

Not a packet yet from IfA. They found the problem, though: the network was damaged in our building. Physical repair completed, and (eagerly) awaiting reconfiguration to bring us back online.