Updates

You So Crazy, Nature

Even with my general (and limited) understanding of biology, that unless it’s forbidden by the laws of physics, nature generally does anything and everything you can imagine… This one blew my mind.

And not just once, with creatures having eyes on their shells, but with the number of times eyes have evolved within just that genus (remember: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species), and also the correlation between nerve holes in the shell and eye complexity.

Researchers Solve Mystery of The Sea Creature That Evolved Eyes All Over Its Shell

A chiton (Credit: Jason Edwards/Getty Images)

It’s amazing how something can make total sense while being hard to wrap your brain around it at the same time!

Jack Welch

It is a sad day indeed to share the news of William (Jack) Welch’s passing. I won’t duplicate here his achievements and awards, list his papers, nor attempt to wax poetic about his outsized contributions to the fields of radio astronomy and SETI. That’s all here and here.

What I’d like to add is that he was a wonderful person. As you can see from the picture below, he always had a smile, kindness, warmth, fun, and positive energy to share. He had the soul of an explorer, realistic yet indefatigable.

Credit: Jill Tarter

We’ll miss you, Jack.

Black Hole Sun

Won’t you come, and wash the rain away? For those in California and around the world laboring under a deluge from the sky, perhaps this video from the frontiers of astroseismology will be entertaining and informative, if not comforting.

“What if there’s a black hole inside the sun? Hawking Stars from PBS Space Time”

The short version is that it’s not implausible for a microscopic black hole to enter the sun, start consuming material and producing back-pressure against the massive gravity. As you can imagine, its growth eventually alters the life cycle of the star, but perhaps more subtly than you’d think.

And, back in the context of SETI and general cosmology, while we’re pretty sure our Sun doesn’t (yet) have one, it is encouraging to think that we can place constraints on the number of primordial black holes there are flying around out there, as well as confirm or rule out some dark matter theories.

A New Puzzle

Some of my favorite moments in science are when we find something that we didn’t think was possible. I also think that’s a good way to describe a SETI experiment: an non-nature detector, sifting through the universe looking for something we don’t think nature does.

Today’s instance is an invisible pulsar companion with a mass much larger than a typical neutron star, perhaps the largest on record, and in the range where it’s expected to collapse into a black hole, essentially at or above the “TOV limit.” I’ll let Science News explain.

An unseen object orbiting a pulsar might be an exceptionally lightweight black hole (illustrated), a very heavy neutron star, or something else entirely. Credit: DANIËLLE FUTSELAAR/ARTSOURCE.NL

For those who enjoy these types of mysteries, I also recommend the so-called OMG Particle in the field of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, which broke the “GZK limit.”

Maui Back From Vacation

Every year, now for the past 3 years, there’s a giant wind/ice storm that knocks power and connectivity out at the summit of Haleakala. This year, it started over a week ago, and we’ve just regained connectivity to the instruments. Hooray!

Fingers crossed we’re done for this year and that the infrastructure improvements they’re doing make next year even shorter or a non-event.

Screenshot of IFA2 control console

We were actually observing when the power went out, but our multiple levels of safeguards obviously did their job. As you can see, the cameras are in fine working order.

It sure would be nice if the moon weren’t so bright, though! Even outside of the field of view, the two bright semi-circles in the bottom half of the images are scattered light from it.

PCBs: Progress and Compromise

Trace map of new LaserSETI power breakout board

Making our next 10 instruments efficiently, as well as ensuring their reliability and ease of maintenance, is a top priority. Some of you might remember a previous iteration of a power board, an attempt to reduce wiring and build effort that encompassed all power wiring in the instrument and attempted to eliminate a COTS (commercial off the shelf) component. That board, however, was overpriced and unnecessarily aggressive, so we switched vendors, changed how we did the cabling to avoid joints, and reduced the scope of the board to handling the two remaining wiring challenges: the fans and FLI cameras.

The result is above and below, and is 40x cheaper than before, while still eliminating all of the manual labor, difficulty when swapping out components, and long-term reliability risk! Fans plug into 4-pin headers, and FLI cables will screw into block terminals (not rendered below) in the bottom right. No soldering, everything labelled, quicker and better than could be done by hand.

3D rendering of new LaserSETI power breakout board

We hope you enjoy these peeks into the details behind LaserSETI, but stay tuned for some bigger updates and announcements soon!

Get Them While They’re Hot

Eclipses are one of those things that are easy to assume they’ve been around and will always be around. But no. While the Anthropic Principle guarantees the universe must be sufficiently fined tuned for us to exist, there’s nothing which requires us to be alive during the “Golden Age of Eclipses.”

So we’re just lucky. I like to think about what other wonders are there to be appreciated: nearby, on our planet, elsewhere in our universe. They must be uncountable.

Happy holidays to all and please enjoy as many wonders as you can!

New Set(s) of Wheels

Since we’re building 10 new instruments, we’ve made a number of small investments to make building them easier and faster. This was a fun one to share:

Two LaserSETI instrument bases, with different types of dollies to make building them easier

On the left, you’ll see an off-the-shelf appliance dolly. Cheap and easy to obtain, but it only allows access to the wiring area in the instrument base with the panels removed and with the dolly somewhat awkwardly interfering with said access. On the right, we’ve machined custom aluminum “legs” with casters, so the bottom panels can stay on and even be opened or closed as necessary. The machining took a couple of hours, however, so we’ll be testing both side-by-side, to see which fits the need better–or maybe both are good for slightly different purposes or phases of construction!

For reference on our development process, we’re including XKCD’s study of tool making below (“automation” in programming-speak). 😉

https://xkcd.com/1319

Enclosures mean Build Time!

Today’s the day when a lot of work streams come together in the Gantt chart: our 10 enclosures have been delivered. That means we can start building instruments, which means we can deploy them, which means more sky coverage and advancing the project!

6 palletes containing a metaphorical and literal ton of stainless steel

Darius from East Bay Machine Company was amazing. For hours, we lifted, unpacked, pushed, and repacked it all into our offsite storage unit. A forklift would’ve made it go at least 3 times faster,

Darius, Eliot, and their work cut out for them

We’ve been working towards this day for a long time and in a lot of ways. If you’ve been keeping up with us, you already know about the years’-worth of 3D printing to produce all the internal bracketry. The spreadsheet below shows we have all the parts we need for 6 complete instruments, but are closer to 70% done with overall printing. And you may remember we already purchased the cameras, transmission gratings, computers, and other critical components. Fundraising and observatory discussions have also been progressing.

Current 3D printing inventory management spreadsheet

Work always continues are a furious pace, so stay tuned to see how these Version 2.1 instruments shape up and test out, which new observatory we’re deploying to next, and more!