Archives January 2024

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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