The recent installation of the fourth LaserSETI observatory on Isla Magueyes in Puerto Rico was a fantastic experience and we’ve been happy to report that it went smoothly! That is, thanks to the help of Dr. Abel Mendez, the Deparment of Marine Sciences (University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez), and the Astronomical Society of the Caribbean (Sociedad de Astronomía del Caribe), and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. Braving the heat is always part of the process, but the company and the incredible views kept us going. Check out this time lapse of the installation to see how it all went!
It’s official! There is a new LaserSETI observatory in town, specifically in Sedona, AZ. While the the installation was successful, we were unable to focus the instruments while in Sedona due to the cloudy Arizona skies. So, we will be returning in the coming months to complete this final step. With the addition of the two LaserSETI stations that comprise this observatory, our sky coverage will increase from approximately 18 to 30%. That’s one step closer to monitoring all the sky, all the time. Read more here: https://www.seti.org/new-laserseti-observatory-installed-sedona-az.
Exciting news for LaserSETI! Two new LaserSETI stations will be installed this weekend in Sedona, Arizona. Although the current installations in California and Hawai’i observe almost 20% of the sky at one time, that will go up dramatically with the new observatory. You can see here how the LaserSETI team has been hard at work getting ready for the install.
The team’s mascot, Stormy, obviously helping with the preparations.
Part of the team getting ready for the shipment to Sedona.
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!
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!
There’s always a lot going on with LaserSETI. It’s easy to be super focused on the operations and observational data but, just like overall SETI 9-dimensional haystack, the LaserSETI project is similarly multifaceted, and we’re always trying to make progress on all its different dimensions.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case, closer to a thousand hours… of 3D printing time. Here’s the receiving bucket containing the parts for the new instruments, waiting to be cleaned and put to use:
Large bucket of LaserSETI parts, waiting to be cleaned and used
We’ve done so much printing, in fact, that it’s time to swap out the printing surface for a new one. It’s not hard to spot the difference, is it? And, with a shiny new surface, it’s a good time to print the parts that are a little more delicate in the first layers, like the sunshade that protects the cameras’ shutters from the beating sun.
3D printer build surface: used vs. new
On some of those other dimensions, here’s a few things happening right now:
Replacement of a misbehaving hard disk in our long-term storage array, and rebuilding the double redundancy of the 100TB volume
Copying a subset of the data to ship off to a budding student partnership to study the data
Spoiler alert: not as good as we’d hoped, because the chances of seeing an event are proportional to how spread out your sensors are on the ground
Working with a mechanical engineer to iron out the kinks caused by heat transfer in the cutting process when fabricating our stainless steel enclosures
Since the launch of this website, we’ve had live images from all the cameras: science and internal “pi camera”. But it’s a lot easier to really understand and explore what the instruments are seeing when you can watch how things evolve across the whole night (or day). So, without further ado, please head on over to the Live Status page, and watch some of the movies!
There’s a subtle red line underneath each thumbnail to help indicate they’re clickable. Each one should be the last full day or night cycle. That is, if we’re observing, it’ll be last night’s movie, or during the day, it’ll be yesterday’s daylight hours.
SETI Institute Giving Day is here! Help us raise $6k TODAY to put more instruments in the field faster. If we reach our funding goal, a generous donor will write a check for another $5k. This is an awesome opportunity to support LaserSETI. Make a gift now! https://bit.ly/3O4YKbY
