Archives May 2022

Tomorrow night, May 26th, I’ll be kicking off the annual Ferguson Observatory Speaker Series. We’ll start from SETI basics, explain how LaserSETI is designed, and take questions. It’s free, it’s virtual, and they’ll give you your money back if you don’t learn anything!

RFO Speaker Series: The LaserSETI project with Eliot Gillum

Join RFO and Eliot Gillum for the SETI Institute for an informative conversation on the LaserSETI project!LaserSETI is an ambitious project to continuously scan the whole sky for laser flashes from beyond the Earth-Moon system, ostensibly from another civilization. The first two instruments in this…

When it was announced a couple of years ago, I thought VASCO was a great idea and important work. Today, an article was published “70-Year-Old Astronomy Photos May Be Clues to Alien Visitors“, and despite the accurate but click-bait-sounding title, I’m glad to see they’ve done that work well, with great care and attention to detail. As with any general audience article on science or medicine, I encourage everyone to at least open the original paper to see what else you can glean from it, especially since this is a pre-print and is expected to evolve before publication.

While I’m quite pleased with the quality of both the article and the paper, I’d feel like I was leaving something out if I didn’t say that, based on what I see in the paper, while I agree the linear structure indicates fast-moving objects, I don’t think one can assume that the whole event is captured by a single plate, and thus we’re unable to constrain its angular velocity and therefore altitude. That puts them well within the range of a lot of high-speed and high-altitude experiments being done in southern California at the time, including the infamous Area 51, in Palomar’s neighborhood.

VASCO has some great ideas of other catalogs to analyze, which I think is the right next step in any case. They’ve shown there’s some interesting events to be explained in our collective archives, and science is always better (and easier) with many data points. I look forward to seeing how this story evolves!

It is the way of this world for life to grow, prosper, and pass on, to make room for new life. But the passing of Franklin Antonio, co-founder of Qualcomm and benefactor of LaserSETI, is more than just the regular machinations of nature.

I’ve had the pleasure to know a great many bright people, but Franklin stands out on the list. In any area he was passionate about, he could go toe-to-toe with professionals and win. Chip-level software, astrophysics, or feeding those in need–he knew how he wanted the world to be better and was a determined and overwhelming force for doing so.

It’s fair to say that half the LaserSETI instruments in the field today are due to his generosity and shared vision of searching the universe for life. I still remember how thrilled I was to have his support, and I’m gratified I got the opportunity to thank him for it and show him the difference he made with me and on our project.

A LaserSETI instrument is full of computers, sensors, and other electronics, and hence it’s also full of wires. Each wire has to be cut to length, connected firmly, and worked around carefully when performing any other operation on the instrument.

It’s therefore very exciting that we’ve designed a custom PCB (printed circuit board) that can reduce all that complexity, effort, and risk. Thanks to today’s modern electronics ecosystem, it’s easily outsourced and since it replaces existing COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) components, these benefits add nothing to the cost of an instrument.

We’re not quite done making sure every need and clearance is accounted for, but we’re close. Since these traces will carry a decent amount of current, however, we have at least validated the current flow, trace width, copper thickness, and resulting temperature increase is very well within limits (credit: PCB Trace Width Calculator). We want both the boards to be super reliable for the long term, even when it gets hot inside the instrument on some days or at some locations.