November 20, 2017

I know most of you didn’t support the campaign purely for the great perks, but we hope you’re as excited as we are to hear that you’ll be receiving any perk you ordered very shortly!  All items have been manufactured and delivered to us, orders have been locked on Indiegogo, and we’re starting the shipping process now.  There’s a lot of other work to do around here, but we think we can box up and ship them all out within the next couple weeks!

Have you or someone you know been inspired by Laser SETI, or the search for any other type of techno-signature?  We’ve heard such wonderful, supportive messages from wide and far that we wanted to share them with others!  If you have a haiku, painting, burnt toast reminiscent of our camera, or just a sentence or two you’d like to share, please tweet it to @SETIInstitute or share it #LaserSETI. 

For those with upcoming seasonal festivities, we hope to see some inspiration shared by wearing a Laser SETI hoodie instead of an ugly holiday sweater, or a SETI hat instead of knit cap.  We thought we might even discover some feline alien life chasing a Laser SETI laser pointer!

On the engineering front, it’s nothing but progress as well!  As backers, we’re pleased to share with you the above preview rendering of the two-camera enclosure.  As we mentioned in the campaign originally, two cameras are required per field-of-view at each site, and this modular and scalable system houses both the cameras as well as the electronics required to manage, process, and store data for them.  Its “eyes” are half closed because the extra shutters which protect the optics from direct sunlight are shown halfway through the opening process.  

There’s more than we can explain here shown in the picture, but of course there’s also a lot more progress that you can’t see!  The electrical system has been built and tested.  Structural parts that can’t be 3D printed are being sent for fabrication, which is one of the longer aspects of the schedule.  Exact cross-site field-of-view alignment models have been built.  We’re currently targeting the end of February to deploy the first cameras, and we’ll update you all on that schedule as it develops–and we’ll try to continue to share pictures in each update so you can literally see the instrument come to life!

Thanks again for all your support and happy holidays to all Earthlings who celebrate them!