We'd like to take a moment to introduce a new weekly feature on the SETI Blog. Each week at the Space Sciences Lab in Berkeley, the SETI core group meets to discuss the what they have been working on for the past week, and the challenges they will face in the week ahead. Here's what happened on Monday, July 27th.

Jeff and Matt went the OSCON for three days at the San Jose Convention Center Last week. They learned some new tips and tricks, which they immediately folded into their stripchart diagnostic framework upon their return. There was discussion about making this stripchart framework available via Sourceforge, as it works fairly well for SETI@home. While at OSCON they also went to seminars for Drupal and MySQL, and they were interesting and helpful, but not really hands-on.

Also, got one of the recently donated Intel machines working. It required minor expenditure (to buy disks and a new disk controller), but it will be cheaper to get another similar system (also donated by Intel) online.

Bob got back into the office this week, and “started buying stuff like mad.” Apparently that was the function that was missing. His databases are all running quite well, though.

Eric rolled out the additional Chirp step, so our bandwidth dropped a half, but when we’re not running Astropulse. Astropulse chews at our raw data way faster than Multibeam. It would be nice to try and understand why Astropulse works many times faster than SETI @ Home does.

In Astropulse Updates, it seems that the last steps are to build the RFI marker. And we need to try and understand why Astropulse works so much faster than SETI @ Home.

Andrew just returned from two weeks at the SERENDIP 5 experiment in Puerto Rico. We are going to try and develop some new types of plots that we can make from the Data coming out of Arecibo.

He also gave tours of the SERENDIP instrument to people at summer school in Arecibo. Some people asked why we don’t use the SERENDIP instrument on something other than alpha? Why don’t we run a SERENDIP-type instrument at GBT? These are all good questions, indeed.

Dan thinks that Parkes would be a more interesting spot than GBT, because Parkes is a whole new part of the sky.

But it must be kept in mind that every time we think of some new receiver, we have to think about how the data from the new receiver is different and how we’re going to look at all of it and throw out all of the RFI. It is really a question of personpower.

Is it possible that we could make SETI at Home go to different frequencies? It is something to think about.

Dan was in Ithaca, New York at Cornell University last week, discussing how we are going to move the data from Arecibo to Berkeley. We are thinking of sending the raw data form Arecibo to Berkeley, and then sending it over to Cornell (they have a lot of disk space) and then we would have two copies of the database.

Andrew brought up the point that we should make sure we are using the same (identical) code in both Cornell and Berkeley.

Dan agreed, but noted that we should control the data flow from Arecibo, to Berkeley, and then to Cornell. But after that, the Code can diverge.

In other news form Ithaca, they are going to work over the next 3 years to build this big cryogenic thing that should generate 40-80 beams. It can make beams of different sizes, make nulls in different directions, and make some beams interact. It will be a pretty exciting project.

Berkeley’s part in this project is pretty straightforward. There are still some research things that need to be worked out in order to build the instrument, such as getting the whole system down to 30 Kelvin. Over the next year they will be building a prototype in Ithaca, with around 19 different elements, rather than around 100. The prototype will be a pretty big and exciting new direction for Arecibo!

Also, we are going to clean out the basement this afternoon, and we are going to be brutal. There are some old crates we need to get rid of, and some 9 Gig drives.

That is all from the Space Sciences Lab this week!