Hey Everyone!

Do you remember me? After a semester away, I am back with SETI this fall to bring you the weekly updates from the group meetings, direct from the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Keep checking this space for an exciting weekly write-up of what's going on with SETI at Berkeley!

Without further ado, here is the summary from this week's meeting:

Last week, Dan and Andrew were out at a conference in Green Bank, West Virginia, in honor of the 50-year anniversary of the first experiments of Dr. Frank Drake, considered by many to be the first modern SETI effort.

Many questions about the last 50 years of SETI, including: What did Drake’s observations indicate? What kind of implications do they have? Well, his experiments were the first to be conducted in a way similar to how we conduct our research today—and hence them to be the first modern SETI experiments, even though scientists have been inquiring about the possible existence of ET for hundreds of years.

The conference boasted really diverse crowd, not just SETI scientists, but also people on all levels of the discussion about ET, including an astronomer from the Vatican and a federal judge. There was also a lot of talk about things not necessarily connected to the science of SETI, such as the implications and morality of ET, as well as the legal and social implications of finding a signal.

Most intriguing for us at Cal was the incredible amount of excitement at the conference over the potential of doing SETI experiments in Green Bank, the location of NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory). Their telescope, GBT, is the biggest steer-able telescope on the planet, and it would allow us to look at parts of the sky we can’t really see with the Arecibo telescope. We look forward to working with our colleagues at Green Bank.

In other SETI news, Bob announced that Marvin is up and running as the database server for Astropulse. We are working on moving some stuff around between our databases, a “database migration,” if you will.

Users donations have allowed us to raise enough money to buy a new machine (thanks for your support, users!) but it might be wiser to re-asses what we need and use the money in another way. A new server? More processors for more RAM? Faster Ethernet? Bank the money? We are anticipating upgrades, but we are just not sure what we need yet, we want to make sure we are using the money in the best possible way.

Last week Dave was at BOINC workshop and a two-day conference on citizen cyber-science. Einstein@home is thinking about doing something with users looking at plots and ranking them, sort of like we are trying to do in the future. Their plots may look (arguably) a little better than our plots—which is something we may want to try and work on.

Einstein@home has recently made some exciting discoveries Their major goal is to find a pulsar whose companion is a black hole. The presence of a pulsar whose companion is a black hole can act give us important information about the black hole—allowing us to calculate quantities such as the black hole density. They aren’t sure what the companion of this new pulsar is yet. Likewise, it would be really exciting to find a pulsar at the galactic center.

In Matt’s projects: NTPCKr and RADAR are going along pretty smoothly. There was a bit of a glitch in normal operation last week when the AC broke down and some SETI machines began to overheat. The facilities support team implemented a“MacGyver-style fix” involving a standing fan a hose until they could get their hands on the new part that was needed. Let’s just say that it is a good thing that it is actually fixed now!

Eric is on vacation for this week, he’ll be back next Monday.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!