The SETI at Berkeley group will now be having weekly Science meetings, and few (every other weekly) general meetings. Watch this space for science and server updates!

Dan wanted to use this meeting to outline general project goals for our SETI group this year.

1. SETI@Home: We want to expand SERENDIP to be multibeam, especially since we now actually have enough hardware to build a multibeam spectrometer. Also, a new pulsar-observation machine, named “Guppy” is going to be installed at Arecibo. We are hoping do run a SERENDIP experiment (i.e commensal SETI) on it.
2. Astropulse: We have proposed to re-observe the Astropulse data.
3. Greenbank Telescope Proposals: At the end of 2010, we submitted a proposal to do a SERENDIP-type operation on the Greenbank telescope in West Virginia. Many of the reviewers of the proposal seemed to think it was a good idea, since the project doesn’t require any extra observation time of its own. However, one of the reviewers mentioned that there might actually be no place to plug it in and get our required bandwidth, since astronomers using that telescope to make observations of spectral lines require very narrow bandwidths. For SETI, we need 10 MHz of Bandwidth. However, pulsar observations need as much bandwidth as possible, so commensual observation could be possible during this time. Furthermore, on Feburary 1st, NASA is planning on releasing data from the Kepler mission, listing hundreds of new candidates. This is an exciting and important opportunity for SETI—and we are planning on being able to observe some of the candidates using the Greenbank telescope, that is, if we win our proposal.

4. The final item on the current agenda is: the possibility of a new optical instrument at Leuschner or Lick Observatories?

Out of all of these project goals, we have decided to prioritize the Kepler proposals and the re-obervation of Astropulse data. It was also decided that Andrew would take the lead on the Kepler field observations and that Eric would take the lead on the Astropulse re-observations.

In terms of the Kepler observations, we need to discuss how we want to utilize the telescope time that we may get, as well as what are the best observation techniques for spotting signs of extraterrestrial life.

First of all, we are considering sending the data we take from the Kepler field out to SETI@Home for y’all to chew on, as well as through a pulsar software call presto which does both single pulse and periodicity searching. But should we be spending time on individual objects when really, we could just slew the telescope across the entire field and get a broader picture? In order to even detect Gaussian pulses, we need to slew the telescope.

There are going to be a couple of candidates mentioned by NASA that are much, much more interesting (for our purposes) than the rest. Some of the candidates might be planets, but for example, may have surface temperatures not conducive to life as we know it. These planets are typically not of must interest from the viewpoint of SETI. However, we should keep in mind that our definition of life is very Earth-based, and we are not entirely sure what life could be like on other planets. Thus, it may be worth our while to do some cross-field slewing to look, even if it is briefly, at these seemingly uninhabitable worlds.

Thus, it seems advantageous to go with a combination of targeted observation of interesting objects, as well as some broader scans. The original proposal asked for 24 hours of telescope time that could be portioned out in this way: 16 hours spent pointing (we’ll be able to look at ~10% of the field at a high sensitivity), and 8 hours of scanning (90% of the field at 30 second beam). We look at something for a longer time and then slew really fast between each object…or do we slew slowly across the next object and spend a shorter time on each one? Before the logistics of the optimal path (traveling-salesman problem-esque) solution to our situation, we need to do some further research into which candidates exactly we want to look at, how far they are apart, and how fast the Greenbank telescope can slew between them.

More updates on the Greenbank and Kepler field observations after next week’s science meeting. Thanks for reading!