50ish Years of
SETI@Arecibo
Dan Werthimer , UC Berkeley
http://seti.berkeley.edu SETI Before Arecibo
Porno in space: FUNDED! The Arecibo Message
The First SETI “Experiment” at Arecibo Drake, Sagan et al
Stay tuned, response expected in year 46374 Sagan & Drake 1975: A Search of 4 Nearby Galaxies for Type II Civilizations
M33
Other early Arecibo SETI Searches
‣1977 Stull & Drake - 6 Stars @ 1664 - 1668 MHz ‣1978 Knowles & Sullivan - 2 Stars @ 130 - 500 MHz ‣1978 Horowitz - 185 Stars @ 1420 MHz ‣1978 Cohen et al - 25 Globular Clusters @ 1665 MHz ‣1979 Tarter et al - 200 Stars @ 500 - 600 MHz ‣1982 Horowitz et al - 400 Stars @ 1.4 - 2.8 GHz ‣1988 Commensal SERENDIP II ‣1992 NASA High Resolution Microwave Survey
Warning
Why you might not want to do SETI at Arecibo
SERENDIP IV
Photos Courtesy NAIC Arecibo Observatory, a facility of the NSF
• 168M channels • 100 MHz Band centered on 1420 MHz
Why you might want to do SETI at Arecibo
Piggyback ALFA Sky Survey • Improved sensitivity – Tsys • Uniform sky sampling – galactic plane concentration • Multibeam RFI rejection • Larger Bandwidth (SERENDIP V coming soon) • Piggyback on Palfa, Galfa, Egalfa • Automatic recording during ALFA use
(no more operator manual switch for observations)
SETI Figure of Merit Drake, Gulkis
FOM = Sky Coverage
* Frequency Coverage
* Sensitivity -1.5
Arecibo SETI Figure of Merit
Search Date Telescope MHz Sky W /m^2 FOM Cover Phoenix 2000 Arecibo 1800 1E-5 3 E-26 2.5 SETI@home 1999- Arecibo 10 0.25 1.4 E-26 300 SERENDIP V 2008 Arecibo 300 0.25 10 E-26 300 SETI@h II 2015? Arecibo 300 0.25 1.4 E-26 10,000 Prelude 2008 ATA 42 1000 0.001 200 E-26 0.5
Square Km 2020 SKA 10000 0.001 1 E-25 15,000
Berkeley SETI Group
David Anderson, Hong Chen, Jayanth Chennamangalam, Jeff Cobb, Matt Dexter, Frank Drake, Eric Korpela, Matt Lebofsky, Geoff Marcy, David MacMahon, Rem Stone, Andrew Siemion, Dick Treffers, Mark Wagner, Shelley Wright, Dan Werthimer
NSF , NASA, Individual Donors
Sun Microsystems/Oracle , Agilent, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Xilinx
UC Berkeley SETI Programs Name Time Scale Search Type
SERENDIP seconds radio sky survey
SETI@home mS - seconds radio sky survey
Astropulse nS - mS radio sky survey
SEVENDIP nS visible targetted
SPOCK 1000 seconds visible targetted
DYSON IR targetted The SETI@home Client
Data storage: NERSC HPSS
(Naional Energy Research Scientific Computing Center) SETI@home Statistics TOTAL RATE
8,464,550 participants 1,000 per day (in 226 countries)
7 million years 1,000 years per day computer time
1022 floating point 3000Tera-flops operations
Web site: 2 million hits/day 200,000 visitors/day (stats & games popular; science less popular)
100,000 children, families (including congress members and their kids)
> 7,000 schools
Gaussian Candidates
AstroPulse (Vonkorff, Korpela, Werthimer) • Sky survey – SETI@home I and piggyback ALFA data • Good time resolution – Sensitive to 0.4 µs radio pulses at 21 cm • DM range – -830 to +830 pc/cm3 (but not -50 to +50) • Sensitivity – 10-18 W/m2 peak (Coherent de-dispersion) Astropulse: Arecibo Transient Search Volunteer Computing: 400 nS pulses
Arecibo SETI@home led to
Public Participation Supercomputing
David Anderson, Rom Walton, SETI Group
• aka Distributed Computing • aka “edge resource aggregation”)
Projects • Astronomy – SETI@home (Berkeley) – Astropulse (Berkeley) – Einstein@home: gravitational pulsar search (Caltech,…) – PlanetQuest (SETI Institute) – Stardust@home (Berkeley, Univ. Washinton,…) • Earth science – Climateprediction.net (Oxford) • Biology/Medicine – Folding@home, Predictor@home (Stanford, Scripts) – FightAIDSathome: virtual drug discovery • Physics – LHC@home (Cern) • Other – Web indexing/search – Internet Resource mapping (UC Berkeley)
Thinking@Home
(BOSSA)
Stardust@home... Stardust (NASA)
Stardust January 2009 19 Citizen Science Projects • SETI@home and Astropulse (UC Berkeley)
• Stardust@home (UC Berkeley)
• SetiQuest (Seti Institute)
• Galaxy Zoo (Galaxy Classification)
• Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count (1900)
• Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Monitor Network
• Clickworkers (mars crater identficiation - NASA)
• Ebird, NestWatch, FeederWatch, Urban Birds (Cornell Univ.)
• ParkScan (monitor San Francisco Parks)
• ScienceForCitizens.net
Arecibo SETI “Spin Offs” • Public Participation Distributed Computing
(Edge resource aggregation) • Transient Sky Survey for uS pulses (Astropulse) • Instrumentation at 45 Observatories (CASPER)
(open source hardware and software for spectometers, correlators, beamformers, pulsars) • Education, Public Outreach • Commensal Observing Concept Future SETI at Arecibo • Astropulse (uS dispersed pulses) • SERENDIP VI Spectrometer (14*256M channels) • SETI@home II (300 MHz – ALFA) • Wideband SETI (4 GHz bandwidth spectrometer) • New Multibeam Receiver Arrays – 100 beams New wavelengths, More Bandwidth
Upcoming SERENDIP VI and FRB Multibeam System
Moores Law – Instruments using FPGA’s: 2X per year (1,000,000 over 20 years)
SETI HAIKU
Searching for life Answers are revealed About ourselves
Paula Cook, Duke University One million earthlings Bounded by optimism Leave their PC’s on
Dan Seidner
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