Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - IBM Enters SETI@Home's Game

Episode Date: December 6, 2004

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As IBM downloaded SETI at Home, we'll find out on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone and welcome back to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. David Anderson is Project Director for SETI at Home, the five-year-old project that has turned five million personal computers into the world's largest supercomputer. David will join us later to contrast his effort with the World Community Grid, just announced by IBM.

We'll also drop in on a ceremony honoring the Spaceship One and Mars Rover teams, among others. And Bruce Betts will be here with the winner of our Rename the NASA Administrator contest. Here are some space headlines to get us started. It's probably one of the most beautiful images ever taken from space. The just-released true-color image of Saturn's rings with the great cold planet itself in the background is just one of thousands returned by Cassini. You can see it and many others at planetary.org. Speaking of Cassini, its small companion, the Huygens probe, is now just days away from the release that will send it plunging toward Cloudy Titan. You can read an interview with John Czarnecki,

Principal Investigator for the Huygens Science Surface Package of Instruments, at our website. And NASA has proudly announced that after rigorous peer review, 11 formal papers by 122 authors have been published in the December 3rd issue of Science Magazine. Topics survey the major findings by the Mars rover teams in the first three months of their time on the Red Planet. Emily's Q&A is up next. I'll be back in a minute with a report from the California Space Authority's Spotbeam Awards.

Stay with us. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, could a planet formed in a binary star system have around-the-clock sunlight? There are two ways to have planets in a binary star system. In the first, the pair of stars orbits close to each other. The two stars would behave essentially like one large object as far as the pull on the planet is concerned. The planet would orbit both stars at a great distance. Such a planet would not have around-the-clock sunlight, but residents of the planet would enjoy a spectacular double sun in the daylight sky. One such planet was discovered in

October of 2002 orbiting the star Gamma Cephei. The second way to have a planet in a binary star system is if the two stars are separated by a great distance and the planet orbits one of the two stars closely. What would the sky look like in that situation? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. to find out. Beam Awards Dinner, sponsored by the California Space Authority. Glass trophies were handed to educators, leaders of the aerospace industry, political representatives, and others, handed to them by the likes of Buzz Aldrin, after whom one of the awards was named. The Jet Propulsion Lab received recognition for a mostly glorious year of successes, led by spirit and opportunity, the two little rovers still

exploring Mars. Accepting on behalf of JPL director Charles Elachi was deputy director Gene Tattini, who expressed the appreciation of his boss and the 6,000 other people who work for the lab. What I thought I'd do also very quickly is just bring you up to date on where the little rover spirit is with a couple of factoids, if you'll bear with me. Today we celebrated the 326th sol on the surface of Mars with rover Spirit. That's against a requirement of 90 sols. That little rover has now moved 3.7 kilometers against a requirement of 60 meters. It is now some 55 meters in altitude as it's going to crest the Columbia Hills and peer onto and down into a valley of Mars that has heretofore not been seen by the human eye. We have, through both of the rovers, downloaded now some 71.5 gigabits of information, which altogether totals 63,687

individual images of the planet Mars. So just like to pass that on to you. Quite frankly, Charles will tell you, I will tell you, and probably 99.9% of the men and women that work at the Jet Propulsion Lab will tell you that it's a little bit embarrassing coming up here and accepting these acknowledgments and awards because we have so damn much fun doing what we do that we should be giving you the awards for the privilege of allowing us to come to work every day at JPL. Thank you. The last award of the night saluted innovation, and there couldn't be much doubt about where that would go this year. Stu Witt, manager of the Mojave Airport in the Southern California desert, got to hand the

trophy to Kevin Mickey, vice president of Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites. In his introduction, Witt reviewed the many records shattered during the recent flights of Spaceship One, including at least one that was completely unexpected. It happened during the live webcast of the second XPRIZE flight, a webcast hosted by Stu Witt and Kevin Mickey. It turned out to be the largest singular event in the history of the Internet known as a webcast. And the second one was a Britney Spears concert in Central Park. And so, Kevin, it is my true honor and pleasure to call you my friend and present this award to you this evening in

front of this distinguished audience. Ladies and gentlemen, Vice President of Scaled Composites, Mr. Kevin Mickey. Thank you. Had I known Stu was going to give out this award, we could have just gone down to the local cafe there at Mojave. I would have saved 120 miles on my car, and I wouldn't have had to figure out this damn tie. Thank you for recognizing us for innovation.

While we feel that that's important, and of course it takes innovation to accomplish what we did, what we did isn't nearly as important as the fact that we did it. What you folks can do for us, besides recognizing us as innovators, as leaders, and as influential people in our industry, is that you can create an environment within your companies, within this industry, that people stop analyzing, stop making PowerPoint presentations, they stop looking for reasons why they cannot do things, and they go out and do them. Thank you.

Just a sampling of the California Space Authority's Spot Beam Awards last week. You'll find a link to the CSA's website at planetary.org. We're not done saluting innovation. I'll be back with David Anderson of the SETI at Home Project in just a minute. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars.

We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in The Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS.

That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, PlanetarySociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. It is the year 2100. Humankind has spent over a century searching the galaxy for intelligent life. The entire electromagnetic spectrum has been carefully monitored for evidence. So have gravity waves and neutrino flux. Now the heads of the remaining SETI projects have gathered for one last holographic news conference

where they declare the effort a success. No, E.T. never phoned home. But as in all scientific inquiry, a negative result can be as significant as a positive one. More important, the search itself, constantly refined and renewed, has led to undreamt-of advances in many fields. We don't have to wait a hundred years. Last week, IBM announced the World Community Grid.

The description of Big Blue's plan must have seemed awfully familiar to the five million past and present participants in the SETI at Home project. It certainly sounded familiar to David Anderson, SETI at Home's director, and a past guest of Planetary Radio. We made a low-tech phone call to David a couple of days ago and asked for his take on IBM's project, as well as his own new addition, the Berkeley Online Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC. David, thanks again for coming back on Planetary Radio.

Sure. Well, let's get one thing out of the way first. How many users are you up to there at SETI at Home? Well, we're holding SETI at about a half million users. And how many users total over the course of the project? Five million people since the beginning of the project have participated. Still amazing. In the news, and in fact on the Planetary Society's website at planetary.org,

I don't know if competition is the right thing to call it, but IBM's new World Community Grid. And there was a great article that was posted November 24th by my colleague Amir Alexander that talks about this new project from IBM and actually contrasts it with SETI at Home. I guess you may want to congratulate IBM for following a path that you guys started to explore about five years ago. Yeah, World Community Grid is really a new name for something that's been around for a while. This company, United Devices, has been doing a public computing project to screen cancer drugs for a couple of years.

This is kind of a corporate version. It's big companies that are doing the project, and IBM kind of took over sponsorship of that and gave it this new name of World Community Grid. But as of right now, it's still just running one biology-related project. That's a protein folding project, I think? Yeah. Their model is that big distributed computing needs to run on big mainframe servers, and

IBM is a big company that can supply those. BOINC takes a somewhat different approach. We've set things up so that you can run a distributed computing project off of your own server, and scientists around the world are doing this, and they don't need to get the permission of anybody to run their projects. they don't need to get the permission of anybody to run their projects. So as a result, we have a great diversity of distributed computing projects based on BOINC in a bunch of different areas. We think this is the future of public distributed computing, not this corporate model. And so the idea of BOINC is to open up grid computing to really anybody who wants to make use of it.

Yeah, though we don't call it grid computing. Grid computing really has to do with sharing of resources between institutions like companies and universities and research labs. The idea comes from the electrical power grid where one day you're supplying computing power, the next day you're using it. The situation with projects like SETI at Home and BOINC-based projects is a little different. We're using public resources, PCs owned by the general public, by private people in their living rooms and dens and so forth,

who volunteer those computing resources to scientific projects that they think are worthwhile. Does that make BOINC, in any even tiny sense, a little bit like a peer-to-peer network? Well, it has something in common with peer-to-peer, which is that it's using the vast computational and storage resources that are kind of out at the fringes of the network, not in the supercomputing labs and the machine rooms of these institutions, but out in people's living rooms. Just because there's so many of these computers and they're becoming so fast, they're actually a much larger resource than the institutionally owned computers.

And, of course, you're totally legal, as the peer-to-peers are maybe not entirely. Yeah, peer-to-peer really had to do with file sharing, which has always been kind of at the fringes of legality. So, BOINC, SETI at Home, transitioning to this new infrastructure called BOINC, is much less centralized, and it is an open system, but talk about what that really means. Well, it means that any scientist can download our server software and set up a Linux machine using other open source software like MySQL and Apache and create a project.

The source code is freely available. A bunch of projects have done this already. So there's a wide variety of things. There's climateprediction.net, which is studying long-term climate change and global warming and has the potential to do a much better and more accurate job of predicting world climate than anybody else these days. There's a project at CERN in Switzerland at the accelerator, which involves simulating the accelerator itself and optimizing its design.

There's a real exciting project called Einstein at Home, which is starting up next year, which is going to analyze gravity wave data, looking for something called asymmetric pulsars, neutron stars spinning around that are kind of lopsided and give off gravity waves. It's sort of analogous to SETI, looking for narrowband signals in noisy data. And there's a bunch of other things coming up. There's something called Planet Quest, which is going to look at time series of star photographs looking for planetary occlusions.

Another thing called Orbit at Home, which is going to do long-term predictions of the orbits of near-Earth objects and try to figure out which of them might collide with Earth someday. So, like SETI at Home, these other projects find their data wherever they can pick it up. I mean, SETI at Home, of course, picks it up from the big radio telescope in Puerto Rico, Arecibo. The Einstein at home, where would they be getting their data from? I'm really curious about that gravity wave project. There's a project called LIGO, Laser Interferometry Gravitational Observer, which has detectors at three places in the world, two in the U.S. and one in Europe. They're these sort of vast

underground things that use lasers to detect sort of gravitational fluctuations that pass through the laser beam. This project is, it sort of combines the data from these three detectors and does sort of interpolation to figure out where signals are coming from. So I'm a researcher who has been wondering where in the world I'm going to get enough supercomputer time to complete my project. We, I guess, want to let them know, first of all, that this is free, their use of BOINC, but where can they learn more, and where do they get the resources to adapt their project?

The place to look, both for scientists who want to use this technology and computer owners who want to participate, is our website, which is boinc.berkeley.edu, and boink is spelled B-O-I-N-C. It stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. A scientist can go there and download our software, set it up on a Linux machine, and for basically a few thousand dollars can potentially have a project like SETI at home running. Of course, you still have to do the work of getting the word out there and doing publicity and convincing people in large numbers that your project is worth participating in.

Well, let's, with the last couple of minutes here, come back to SETI at Home, which I assume is still by far the biggest cruncher of numbers on your system. What are the latest results that you can talk about? Mostly we've been working on mundane details of getting things switched over to BOINC. Some development that we're doing right now, we're putting the finishing touches on a new multi-channel data recorder. Currently we have a machine that sits down at Arecibo and records a single channel of data at 5 megabits per second.

That's what we use for SETI at home. This new recorder can do the same thing, but 16 channels at a time. We're going to use that first with a new sensor at Arecibo called Galpha, which has basically seven pixels instead of one pixel. It can look at seven points in the sky at once. And we'll be able to record each one of those in two different polarizations. That's great for SETI because it lets us reject RFI, or man-made interference, a lot more easily.

It also lets us cover the sky faster. So we're probably going to start recording data from that early next year. We're still working on this project called AstroPulse, which is going to reanalyze our existing body of data, but looking for a different kind of signal, something called a broadband pulse, which is going to reanalyze our existing body of data, but looking for a different kind of signal, something called a broadband pulse, something that's very short and spread

across the frequency spectrum. We hope that if we find that, it would be evidence of something called black hole evaporation. We've been working that for a while. It's something that we need Boeing to do. So we hope to have that out in a few months also. A little bit of work for Stephen Hawking, it sounds like. That's right. It would provide experimental verification of one of his most important theories.

David, thanks very much for joining us again. Of course, we're going to keep checking back. It sounds like you're certainly staying very busy up there at Berkeley, running SETI at Home and making the power of SETI at Home available to a lot more people. David Anderson has been our guest. He is the project director for the SETI at Home project. He and his colleague, Dan Wertheimer, join us every now and then here on Planetary Radio. We're going to be right back with What's Up and Bruce Betts after this return visit from Emily.

I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Could a planet formed in a binary star system have around-the-clock sunlight? Imagine that the planet is an Earth-like one, orbiting close to one of the stars in the binary pair. The other star in the pair would be orbiting far away, as far away as Pluto is from Earth. Our Earth-like planet might orbit its sun star very quickly, but the other star in the binary pair would move much more slowly. So for a part of our hypothetical planet's year, it would pass in between the two stars.

At these times, from the surface of the planet, one or the other of the two stars would be up in the sky virtually all the time, and there could be around-the-clock sunlight. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. It's time for What's Up with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.

Bruce, hi there. This is an exciting What's Up. Big contest. There is so much stuff. We've got the big exciting contest we'll get to at the end. And there's a ton of stuff to look at in the night sky. Very, very interesting stuff going on. Start with the mundane, the planets that are up there calling to us each night. We've got Saturn rising in the early evening in the east-northeast

and you can see it basically lined up with Castor and Pollux, two bright stars and Gemini. This is not the mundane planetary society, so I just want to point that out. I suppose that perhaps that was a misnomer. Otherworldly, but I've got more for you. Into the pre-dawn sky,

where we've got Jupiter being really bright, Venus being really bright, and Venus and Mars doing a little dance, getting down tonight. Yeehaw! Mars has been just to the lower left of Venus for quite some time, but they are going to nuzzle each other on the nights of December 6th and 7th as Venus drops lower and Mars gets higher in the sky, and they will be less than a degree apart on those nights or pre-dawn hours.

And then Mars will be to the upper right of Venus. So in the pre-dawn sky, look for Venus, the brightest object up there. Mars just a smidge to its upper right. And Jupiter farther up to the right. Lots of planets. Good planets, good stuff. And Mercury is coming soon, so stay tuned for five naked-eye planets. All right, on to other fun stuff that's going on.

Jupiter, if you happen to live in the right place and you are listening to the show right after it comes out, then you're psyched because the moon is going to occult Jupiter. No, we're not studying the occult. It will pass in front of Jupiter, but you pretty much need to be in the eastern side of North America to have the best shot of seeing this. Possibly eastern South America.

Well, one of you East Coast listeners, drop us a line. Tell us what this occultation looks like because we ain't going to see it out here in the L.A. area. Yes, this would be December 7th, the morning of December 7th. A date that will live in infamy. Pre-dawn sky, moon passing in front of Jupiter. Cool stuff. Also, coming up on a meteor shower, peaking on the night of December 13th, is the Geminid meteor shower, which is, on average, the best meteor shower of the year, typically,

except for freakish Leonid meteor shower years, which were passed. So go out there, and you may see one or two meteors per minute. Just stare up in the night sky and look for bright streaks of light. That's basically all you have to do. Boy, this is so much better than two, three months ago when there was nothing going on. This is just great. I know. We've been working hard.

We've been petitioning the sky, doing a lot of grassroots efforts. This week in space history, do you realize, Matt, the International Space Station has already been up there for six years? December 6, 1998, the Unity and Zarya modules were connected to form the core of the International Space Station. No. This is fresh on my mind because I saw it last night. Remember, you can go out and see the International Space Station go by. It looks like a very bright star moving across the sky.

Very easy to find. If you know when and where to look, you can find that on various websites, including www.heavens-above.com. You have to put in your location. That's why I can't tell you when and where to look. It's location-specific, but if you do so, you'll find out when to see that and other dimmer satellites. I don't mean that they're less intelligent, just that they're not as bright. Well, you know what I mean. All right, on to Random Space Fact!

We've talked about our little friend Luna 3, which was the first spacecraft to take pictures of the far side of the moon. But what we haven't talked about, and I think is fascinating, is that after the spacecraft flew around the far side of the moon, it actually came back and re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, slamming into the Earth's atmosphere on April 20th, 1960. Another one I didn't know. Let's go on to the big contest. All right. I know you've been just over there drooling.

We asked you, what should the head of NASA be called? Right now, called the NASA Administrator. We were looking for a better title, preferably one that would make us laugh. We got a lot of great entries, particularly after Matt's plea last week to get more entries after an initial week showing. A lot of you took pity on us after we did that. Thank you so much. It's not that we didn't have any entries, but we knew that with our crowd of intelligent listeners and creative and funny listeners that we could do much better.

Thank you so much. And you did. You came through for us. The judges have carefully, carefully reviewed the entries, and it has been an incredibly difficult decision, but I think we're ready to announce the results. I'll give you a runner-up. First, we'll start with the runner-up, Mike McCormick from Livingston, New Jersey,

suggesting KEOPS, an acronym standing for Chief Honcho of Extraterrestrial Operations. Also, an intelligent reference to the Egyptian king of the Fourth Dynasty, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza. So, congratulations, Mike, our first runner up in this week's contest. Not

good enough for a t-shirt? Sorry, but he's a regular. I know he's won in the past. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, now the big winner all right the big winner first let me tell you who it is it is from steve to jerry from irvine california steve gave us a number of interesting answers uh let me read the steve chigiri first runner-up it's not another runner-up. It's just for him. I enjoyed it, so I'm going to read Master of the Universe and Stuff, which I personally enjoyed,

but we could not resist as the winner, announcing the new name for the NASA Administrator. NASA Director of Unexplored dimensional expanses. That's right. NASA, dude. Righteous. Righteous, dude. NASA, dude.

We will forward these along on to NASA, and I'm sure it will be given the attention it deserves. All right. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, all of you who entered the contest this week. We wish we had T-shirts for all of you. We just don't. So enter again. And, in fact, as we get close to running out of time here, Bruce, what do you have for the new contest?

What is the largest crater on Phobos, moon of Mars, what is the largest crater on Phobos called and why? What is the largest crater on Phobos? There's a crater on Phobos that had of Mars. What is the largest crater on Phobos called and why? What is the largest crater on Phobos? If there was a crater on Phobos that had the impact been much larger, it would have broken apart the entire moon. What is that crater called and why? Go to planetary.org slash radio to find out how to email us your wonderful answer and win the fabulous Planetary Radio t-shirt. And get that in to us, that entry, by noon Pacific time

on December 13. Noon Pacific time, December 13. Just 12 days left after that for Christmas shopping. And you will be eligible for this wonderful Planetary Radio t-shirt which we will announce the winner of about a week after that. Okay?

Alright. I think we're done. Okay, everyone go out there, look up in the night sky, see all those really cool things, and think about how cool water is. Thank you, and good night. Dude, thanks so much. Dude, water rocks, man. It is, like, so versatile.

Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he does join us each week here on What's Up. You don't have to enter the weekly contest to stay in touch. Send us your comments and questions at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And if you're listening on the web, let us know if there's a public station near you that should be airing our show. A couple of you have already brought Planetary Radio to the attention of program directors, who then decided to make us

part of their broadcast schedule. Welcome again to all of you listening to us in Northern California via North State Public Radio. That's it for this edition of the show. Come on back next week for special coverage about big rocks that may be headed our way and how we can dodge them. Take care and keep your head down, everyone.