Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Looking for E.T.'s Laser Beam: An Optical SETI Update

Episode Date: July 12, 2010

An update on the Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence from Harvard's Paul Horowitz.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Looking for E.T.'s laser beam, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We welcome back Harvard's Paul Horowitz for an update on the optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Emily Lakdawalla looks inside the Hayabusa probe, hoping to find bits of an asteroid, while Bill Nye practices some rocket science in this week's commentary. And we will finish as we always do by gazing up at the night sky with Bruce Betts and getting another space trivia contest underway.

It's an overflowing half hour of space exploration, so let's get right to the Planetary Society's blogger. Emily, where in the U.S. do we find you today? Today I'm in Philadelphia visiting my mom. And so the vacation is sort of continuing, but I know you're back on the job because you've got a great entry, or at least everything that you were able to print, about Itokawa. That's right. Hayabusa, of course, returned a sample capsule from its mission to the tiny asteroid Itokawa and back.

They didn't really know beforehand if they would have any samples inside the capsule because a little pellet mechanism that was supposed to fire and help propel samples into the canister didn't really know beforehand if they would have any samples inside the capsule because a little pellet mechanism that was supposed to fire and help propel samples into the canister didn't work properly. But they managed to return the capsule against all odds, and they shipped it back to Japan a couple of weeks ago, and they've been very methodically taking it into a clean room and carefully opened up the capsule about a week ago. And when they looked inside, it looked just shockingly to me pristine. It was so clean, which seems it's a bit of both bad news and good news. I mean, the good news is that because it looks so clean, you know that it wasn't really contaminated by any of the adventures that it went through. But on the other hand, you'd like to see, you know, some samples in there from Itokawa.

Well, they've looked at it very, very closely. They have found a few very tiny microscopic particles inside the sample canister, which is great news. It's essential for them to have found anything. Of course, it's too early to celebrate yet because they have to make absolutely sure that those particles weren't in the capsule originally when it launched from Earth. They have to be able to do their careful chemical analyses on the particles and make sure that they don't look like Earth particles. They have to confirm that they're Itokawa particles. But still, everything seems to go amazingly well on this mission, and I can't wait for the results on what those particles may be.

What's also interesting to me about this is, well, how difficult it is to get detailed information sometimes about missions like this. Yeah, it can sometimes be a little tougher than it seems like it should be. Of course, with Japan, we have the language barrier, but I find Google Translate to do an excellent job on the stories that come out of the JAXA website. But with this announcement today, they posted a couple of pictures, but actually did not publish a formal press release, the kind of five or six, five or six paragraph story that

the public information officer of an agency like JAXA or NASA submits for the press to read and digest to write their news articles. So it's been a little difficult to get information. There was a press briefing held, of course, in Japanese for members of the media who showed up. And as a result, there are lots of stories in Japanese newspapers right now. But those stories contradict each other, as is often true in English language media. Some of them are saying that there were lots of particles found. Some of them are saying that there were a few. Some were saying they're all from Earth. Some were saying that they've confirmed Itokawa, so it's really hard to know what the actual truth is. Emily, thanks so much. We look forward to talking to you back at home again next week.

Yeah, I'll finally be home next week. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. You may want to take a look at her piece that describes how she gets all this news that she brings to us every day or almost every day in the Planetary Society blog. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here, future executive director of the Planetary Society. And this week, the big news in space is here on Earth,

and it really is rocket science. Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, a rocket company, has been working on this common extensible cryogenic engine, the CEC-E, for years. And very, very recently, they got a fantastic new result. They were able to slow the thing down very well. Now, you may not have ever thought about it, but once you do think about it, I bet you understand that rocket motors are either on or they're off. They're going full blast or they're just cold and silent. Now, the place where this problem was solved very successfully was on the lunar excursion module. Those of you old

enough to remember Apollo, that engine could go to one-eighth of its full power. It could go down eight to one. Well, this new Pratt & Whitney Rockendine engine can go 18 to 1. 18 to 1, better than twice as good as the one from 40 years ago. And what this means is we'll be able to get to new exciting places in space more cheaply, more quickly, and much more safely. These are man-rated engines, engines good enough to have people on board, and they can go from full on to just barely on very easily. So if you've ever been in a car, it's very common. You speed up and you slow

down. If you've ever operated a light switch, it goes on, but it only goes off unless it has a dimmer. Well, this is an engine, a rocket engine with a dimmer switch. This is another cool little thing in rocket science that I think is just very, very exciting and makes the new plan, the new space exploration plan, not just for people in the United States, but for people all over the earth, will have better access to space. It's fun. It's rocket science. It's cool. Well, I mean, it's cryogenic, but once you light it up, it's really hot. I've got to fly Bill Nye, the common extensible cryogenic engine planetary guy. There is more than one way to look for E.T. Most researchers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

are scanning the skies with exquisitely sensitive radio receivers. The Planetary Society supports one of these. It's based in the southern hemisphere, where it listens for signals that would not be heard from the top half of our planet. But what if our galactic neighbors are using powerful lasers to stay in touch, or to find the new guys on the block? Harvard University professor of physics and electrical engineering Paul Horowitz using powerful lasers to stay in touch, or to find the new guys on the block. Harvard University professor of physics and electrical engineering Paul Horowitz built an amazing instrument that scans the sky for these bursts of light.

He recruits gifted grad students like Curtis Mead to play key roles on his O-SETI team. Paul and Curtis recently joined me by phone from Harvard to explain their latest advance. Paul, you continue to make pretty amazing advances in this field of optical SETI. I guess our topic for today, our major topic, is something Curtis has been heavily involved with. Yes, I was going to say that you say I make progress, but it doesn't hurt having guys like Andrew Howard and Curtis Mead on the team here. They do the heavy lifting. It's a chip, right, that is going to give you a pretty tremendous improvement in performance?

Yeah, I guess I'd say the reason we're able to do optical studies depended on really high-performance chips. The system we're running now uses a custom chip that was done by Andrew Howard and was used in the first experiment that we put in at the new Planetary Society Optical Study Observatory. Curtis's improvement on Andrew's chip is to figure out how to trick a high-performance commercial chip into doing much more than Andrew's chip did when it was designed back five years ago. It's a very clever scheme in which he takes something called an FPGA. It's a fancy chip made by Xilinx that costs upward of $1,000 apiece. And he wires it up in a way that no one who designed the chip had intended

that make it 16 times more capable in terms of its ability to follow flashes of light from the sky compared with the previous custom chip. Xilinx, this company that manufactures these chips, they must be kind of grateful for the fact that you've come up with a way to do something they never thought of. Well, you know, I think they were quite amused by this idea. It's something they hadn't thought about. So charmed, in fact, that they volunteered that they will supply the chips that we need. We need about 32 of these plus some spares,

so we're talking substantial expensive chips. So maybe the downside for them is that they shook hands on a deal to give away $40,000, maybe $60,000 worth of chips. Not bad. I guess that's not all you need, though, to make this happen. Well, that's hardly what, you know, Curtis has been working a year laying out this circuit board to hold these things. It's got 12 layers. It's got wiring that's about as thin as a human hair, 4,000th of an inch, just threading through these 12 layers. So the hard work, I think, isn't taking the chips.

The hard work is designing the circuit, making it all work right, putting it on these boards, and knitting it all together into this camera system. Curtis, quite an education you're getting there. Well, it's been a wonderful experience working with Paul and working on this optical sighting project. It sort of allowed me to stretch my electronic design legs, get into a project that is incredibly interesting and, I think, worthwhile. It's got to look good on the resume, too. I hear that you are, are you about to graduate, or are you going to be there for a little while longer? I'll be here a little while longer, at least another year, and, you know, somebody's got to

make sure this thing gets off the ground. We're not letting him go after he graduates. He's staying on as a postdoc, because we have to find those guys up there, you know? Absolutely. I was reading something from our soon-to-be executive director, in which he talked about a conversation with you, Paul, and you made reference to wanting to join the Galactic Club. Yeah, it's about time, you know? I mean, here we are on Earth doing our little stuff and cultivating our gardens and talking about oil spills in the Gulf and all that.

But meanwhile, out there somewhere in the galaxy of 400 billion stars, there's got to be other intelligent life doing all kinds of cool stuff. Some of it a heck of a lot more advanced than us and in communication with each other. And we're sitting here with our fingers stuck in our ears. And it's about time that we join the club. Stringer's stuck in our ears, and it's about time that we join the club. Yeah, you know, just last week we were talking about the Kepler mission, having shown that there may be hundreds more planets out there, exoplanets, than had been discovered up to date.

Sure is nice to think that some of those have folks looking back at us wanting to say hello. Do us a little bit about, for those who may not be all that familiar with it, about the concept of optical SETI as opposed to the stuff that Frank Drake and Philip Morrison figured out years ago using radio frequencies. Yeah, well, you see, I guess the way to put it is radio got there first. People started thinking seriously about communication, or at least receiving signals from extraterrestrial advanced civilizations. Around 1960, Frank Drake, Project Osma, Phil Morrison with Cacconi and his paper. And at the time, radio technology was pretty good. We haven't gotten so much more powerful in our transmitters

and so much larger in our antennas than that time. And it seemed like the best way to make communication because it travels nicely through the galaxy. We can generate prodigious amounts of power, megawatts. You can beam it quite well if you don't mind building yourself a thousand-foot antenna or larger, and so on. So it was just a communications calculation. It wasn't speculation. A year later, the laser was demonstrated. It wasn't a terribly powerful thing when it first came out, and people didn't very much connect it up with the business of SETI, although Charlie Towns, quite a visionary, did publish a paper in 61

pointing out that one could imagine communicating optically. But what's happened since then is lasers have become incredibly powerful, incredibly capable. Optical telescopes have become extremely large, telescopes like Keck and much larger. If you revisit the whole business of what can you do with radio versus what can you do with optical, it's not so obvious anymore that radio is the only way to do it with the most powerful lasers we've

demonstrated on Earth attached to something like the Keck telescope used as an outgoing, as a searchlight. We could generate a flash of light, a billionth of a second long or so, that would look much brighter than our star would look to a civilization out there that we're pointing at during the time that flash is going on. The number is about a factor of 10,000 times brighter. Now, that's cool. That means you can do it. Now, is it the best way?

You know, the best way is the way that they're doing it, and we don't know that. So we have to play this guessing game. What would we do? Or rather, from the limits of science and technology, what works the best? And the answer isn't completely clear, but optical is definitely in the running. Optical is definitely worth a shot. And who knows, maybe it's what they're doing. It's sure an easier experiment than radio SETI. It involves a lot less construction of fancy stuff, although it keeps us quite busy. We'll hear much more from Harvard professor Paul Horowitz about his optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence when Planetary Radio continues.

Hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J. The passion, beauty and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen.

You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary

Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Harvard professor Paul Horowitz and grad student Curtis Mead aren't listening for ET.T. They are watching, watching for a dazzling, though brief, blast of light that could be a message from the stars. And their big, very sensitive telescope has caught a handful of tantalizing results. Well, you've got to give these files some name, you know. So when we capture an incredible event, Curtis has been labeling these things BIC and then followed by the serial number. So, for instance, BIC-6 or BIC-6A is a really good one. BIC stands for Bastard in Cloud.

And this is a reference to Fred Hoyle's wonderful novel, The Black Cloud. And I'm thinking, of course, of the wow signal and why you don't call them wow number six or number eight. Ah, that name's been used. What can you do with a BIC? I mean, a really good BIC, and I'd say we have something like eight now, Curtis, they're perfect. What we do is we put them on our hit list to be re-observed, re-observed instantly by automatic software if possible,

and re-observed at the next observing night. Our telescope doesn't swing east-west. It only is positionable north and south, so we only get about a one-minute shot at anything going over. And so, sadly, we can't follow these guys when they send us an interesting flash. I'm kind of assuming that it's a they and that they've sent us something, and the something is a flash. I think we have to realize that most of these things are probably natural events.

So far, though, no repeat performances on the following night? No repeat performances, but they're just single, interesting, very powerful events that were recorded. I think one of them is in Bruce's article, upcoming article in the Planetary Report. That's big six, big six. I've heard that he's got an article coming up, the Planetary Report, of course, being the bimonthly magazine that goes to members of the Society. We'll check that out as well.

Listen, you guys promised to call us, right, when you see one of these over two or three nights? Well, we'll put you on our list. You have dedicated to this project the largest reflecting telescope on the East Coast. Yeah, actually, east of the Mississippi. Colony Telescope is probably insulting real telescopes of the world. This thing doesn't form terribly good images. It has about the visual acuity of the human eye, about an arc minute or two.

It's really a light bucket. It has a large collecting area, at least large by the standards of telescopes on the East Coast. And it was very inexpensive because we didn't try to make it produce astronomical clarity. It cost us, well, the telescope mirror cost about $50,000 when we were done building the building around it and putting all the equipment up.

There's a few times that. But that's absolute bargain basement price for a large telescope or even a large light bucket. Let's come back to that chip and the innovative use that you're making of it. What really is the advantage that you've achieved in your plans to move to this processor? The easiest way to say it is it offers a real jump over the capabilities of Andrew's chip in two ways. One is it covers a lot more time both before and after the receipt of any flash of light because it has a lot more memory on the chip. We can actually see what was happening you know microseconds before. That's a lot of time in this business. But the second, even more important one, is that Ender's chip was strictly limited in its ability to follow up

on any flash of light. Once it got a flash of light in any of these pixel pairs, it basically focused in on that and ignored most of the other pixels. It ignored 15-16ths of the other pixels, and that was just required by the way the thing was designed curtis's scheme using these xilinx chips basically just breaks through that barrier when anything happens every pixel is recorded in full fidelity for a long time after and you can look backward in time because it's always storing the data all the time now why is that a good thing i mean what does this help you to reject spurious signals? You know, what happens is we get occasionally, and occasionally I'd say the best of these are maybe once every few months or perhaps once every half a year, we get something that looks just perfect.

We have about seven or eight of these things collected, and it looks like a compact flash, pretty short, just a few nanoseconds, billions of a second, pretty bright. And we can't distinguish that, which is what you'd see from a true source out there in space, from an atmospheric event that may be the chief background we have, a thing called Cherenkov radiation that's produced by high-energy cosmic rays as they come crashing into the atmosphere. In a few billions of a second, it's all over. You get a flash of light, but it is elongated in shape. It tends to be a streak or sort of an arc, but it's distinguished by its shape and its time scale. Now, the time scale is about right for the kinds of detectors we have,

but the shape would give it away if we had the fidelity in our camera to render that shape. By focusing in on the bright place in the flash, it doesn't see the red. So if we have kind of a streak with a tail sort of like a comet, but a bright center, it'll show us that center as if that's all that happened, and we can't tell whether it was the real thing, those guys out there, or whether it's one of these flashes from a Cherenkov event. And Curtis's wonderful new system will break through that limitation guys out there, or whether it's one of these flashes from a Cherenkov event. And Curtis's wonderful new system will break through that limitation.

If it's a comma-shaped event in the sky, it'll show it that way. And this is what we're really looking forward to. This week, Andrew is... That's Andrew. Curtis. These brilliant guys, I've got them mixed up. Your parents do that all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's basically making a list of parts that we're going to order.

We're going to have one prototype, one and one-fourth prototype boards manufactured. Just getting the three prototype boards with one and a quarter of them stuffed is going to cost us about $7,200. So we want to make sure we do this thing right. We'll probably have those boards back in a month or two for testing. And when that's all set, we're ready to pounce and do the real thing. But at that point, we're going to have to order a whole bunch of these boards. We're going to have to make sure we have the dough. Well, people can learn more about this by going to planetary.org.

That's the Planetary Society website, of course. And under projects, there's a drop-down list there. Paul, thanks very much for joining us once again on the show. And Curtis, I'm glad you'll be sticking around to finish some of this stuff. And may you be there when you guys get that telltale signal, hopefully what will be our friend somewhere else across the galaxy. Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure. Paul Horowitz is a professor of physics and electrical engineering at Harvard University. He's been there for a very long time, got his Ph.D. there,

came up with a little something called the art of electronics, which is essentially the Bible of electrical engineering and electronics. Curtis Mead is the latest in his series of his description, brilliant graduate students who've been helping him with all kinds of projects, including the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, looking for optical flashes of light. We'll try and shine some light on the subject of the night sky with Bruce Betts when he joins us in just a few moments for this week's edition of What's Up. Sure enough, it's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's here once again to tell us about the night sky, and we'll have some other fun, I'm sure.

Hey, welcome back. Hey, good to be back. Did you catch that spectacular total solar eclipse in the South Pacific? I only wish. No, I have to say I did not. And had it been taking place on the west coast of North America, I also would have missed it. Because if anyone who walks outside here can see that our marine layer, our June gloom, has been extended by popular demand into July. Yes, it's doing an encore. Let me tell you about the night sky. To the west in the evening, see potentially four planets and a bright star all roughly lined up. We've got Venus. The first easy thing to find is the super bright star-like object. If you go to its upper left comes Mars,

reddish, then Saturn, yellowish. If you go to Venus's lower right, you will see Regulus, the bright bluish star of Leo. And if you got a clear shot to the horizon, you can go to the lower right of that and pick up Mercury and planets as they will have want to do. They keep wandering around the sky. We're getting Mars, Venus, and Saturn all coming to play together. Around July 30th, Mars and Venus are particularly close to each other and should make a lovely sight. In addition, depending on when you're hearing this, July 14th, crescent moon near Venus.

July 15th, it's near Mars and Saturn, making for even more of a planetary festival. Jupiter also rising in the middle of the night. Bright star-like object high overhead in the pre-dawn. We move on to this week in space history. Bunch of stuff this week, including the launch of Apollo 11 in 1969, but also going a little farther back, 1965. Mariner 4 becomes the first spacecraft to fly by Mars in 1965. Also, Apollo-Soyuz project launched and docked during this week in 1975.

Yeah, big week. Big week. Speaking of big, we move on to... I was wondering why that sounded so familiar. It's good to know we can call on you for a Sly Stallone impression whenever we need it. Anytime. Did you know we've passed the 500 humans in space mark? Yes. I did know that. You know all sorts of stuff.

And why aren't I one of them? That is an answer that is both easy and long. answer that is both easy and long. 518 humans from 38 countries have gone into space using the guideline of 62 miles or 100 kilometers. We move on to the trivia contest and I ask you about, very much an about type question, how large is the Crab Nebula along its longest visible dimension? One of the favorite fuzzy objects to look at in small telescopes formed in 1054 AD from a supernova explosion. How'd we do, Matt? Very good response in spite of us, you know, only giving away a planetary radio t-shirt. Would you stop saying that? It is not only a planetary radio t-shirt. I just like to egg you on. It is a glorious planetary radio t-shirt. You're stop saying that? It is not only a Planetary Radio t-shirt. I just like to egg you on. It is a glorious Planetary Radio t-shirt. You're wearing one right now. You just

won't admit it. I just love to get that reaction from you. So there was a little bit of variability here, but all within the acceptable margin of error that you laid out. Our winner, Colleen Keneally, Eden Prairie, Minnesota. And she came up with a diameter of roughly, along the longest axis, 11 light years, which is pretty darn huge. And she pointed out, as did many people, that you have to pay attention to when you answer that question because it's expanding at 1,500 kilometers per second. question because it's expanding at 1500 kilometers per second that's what struck me whatever no i mean they're different numbers but all that's ballpark within a few light years this all expanding since 1054 yeah and yet 13 or 11 12 light years across whoa lindsey dawson actually sent us a little flashing animation thing that showed an image in 1973 and a much more recent image. You can see this thing grow.

It's a monster. We also got some interesting analogies to help people understand just how big it is. Okay. William Stewart brought us this, which I think you're going to like. If the pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula were broadcasting planetary radio, as it should be, of course. I just assume it is. Then if you were out at the edge of the nebula, you would right now be pretty much getting to hear about Spirit,

the Mars Exploration Rover, landing on Mars. about Spirit, the Mars Exploration Rover, landing on Mars. At which point the people listening will of course say, what's Mars? You know we love our common systems of weights and measurements. Oh we do. So here's the one that came from Mark Smith. Mark said, if you were to take our entire solar system and shrink everything from the Sun out to the orbit of Pluto to the size of an old-style silver dollar, the big ones, the Crab Nebula would be 160 miles away and a quarter of a mile across.

Let us move on. How long was the longest period of continuous human presence in space, not counting the TV show Lost in Space or Star Trek. How long was the longest period of continuous human presence? So there was always a human in space during this period. And what dates did it span? You thinking about it? I am thinking about it. How do they enter?

Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And you have until July 19 to do that. The 19th of July, Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Alright everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, think about the magical, marvelous mystery of eggs. Thank you and good night.

He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He's a good egg. Always good for a yolk or two. He'll join us again next week, right here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова