Thursday 22 October 2015
Monday 19 October 2015
Untitled SETI Story - Part III
Madeleine Browne smoothed out the freshly-printed press-package on her desk.
"And how did you get my direct number?"
She was just finishing the press conference announcement for the SETI website when the phone had rung.
NASA.
Specifically someone named Julie Shin at the National Astrobiology Institute. Somehow she had caught wind of the goings on in Puerto Rico before the press. She knew someone in Heliophysics at Goddard who knew somebody on something called RAGSS at Arecibo who knew somebody working for SETI there... probably this intern, Daisy Tobin. Word gets around. Someone in the NAI Press Office had had dealings with her, and he gave her the number. Matt Brinker, probably - he was the SETI attaché to the NAI.
This would be the first of many calls - and they'd get increasingly impolite as the story gained traction. Maddy had been a press officer for a dozen different non-profits, each more "fringe" than the last, and she'd been through this circus too many times to count. Luckily this was just a personal-interest call.
"The watch-word is patience and restraint. We need to confirm this with as many different instruments as possible, and then set about analysing the signal to confirm artificiality."
The same note of caution was re-stated the next day in front of a roomful of gathered journos - from science magazines, websites, a few newspaper sci correspondents, two TV news stations, and as many wing-nut conspiracy sites as you could shake a stick at. Not a great showing for what could-be-but-likely-wasn't the Greatest Discovery In The History Of HumankindTM, but a respectably full room, given the short notice.
"SETI's Allen Telescope Array in California is currently undergoing an upgrade, but has been partially brought back online to provide more detailed analysis of the signal." She gulped. "NASA have - incredibly generously - offered to attempt to detect the signal with a number of their outer-Solar-System assets, namely New Horizons and the Voyagers. We cannot express our gratitude enough, as this will help to pin down the distance to the signal source via triangulation."
"So, to reiterate: The signal has been constantly transmitting on a tight-band frequency for at least the last 3 days. The signal strength is pulsing in a mathematically complex pattern that is unlikely to be naturally-ocurring. All man-made sources have been effectively ruled out. We're keeping the location of the source on the sky on a need-to-know basis for now, but that will change - SETI has always valued the contribution of citizen scientists."
Maddy gripped the sides of the podium and straightened up.
"Any questions?"
BOOM.
"And how did you get my direct number?"
She was just finishing the press conference announcement for the SETI website when the phone had rung.
NASA.
Specifically someone named Julie Shin at the National Astrobiology Institute. Somehow she had caught wind of the goings on in Puerto Rico before the press. She knew someone in Heliophysics at Goddard who knew somebody on something called RAGSS at Arecibo who knew somebody working for SETI there... probably this intern, Daisy Tobin. Word gets around. Someone in the NAI Press Office had had dealings with her, and he gave her the number. Matt Brinker, probably - he was the SETI attaché to the NAI.
This would be the first of many calls - and they'd get increasingly impolite as the story gained traction. Maddy had been a press officer for a dozen different non-profits, each more "fringe" than the last, and she'd been through this circus too many times to count. Luckily this was just a personal-interest call.
"The watch-word is patience and restraint. We need to confirm this with as many different instruments as possible, and then set about analysing the signal to confirm artificiality."
The same note of caution was re-stated the next day in front of a roomful of gathered journos - from science magazines, websites, a few newspaper sci correspondents, two TV news stations, and as many wing-nut conspiracy sites as you could shake a stick at. Not a great showing for what could-be-but-likely-wasn't the Greatest Discovery In The History Of HumankindTM, but a respectably full room, given the short notice.
"SETI's Allen Telescope Array in California is currently undergoing an upgrade, but has been partially brought back online to provide more detailed analysis of the signal." She gulped. "NASA have - incredibly generously - offered to attempt to detect the signal with a number of their outer-Solar-System assets, namely New Horizons and the Voyagers. We cannot express our gratitude enough, as this will help to pin down the distance to the signal source via triangulation."
"So, to reiterate: The signal has been constantly transmitting on a tight-band frequency for at least the last 3 days. The signal strength is pulsing in a mathematically complex pattern that is unlikely to be naturally-ocurring. All man-made sources have been effectively ruled out. We're keeping the location of the source on the sky on a need-to-know basis for now, but that will change - SETI has always valued the contribution of citizen scientists."
Maddy gripped the sides of the podium and straightened up.
"Any questions?"
BOOM.
Untitled SETI story - part II
Carlton
finished logging the data from the night's addition to the Radio
Astronomy G-type Star Survey. RAGSS wasn't the most glamorous acronym,
but he was glad to be working on a project that helped to characterise
the Sun in comparison to its stellar brethren, and glad to be able to
use the famous Arecibo "chum-bowl in the Jungle".
That nickname needs work - I better not say it out loud.
RAGSS was able to use this prestigious facility by the happy coincidence that they were interested in almost exactly the same set of stars that SETI liked to repeatedly survey, and that they were using a completely different set of electromagnetic frequencies to do so. RAGSS's PI Doctor Ortega would have liked to go star-to-star at a faster clip than SETI, but as a serendipitous alignment of interests between the now-wealthy Alien-Seekers and a tiny, under-funded, but respected graduate school in Philadelphia, they were slaved to SETI's will - and SETI figured ET would need at least 15 minutes-per-star-per-month to let itself be known.
Carlton smiled as he packed up his laptop and breezed out the door. He always liked to drop by the SETI shack when Daisy was on duty and try to cheer her up - she wasn't the most talkative intern, but she was cute and nerdy, and nowhere near as intimidatingly different as the local Puerto Rican girls. He liked to think she enjoyed his visits, despite herself.
The cheesiest grin he could muster plastered his jowly face as he knocked on the door.
"Carlton?! Come in! Look at this!" came the muffled but alert voice from the other side of the door.
That's unusually perky for Daisy...
The door was ripped open by a wide-eyed Daisy. "I think I've actually got a candidate!"
Carlton spread his arms demonstratively and dropped the line he'd been preparing.
"From RAGSS to riches!"
No effect.
That was terrible. Really awful. I mean, accurate, but in-poor-taste, and just terrible. Stop smiling, Carlton.
Luckily, Daisy hadn't seemed to hear him. "LOOK!" she implored, pointing at her laptop.
One half of the screen was a 3D signal attenuation graph, and the left hand side showed the familiar raw detector feed alphanumeric grid on the top half, and a similar drizzle-feed of frequency distributions. Each display was synced, and repeating a 30-second loop of recorded data.
A high-strength signal bubbled onto the upper left of the grid, pulsed rythmically across the field, the counter reset, and the playback started again. The frequency distribution graph showed activity confined to one vertical bar, and the 3D graph... looked pretty provocative.
Carlton's ample jaw succumbed to gravity.
"Is this real-time?"
"yeah."
"A comsat."
"No, look at the slew-rate."
"A geostationary comsat."
"No! look at the pointing!"
"Ok... you need more eyes on this. Have you called your boss?" He looked at her expectantly, totally not thinking about how hot she was when gripped by scientific awe.
She gulped, reaching for her phone. "I really don't want to be wrong."
Part III
That nickname needs work - I better not say it out loud.
RAGSS was able to use this prestigious facility by the happy coincidence that they were interested in almost exactly the same set of stars that SETI liked to repeatedly survey, and that they were using a completely different set of electromagnetic frequencies to do so. RAGSS's PI Doctor Ortega would have liked to go star-to-star at a faster clip than SETI, but as a serendipitous alignment of interests between the now-wealthy Alien-Seekers and a tiny, under-funded, but respected graduate school in Philadelphia, they were slaved to SETI's will - and SETI figured ET would need at least 15 minutes-per-star-per-month to let itself be known.
Carlton smiled as he packed up his laptop and breezed out the door. He always liked to drop by the SETI shack when Daisy was on duty and try to cheer her up - she wasn't the most talkative intern, but she was cute and nerdy, and nowhere near as intimidatingly different as the local Puerto Rican girls. He liked to think she enjoyed his visits, despite herself.
The cheesiest grin he could muster plastered his jowly face as he knocked on the door.
"Carlton?! Come in! Look at this!" came the muffled but alert voice from the other side of the door.
That's unusually perky for Daisy...
The door was ripped open by a wide-eyed Daisy. "I think I've actually got a candidate!"
Carlton spread his arms demonstratively and dropped the line he'd been preparing.
"From RAGSS to riches!"
No effect.
That was terrible. Really awful. I mean, accurate, but in-poor-taste, and just terrible. Stop smiling, Carlton.
Luckily, Daisy hadn't seemed to hear him. "LOOK!" she implored, pointing at her laptop.
One half of the screen was a 3D signal attenuation graph, and the left hand side showed the familiar raw detector feed alphanumeric grid on the top half, and a similar drizzle-feed of frequency distributions. Each display was synced, and repeating a 30-second loop of recorded data.
A high-strength signal bubbled onto the upper left of the grid, pulsed rythmically across the field, the counter reset, and the playback started again. The frequency distribution graph showed activity confined to one vertical bar, and the 3D graph... looked pretty provocative.
Carlton's ample jaw succumbed to gravity.
"Is this real-time?"
"yeah."
"A comsat."
"No, look at the slew-rate."
"A geostationary comsat."
"No! look at the pointing!"
"Ok... you need more eyes on this. Have you called your boss?" He looked at her expectantly, totally not thinking about how hot she was when gripped by scientific awe.
She gulped, reaching for her phone. "I really don't want to be wrong."
Part III
Untitled SETI story - Part I
Daisy rubbed her eyes and flicked at the red straw loitering against the rim of her tumbler of coke-and-meltwater. It made a full round of the glass, perturbing the last rounded remnants of the ice. The meager sighs of the beverage's expended effervescence underlined the monotony of her life recently.
Six weeks in Puerto Rico. 'Woohoo', right?
She was not the easily-jaded type, but after a month's worth of 8-hour shifts of doing basically-nothing, she was sick of the heat, sick of the view, sick of Carlton's painful attempts at conversation, and sick of closing her eyes to see a burned-in grid of negative-colour zeroes - the aggregate effect of zoning out while staring at a raw output terminal at 3am in the morning on an intern posting with SETI.
A beep from her terminal followed by a deep bass judder through the floor of her little perch overlooking the dish signified a scheduled target change, and the engagement of huge winches to tug the enormous feedhorn assembly to a new position. The cables twanged and popped and resonated with the strain. That, at least, was something that still amused her.
She glanced at the clock. 6:57am. One more hour before day shift and bed. She zoned out as the familiar otherworldy hum-and-zott of motor-and-cable continued. Some zeroes near the edge of the grid bubbled into higher numbers. It barely registered with her. The ball of undulating numbers cleared the edge of the grid and crossed the centre, some of the centre-most digits transitioning to letters after hitting 9. Daisy scratched her nose absent-mindedly.
The vertical centre line of digits on the grid briefly read
6
E
Q
U
J
5
The happenstance sparked recognition in her, and she glanced momentarily at the framed image on the wall - those same digits on a printout, circled in red pen, with "WOW!" written in excited penmanship in the margin.
Still, she was unmoved, beyond appreciating the coincidence - after all, it simply represented a spike in signal strength on the feedhorn - measured 1-9, then A-Z for easy reading. ASCII output. Old-school.
This was Arecibo, SETI, no fancy 3D signal attenuation graphs here, baby. The mid-nineties was as advanced as the in-situ equipment got, at least in SETI's on-site shack. Newer and better ears the world-over were listening to the cosmos on behalf of the usual retinue of Ivy-Leagues and Institutes of Technology, and thanks to an investment fad among the Silicon Valley Billionaire pack, SETI was now well-funded enough to outbid the small-fries and nearly monopolise Arecibo full-time.
The recurrence of the famous "WOW!" pattern was of course a red herring, a not-entirely-unlikely confluence in the data, and gone amid the constantly-shifting values in the blink of an eye.
It had spiked her attention, though. There was a signal, for sure - but that was hardly unusual.
Probably a satellite, she mused, watching the blob continue to pulse as it slowly slid across the detector grid. They caught comsats several times a night, the odd civvie aircraft would blink through, and occasionally a terrestrial signal reflected off a passing LEO object.
...but...
Comsats stick pretty close to the equator, planes and LEO sats are faster, and reflections are never this strong
She glanced at the feedhorn pointing read-out. Nowhere near the equator. She whipped out her phone, unlocked it, and tapped into the Sat-Pass app to see what was passing over her at that moment... a couple of spent rocket stages and a Russia Geo-science bird... but nothing in the track the telescope was slewing through...
The blob slid off the screen. The groan-and-womp of the slewing mechanisms ceased, and the subtle hum of the star-tracking motors kicked in as the great dish found its scheduled target and settled in for a quarter hour of uneventful observation.
She sighed and sat back in the creaky chair.
Daisy. You're not going to find a signal from the great beyond at 7am while strung-out on caffeine and high-fructose corn syrup.
She rubbed her itchy eyelashes again - the ever-present grid behind her eyelids flaring red with the pressure. Her mind overlaid an impression of the signal, unbidden. There had been a rythm to the pulsations.
Atmospheric scintillation? ...maybe... just a bit too rythmic, though...
A Pulsar? No... none in that part of the sky.
She had the locations of every notable pulsar in Arecibo's swathe of the heavens memorised by this point. She knew there weren't any new ones because stars exploding violently in the night sky are kind of hard-to-miss. For a SETI observer, seeing a pulsar transit the screen pipping off millisecond-perfect radio spikes could be momentarily thrilling, but mislea - hang on...
this signal had transited the field just like a pulsar, or a geostationary comsat.
It's stationary in the sky, relative to the stars... it's coming from Out There...
Part II
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