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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 Humankind^TM, 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 

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

Blood Moon 2015 Photographed through my telescope by my phone.

Blood Moon 2015

MOVIE REVIEW: Ridley Scott's The Martian (Spoiler free)

I was lucky enough to win a pair of tickets to the Irish premiere of The Martian thanks to Astronomy Ireland.

Having read the superb, compelling, funny, and unapologetically-technical-but-amazingly-digestible novel by Andy Weir, I was hotly anticipating the film. I'm normally extremely shy of spoilers leading up to a film, but with all indications pointing to a very faithful adaptation by Ridley Scott, my familiarity with the story dispelled any such trepidation.
So I watched everything.

With each new trailer and promotional tie-in, my cautious optimism increased: Would this finally be a film that reveled in scientific literacy in a light, upbeat manner?! Whole tranches of dialogue were liberated right from the pages, and with every successive image in the trailers, it was like viewing a recorded compilation of my own mental images from reading the book... with a heavy heap of Hollywood gloss, of course.

As the release date approached, the media juggernaut rumbled on. I watched the book's subreddit swell with glowing reviews from sources personal and professional.

NASA, spying an opportunity to curry some additional goodwill, wisely convened joint press conferences, seating real live astronauts with the likes of Weir, Scott, and lead actor Matt Damon.
And so, it all culminated at the Savoy theatre on O'Connell Street at 7 pm on the 24th of September 2015.

My friend and I arrived, immediately engulfed by a throng of people. There was a red carpet, promotional decor (including a prop surface excursion helmet from the film), and hilariously well-chosen mood music playing. On our way to the cinema, we had spied a BBC news broadcast in a bar reporting live on the London premiere of the film... Attended by the entire cast... Meaning they were not in Dublin!

As it was, the most notable personality I spotted was the wonderfully avid space enthusiast and journalist Leo Enright, familiar to me from just about every notable space mission press conference I've ever watched. From Curiosity to Rosetta, the man gets around! I would have loved to speak to him, but he was busily chatting to someone else.

His presence was not his only contribution to the evening, however, as we discovered upon taking our seats.

The film was preceded, as people filed into the grand (and thematically named) IMC Galactic auditorium, by a slideshow of images from The real-life Martian, NASA JPL's Curiosity rover. Some images were less than 24 hours old, processed by Leo Enright himself, depicting rover's current environs in the foothills of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, Curiosity's home for the last three years.
With the place filled to capacity, the lights dimmed, and the screen filled with literal and figurative stars.

While he's never lost his mastery over visuals, I have not been impressed with legendary director Ridley Scott's recent efforts, so there was still some part of me waiting for the other shoe to drop after The Martian's well-pitched marketing campaign.
After so thoroughly enjoying the book, and sharing that enjoyment with my ten year old nephew (he devoured the novel in a matter of days), I had a sizeable emotional investment in the characters and the story. I was fearful of a repeat of Scott's last big space adventure, Prometheus - a film that looked astonishing, but played out like the script had fallen into a blender.

I need not have worried.

If you're familiar with the story of Andy Weir's book, let me just say that there is a special thrill to be had in witnessing something you hold dear being done such justice.

If you're not (as was my friend - in contrast to myself, he had seen little more than a few scene-setting promo videos), everything that keeps people turning pages in the book is effectively translated to the screen.

The film takes itself seriously, but by the nature of the characters humour occurs seemingly spontaneously, and I found myself creasing with laughter on several occasions.

The opening moments threw me a little by differing in presentation from the book, but after a few short moments, I developed a Cheshire cat grin that scarcely departed aside from moments of wincing empathic pain, dramatic tension or simple, reverent awe at the beauty of the vistas before me.

Matt Damon was set a herculean task in embodying Mark Watney, the loneliest person in history. Damon is a capable actor, but Watney carries the plot, commanding well over half of the screentime solo.

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote in detail in his Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth about the philosophical shift that comes with astronaut training. The methodical, logical manner of thinking that these professionals in life threatening and immediate situations rely upon to come out the other side.

That "right stuff" is present in spades in Damon's Watney, but so too - straight from the page - is his sardonic, cutting wit, near-boundless positivity and resourcefulness, and his genuine awe-fueled enthusiasm for his happenstance position in the universe. These moments come off as tender, honest, and breathtaking, and make full use of Scott's visual prowess, serving up grand, crater-pocked landscapes, steely cold skies scudded by high altitude clouds - and never too long a wait for Phobos or Deimos to pass unassumingly overhead in the distance.

In fact, from stark, elegant spacecraft, and rich, succulently-detailed orbital views of Earth and Mars, to NASA's Epcot-inspired installations and the cramped, cluttered college dorm aesthetic of JPL, the film is not short on visual artistry.

While Damon carries off his isolation as seemingly-effortlessly as Watney, the rest of the sizeable cast divide into two ensembles and play off each other beautifully. In fact, to single anyone out is to do an injustice to the others, though Daniels, Glover, Bean, Mara, Ejiofor, and Davis all get their chances to shine.
That I spent the last few minutes editing that list of names repeatedly speaks to how strong every link in this chain is...

...It also speaks to the egalitarian nature of the script!
For a film about isolation, there is an even hand played to each character, allowing everyone some measure of depth and development.

Of course, in any adaptation, there are changes wrought.
The labyrinthine plot of the book is straightened in some sections - parts are left out here and there, but never in a way that damages the consistency of the overall story or significantly alters its central themes. In a few areas, characters are gifted new scenes, and the opportunity for growth is never wasted. Some of the funniest parts of the movie are moments that weren't in the (extremely amusing) novel.

Conversely, some of the funniest moments in the book don't make it into the film - though one priceless stream of consciousness from Mark is faithfully repurposed in one of the promo tie-ins.

If I had one issue with the film's presentation, it would be the 3D implementation. It may have been our choice of seating, close to the screen, but the depth in a lot of scenes didn't really seem to tally with the footage it was applied to, leading me to suspect a somewhat botched post-conversion to 3D. The alignment seemed so far off that it created the optical illusion of mountains and rocks twisting and bending unnaturally in certain scenes... It could be mildly distracting.

Lastly, as a recurring member of Astronomy Ireland and a space geek, it's gratifying to see a film getting so much right from that scientific perspective. In recent years we've been increasingly spoiled on that front, with Gravity nailing the free floating ballet of microgravity, and Interstellar succeeding where Gravity failed in orbital mechanics (and in GLORIOUSLY using general relativity as an incredibly emotional driver of the plot).
 As befits a film adapted from a book by a guy who wrote his own simulation software to account for the effects of long-duration ion engine burns (as opposed to the more easily-calculated staccato burns of chemical rockets), there are no glaring errors in the treatment of distance, thrust, relative velocity, or signal delay in The Martian.
I had to scratch my head at one or two scenes where the ships engines seemed to be pointing away from the destination during supposed deceleration burns, but I can rationalise that as some kind of framing or compositional quirk I didn't immediately cogitate.

In reference to Gravity, that film's sound design was a marvel (sound was only transmitted through contact with the characters' space suits), but no such attempt at auditory realism was made here - action in space and on Mars'surface is as deep and as loud as it would be on Earth (so much so that I'm beginning to suspect that it was entirely filmed here!).
Similarly, although much is made in the dialogue of Mars' atmosphere's remarkable thinness, the wind howls, flaps 'pressurised' hab canvas, and causes people to lean into it to make progress at times.
And for that matter, there are very few instances where Mars' 0.38g surface gravity becomes apparent.

However what we have here is a gorgeously shot, immersively acted, cleverly scripted piece of top notch drama.
It could have been a brainless action fest.
It could have been a depressing critique on the follies of human ambition.
It could have been a psychological horror on the spectre of living with only your own thoughts to accompany you...

... But it's not.

What it is, is a love letter to exploration, to determination, to persistent positivity, to resourcefulness. It's an affirmation that what we astronomers do is part of a push towards space exploration that is going to define this century for the rest of human history...

And its a really bloody good film!

Thank you, Astronomy Ireland, for the opportunity to see it so soon - it was damn worthwhile.

Untitled Story part 4

Lydia was about to issue her customary reprimand about the pressure-seal to the bridge having been left open when she remembered that she had been the last one through. Lukazj was floating along the shaft behind her, with Marta emerging through the aft hatch.

Most of the debris in the mid-ship shaft had settled, only the few larger chunks retaining any kinetic energy in the face of the air-resistance, so as the crew sailed through, they were uncaringly pinging little flecks of spaceship out of their path.

Marta had avoided looking at the red-smeared lab door as she passed it. She awkwardly pawed the wall for stability as she pulled on a distressed grey and blue NASA t-shirt and tied the drawstrings on her hastily-donned blue sweatpants. She looked like a college student taking a lazy day - her hair an unkempt afro, her low-effort attire already-worn, stained, and poked by the absence of her usual sports bra. Bracken wasn't a stickler for professionalism at all times - you couldn't be, on a voyage like this, but Marta was perhaps the most fastidious crewmember when it came to her appearance... I guess these are unprofessional times. Lukazj was the best-presented of them. He looks like his official portrait Lydia thought, considering her own disshevelled, bloodied, and patched appearance as they took their stations and strapped into the g-seats.

"Marta, I want you to run over the system logs for the Q-ring and fusion reactor 1." Marta, in the port-facing crew seat, started rattling away on the keyboard by way of acknowledgement.
"Lukazj, see if you can get navigation to make sense, and bring the cold-gas thrusters online, just in case this has something to do with the EM-RCS." as she spoke, she kept her focus on her controls, running her fingers over the panel in front of her, everything much more familiar now.

"I'll open the blue-shade."
The sequence was already in motion, and with that statement, she hit return.

There was a clank, a judder, and an electronic squawk as a red-rimmed error message flashed up on her screen. The motors had all drawn too much voltage.

The Blue-shade petals were designed to protect the cabin occupants from the intense broad-spectrum radiation that the forward lobe of the warp bubble blue-shifted up from the cosmic microwave background radiation. All forward-facing surfaces of the ship were armored against it, and the blue-shade was a series of hinged flaps of composite materials that closed over the windows.

The others looked up expectantly at the noise.

Lydia glanced at the friction-welded Earth-Elapsed Time rollers - still not ready to work that into her thinking... except...
"Lukazj, what do the radiation-shield temperature sensors say?"

He tapped his touch panel a few times.
"Huh! We've been out of warp for over an hour, but it's still hot enough to sear a steak on! This should have dissipated ages ago!"

"Check the log." she continued steadily.

He was already bringing it up. He sagged.
"...Of course - I should really have expected this. The temperatures are off the scale until about 40 minutes ago. The motors are either over-resistant, or the petals are physically welded shut."

Lydia unbuckled and floated over starboard to the Abbal's un-occupied station. She reached up above the console, pulled a panel cover off and cranked the handle inside until the petal outside creaked and shucked unsteadily open.

The others stopped what they were doing, unbuckled, and floated over to peer out.

A haze of tumbling, ashy grit was clearing, reflecting the cabin lights pouring out through the window. It was hard to see beyond it.

"Marta, kill the lights, please." asked Lydia, seeing that Marta was closest to that side of Malik's panel.

The cabin went dark, lit only by the red glow on Bracken's console, and the dull grey of the endless computer logs sprawled out on the others. Outside, the particles of grit lost their definition, and the crew waited for their eyes to adjust and see the stars...

...and they waited.

"We're not in intergalactic space, are we?!" Marta finally asked, incredulously.
Lukazj cleared his throat "No. What little sense I can make of the graviscan indicates that there are gravity-wells in the vicinity. We're in cluster of low-mass stars, I'd say - but the output is totally unreliable."

"What the fuck? ...You two, get back on the logs. I'll open the rest of these petals." Lydia commanded after another interminable silence.