Dear friends,
We are in the final stretch of the Spring 2016 offering of the UCLA SETI course. Students are busy analyzing their data sets and identifying artificial signals. They will present their findings during 10-minute individual presentations this Wednesday and Friday.
In the past few weeks, there have been few formal lectures and much more time has been devoted to hands-on activities. In one lecture, we reviewed basic spin and orbital dynamics to get a sense for the time rate of change of the Doppler shift that we need to consider in our analysis. You may recall that motion between a source and an observer results in a Doppler shift, and the value of the Doppler shift changes as a function of time. Students calculated the contribution due to Earth's motion and that due to the motion of exoplanets. In another lecture, we reviewed some statistical principles that allow us to quantify the likelihood of observing random variations of a certain strength in our data. We distinguish these chance events from actual signals by observing the time-frequency structure of the signals. We also had a wonderful guest lecture about SETI history by Larry Lesyna, a former SETI researcher and benefactor of our SETI initiative. This lecture was a great addition because I had covered almost none of this material. Finally, we had a visit from Joe Lazio, Chief Scientist of the Interplanetary Network Directorate at NASA/JPL, who spoke to us about some of his scintillation research. Both Larry and Joe also talked to some of the students about their career ambitions.
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