UCLA SETI Group newsletter 2021-06-30

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June 30, 2021

Dear friends,

And that's a wrap for the sixth annual edition of the UCLA SETI course, which has by now introduced SETI concepts to over 100 undergraduate students and 10 graduate students. Remote teaching and learning is working very well, as evidenced by the students' productivity and the course evaluations. The students' final projects advanced our objectives in a wide range of areas:

Emery and Cindy worked to improve our prototype citizen science platform.
Jade and Norma created maps showing our survey progress on the celestial sphere.
Christopher developed web-based calculators for our search sensitivity.
Alessia, Lou Baya, and Damien improved our data processing pipeline documentation with standard docstrings.
Harrison created a testing framework for our data processing pipeline.
Anthony tested the accuracy of an algorithm that approximates noise statistics.
Supreethi wrote a program that verifies whether detected signals intersect one another in time-frequency space.
Kyle developed code to improve the pairing of signals from separate scans of the same source.
Kellen and Krishna wrote a signal injection and recovery program to test the efficiency of our data processing pipeline.
Madison and Vedant implemented six classes of artificial signals for our signal injection and recovery tool.
Valeria and Nicholas implemented coherent dechirping of raw voltage data.
Nathan wrote a program to verify whether high-drift-rate detections are genuine signals or incorrect identifications.
Mark wrote a program to compute the Doppler-shifted frequencies of artificial satellites.
Sam developed a sequencing tool for planning future observations.

Our observing run with the Green Bank Telescope was also a success. We targeted 16 newly discovered exoplanets selected from the NASA TESS Objects of Interest Catalog. The students described their data analyses during Zoom presentations in early June. In addition to the usual hunt for technosignatures, we asked each student to describe a class of prominent radio frequency interference. Please click on the links above if you would like to view some of the video recordings.

The Spring 2021 UCLA SETI Class

The United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, approved by the Senate, includes encouraging language for SETI: "The [NASA] Administrator shall continue to implement a collaborative, multidisciplinary science and technology development program to search for proof of the existence or historical existence of life beyond Earth" and "the Administrator shall support activities to search for and analyze technosignatures." This wording is similar to that in the NASA Authorization Act of 2019 (November 2019 newsletter), which ultimately led NASA to provide modest funding to search for technosignatures (November 2020 newsletter). To my knowledge, the UCLA SETI Group is the only recipient since 2008 of U.S. federal funding to conduct new observations to search for technosignatures. Two other research grants were funded recently to study archival transit data (Ann Marie Cody, SETI Institute) and to conduct theoretical studies (Adam Frank, U. of Rochester).

There has been excellent funding news with respect to Venus exploration. Both NASA discovery missions, VERITAS and DAVINCI+, have been selected for funding, and the European Space Agency's EnVision mission has also been selected. Both VERITAS and EnVision will include highly capable radar systems. In my opinion, this is some of the best news in Solar System exploration in two decades. Venus is the planet most similar to Earth in terms of size, mass, composition, and proximity to the Sun, but there are staggering gaps in our knowledge and understanding of this world. These missions will start to provide some of the key information necessary to help understand why Earth and Venus have followed dramatically different evolutionary paths. I am really excited about these mission selections, in part because there are likely tens of billions of Earth-like and Venus-like planets in the Milky Way Galaxy.

In my next newsletter, I will describe an impressive new SETI machine learning tool that Paul Pinchuk developed as part of his PhD research.

Warm regards,

Jean-Luc Margot