Panoramic optical and near-infrared SETI instrument: overall specifications and science program
Shelley A. Wright (a, b), Paul Horowitz (c), Jérôme Maire (a), Dan Werthimer (d, e), Franklin Antonio (f), Michael Aronson (g), Sam Chaim-Weismann (d), Maren Cosens (a, b), Frank D. Drake (h), Andrew W. Howard (i), Geoffrey W. Marcy (d), Rick Raffanti (j), Andrew P. V. Siemion (d, h, k, l), Remington P. S. Stone (m), Richard R. Treffers (n), Avinash Uttamchandani (o) ((a) Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences, University of California San Diego, USA, (b) Department of Physics, University of California San Diego, USA, (c) Department of Physics, Harvard University, USA, (d) Department of Astronomy, University of California Berkeley, CA, USA, (e) Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California Berkeley, CA, USA, (f) Qualcomm Research Center, San Diego, CA, USA, (g) Electronic Packaging Man, Encinitas, CA, USA, (h) SETI Institute, Mountain View, US, (i) Astronomy Department, California Institute of Technology, USA, (j) Techne Instruments, Berkeley, CA, USA, (k) Radboud University, NijmegenS, Netherlands, (l) Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy, University of Malta, (m) University of California Observatories, Lick Observatory, USA, (n) Starman Systems, Alamo, USA, (o) Nonholonomy, LLC, Cambridge, USA)
(Submitted on 17 Aug 2018)
We present overall specifications and science goals for a new optical and near-infrared (350 – 1650 nm) instrument designed to greatly enlarge the current Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) phase space. The Pulsed All-sky Near-infrared Optical SETI (PANOSETI) observatory will be a dedicated SETI facility that aims to increase sky area searched, wavelengths covered, number of stellar systems observed, and duration of time monitored. This observatory will offer an “all-observable-sky” optical and wide-field near-infrared pulsed technosignature and astrophysical transient search that is capable of surveying the entire northern hemisphere. The final implemented experiment will search for transient pulsed signals occurring between nanosecond to second time scales. The optical component will cover a solid angle 2.5 million times larger than current SETI targeted searches, while also increasing dwell time per source by a factor of 10,000. The PANOSETI instrument will be the first near-infrared wide-field SETI program ever conducted. The rapid technological advance of fast-response optical and near-infrared detector arrays (i.e., Multi-Pixel Photon Counting; MPPC) make this program now feasible. The PANOSETI instrument design uses innovative domes that house 100 Fresnel lenses, which will search concurrently over 8,000 square degrees for transient signals (see Maire et al. and Cosens et al., this conference). In this paper, we describe the overall instrumental specifications and science objectives for PANOSETI.
Comments: 15 pages, 7 figures, 1 table
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Journal reference: Proc. SPIE 10702, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy VII (2018)
DOI: 10.1117/12.2314268
Cite as: arXiv:1808.05772 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1808.05772v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Maren Cosens
[v1] Fri, 17 Aug 2018 06:49:35 GMT (2779kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05772
Astrobiology
