Project Phoenix is back at Arecibo, checking out nearby stars for signs of intelligent life. Astronomer Seth Shostak is reporting from the observatory once again, and SPACE.com will be home to his Arecibo Diaries. This is the third installment.
"What? You think Lewis and Clark made discoveries every minute?" Gerry Harp was almost wild-eyed. "I bet most days they just silently shambled through underbrush."
Its true. We get a lot of visitors to the control room, most of them excited by the prospect of seeing history in the making. They savor the thought of being onboard the Santa Maria as the New World quietly edges over the western horizon.
Of course, if you really were onboard the Santa Maria, the western horizon would be about the last thing youd get to look at. Someone else did that. Youd be busy fixing the rigging and sail, or holystoning the deck.
. We use it to send information about candidate signals back and forth to the Lovell 250-foot (76-meter) telescope, just south of Manchester, England. Its the most important link in our elaborate system for determining whether a signal is terrestrial or extraterrestrial. When its down, so are we.Almost immediately, Ackermann leans back in his chair, relieved. "Its rescheduling the observation." Our software reckons that all failures are temporary, so when it encounters a glitch, it simply backs off and tries again. Fortunately, the frame relay isnt completely down. The breathing is labored, but it is breathing.
The system forgoes its usual 20-megahertz march up the radio dial and spends an extra five minutes re-observing star 4661, a K-dwarf neighbor thats a mere 109 light-years away. The frame relay errors are annoying, but not fatal. Like thickets and marsh, they slow progress. Were awaiting some maintenance guys from the Puerto Rican phone company to check the data link out, but its the weekend, and not much is going to happen until Monday.
Most of the glitches we stumble upon are in the Phoenix system. Its complexity rivals refinery plumbing, and some of the hardware is ready for Medicare. But the principal cause of problems is the fact that we observe at Arecibo for a few weeks, and then go away for six months. A continuously operated system can be systematically pruned of troublesome components, and doesnt (like a light bulb) blow up when you turn the switch back on. This is one reason why SETI Institute researchers are so excited about the new Allen Telescope Array. Not only will it benefit from all the lessons learned here, but constant use will inevitably produce a highly reliable system.
I start to unwrap some crackers layered with an imitation-cheese food product when the lights in the control room briefly flicker. A half-second later, a klaxon lets loose with an abrasive blast, and a strobe light turns our quarters into a high-tech discotheque. The Arecibo telescope operators scurry to check equipment after the power dropout. But were not worried: the Phoenix electronics runs on its own generator.
Unfortunately, eight hours later, we are. The power glitch flipped a circuit breaker that runs the compressor cooling the Arecibo receivers, high up in the feed platform. By 3 a.m., the receivers are a toasty 100 Kelvin (about minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 173 degrees Celsius). This is not good, but this problem is on the observatorys turf. By midmorning, it will be fixed. We continue to push our way forward, our observations a bit less sensitive, having lost some of our sail.
But its in the nature of discovery that progress is marked by long, unremarkable slogs, interrupted by shorter periods of crisis. If it wasnt difficult, it would have been done by now.
"We always seem to be fixing stuff," notes Harp. "But of course, when all is said and done, the maintenance is secondary. Its all about that western horizon."
Ackermann gives him a look. "Holystone the deck, Harp. Whatever that means."
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