Follow-ups Progress

Over the past weekend, we were working behind the scenes on “closing the loop” between SETILive and the ATA so that when enough of you mark a potential ET signal, a followup measurement is triggered. You produced a number of follow-up triggers, but the basic problem is that they arrive too late at the ATA. There’s a limited time, for a variety of reasons, between when the data is sent to us and when we have to ask the ATA to interrupt it’s normal sequence. We’re looking at a variety of steps in the process at the SETILive end, some of which we know are contributing and some that could be. These include the time we keep waterfalls available for marking prior to analysis, processor priority for the “workers” that process the marking analysis and the speed of image rendering. We’ll also look at waterfall data rendering and follow-up messaging at the SETI Institute end as well.

When we make some progress on the timing, we’ll be ready for some more testing and may schedule another follow-up testing party in the coming days, we’ll let you know by email if we do. We’ll also give you an update here and in Talk  on any further followups progress made.

Again, thanks very much for your participation and support for the project.