[Launch Alert] Vandenberg AFB Launch Schedule
Launch Alert
launch-alert at mailman.qth.net
Sun Mar 15 13:51:36 EDT 2020
LAUNCH ALERT
Brian Webb
launch-alert-editor at earthlink.net
www.spacearchive.info
2020 March 15 (Sunday) 10:45 PDT
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VANDENBERG AFB LAUNCH SCHEDULE
All launch dates and times are subject to change.
Launch
Time/Window
Date (PST/PDT) Vehicle Pad/Silo
-------- ----------------- ------------- --------
APR-JUN Unknown Firefly Alpha SLC-2W
Firefly Alpha first flight. Vehicle will carry multiple payloads into
orbit. Delayed from FEB 18
OCT-DEC Unknown Delta IV Heavy SLC-6
The vehicle will carry the classified NROL-82 payload into orbit for
the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office
NOV Unknown Falcon 9 SLC-4E
Vehicle will launch the Sentinel 6A (Jason-CS) sea level measuring
satellite
DEC? Unknown Falcon 9 SLC-4E
Vehicle will launch the SmallSat Rideshare Mission 1
DEC 31 Unknown Falcon 9 SLC-4E
Vehicle will launch the WorldView Legion 1 satellite into orbit
JAN 13 Unknown Atlas V SLC-3
Vehicle will launch the Landsat 9 earth observation satellite
The above schedule is a composite of unclassified information
approved for public release from government, industry, and other
sources. It represents the Editor's best effort to produce a schedule,
but may disagree with other sources. Details on military launches are
withheld until they are approved for public release. For official
information regarding Vandenberg AFB activities, go to
http://www.vandenberg.af.mil.
All launch dates and times are given in Pacific Time using a 24-hour
format similar to military time (midnight = 00:00, 1:00 p.m. = 13:00,
11:00 p.m. = 23:00, etc.).
The dates and times in this schedule may not agree with those on other
online launch schedules, including the official Vandenberg AFB
schedule because different sources were used, the information was
interpreted differently, and the schedules were updated at different
times.
PDT: Pacific Daylight Time
PST: Pacific Standard Time
SLC: Space Launch Complex
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NEW TELESCOPE TO LOOK FOR LASER PULSES FROM LIFE AROUND OTHER PLANETS
University of California Berkeley News Feature
2020 March 5
Are advanced civilizations in our galaxy trying to communicate with us
by means of laser blasts? A team of University of California, San
Diego, UC Berkeley, Harvard University and California Institute of
Technology astronomers are building a pair of fly's-eye observatories
to find out.
In early February, the scientists finished installing two prototype
telescopes at Lick Observatory near San Jose, California, the first of
hundreds of planned telescopes for a project called Panoramic SETI, or
PANOSETI, for Pulsed All-sky Near-infrared Optical SETI. Eighty of
these one-and-a-half-foot in diameter telescopes will be assembled
into a geodesic dome, like the faceted eye of a fly, to collect
optical and infrared signals from a big chunk of the Northern
Hemisphere sky in search of split-second flashes of optical or
infrared light.
"The goal is to basically look for very brief, but powerful, signals
from an advanced civilization. Because they are so brief, and likely
to be rare, we plan to check large areas of the sky for a long period
of time," said UC Berkeley's Dan Werthimer, who has been involved
with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) for the past
45 years and is chief scientist at the Berkeley SETI Research Center.
"This is the first wide-field survey for sub-second phenomena."
With its geodesic telescope array, each PANOSETI observatory would
image about one-third of the sky every night in search of short-lived
astronomical flashes that last seconds to nanoseconds, or a billionth
of a second. The observatories would be built in pairs up to a mile
apart to provide a stereo view of the night sky, essential to
confirming and discarding light flashes coming from the atmosphere,
rather than deep space.
"The deployment of two PANOSETI telescopes now offers us a new window
into how the universe behaves at nanosecond timescales," said Shelley
Wright, associate professor of physics at UC San Diego and principal
investigator for the project. Wright first worked with Werthimer 20
years ago when she was an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz. She
was a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow from 2009 to 2011.
Wright and her team, which includes Paul Horowitz from Harvard, as
well as Lick and Caltech astronomers, eventually hope to build
several pairs of these 80-telescope observatories around the world to
image the entire heavens. The two prototype telescopes are now
installed and undergoing testing in the Astrograph Dome at Lick,
which is owned and operated by the University of California
Observatories (UCO) for the benefit of astronomers across the UC
system.
"This allows us to test our optics, our electronics, our detectors,
our software, and get some preliminary data to get us confident
before we go into full production," said Werthimer, who is also the
Marilyn and Watson Alberts SETI Chair at UC Berkeley.
Wright and her team are now evaluating sites for the observatories and
hope to begin observatory construction and telescope production in the
next year.
Adapting technology from PET scanners and lighthouses
PANOSETI incorporates two technologies new to astronomy: an
innovative, lightweight, flat plastic lens, which is akin to the
Fresnel plates in lighthouses, to focus optical and infrared light;
and very fast optical and infrared detectors first developed for
diagnostic medical PET (positron emission tomography) scanners.
A single PANOSETI telescope has a very wide field of view: 10 degrees
by 10 degrees, the width of 20 full moons. This wide-angle view is
made possible by a compressed lens design first used nearly 200 years
ago to reduce lens weight and shorten its focal length.
The team is also developing specialized cameras in each telescope
that can precisely measure when each photon arrives. Most current
telescopes looking for short-lived astronomical phenomena such as
supernovas -- Pan-STARRS in Hawaii and the Zwicky Transient Facility
at Palomar Observatory in San Diego are good examples -- collect light
that brightens and dims over seconds to months. Standard
charge-coupled devices (CCDs) found in every camera and phone are good
for this. But CCDs can't capture millionth-of-a-second flashes of
light.
PET scanners' avalanche photodiode arrays, dubbed silicon
photomultipliers, can. They were developed, for example, to detect
photons of light from the annihilation of positrons emitted by
radioactive tracers injected in patients to detect cancer metastases.
Both Fresnel lens telescopes and avalanche photodiode detectors are far
cheaper than current options, making multi-eye observatories possible.
The researchers are hopeful that the unique ability of these telescopes
to image large areas of sky simultaneously for sub-millisecond light
flashes will reveal never-before-seen astronomical phenomena, if not
messages from other civilizations.
"PANOSETI explores the universe at billionth-of-a-second time scales, a
time scale that earthlings have not examined well," Werthimer said.
"When astronomers examine an unexplored parameter space, they usually
find something surprising that no one predicted. PANOSETI could
discover new astronomical phenomena or signals from ET."
Why would an intelligent civilization want to communicate with us via
nanosecond flashes?
"One way to communicate or get your attention is a flash, like a
lighthouse," Werthimer said. "It's very effective, because it's a
bright, intense flash. If you put a lot of energy into a short time,
the average energy can be small, but the instantaneous brightness can
be incredibly large. It's like fast radio bursts, which appear for a
thousandth of a second. But when they're on, they're the brightest
thing in the sky, and you can see them a billion light years away."
Berkeley SETI already operates an optical telescope at Lick -- the
Automated Planet Finder -- that looks for laser signals from other
planets, though it also is blind to split-second flashes of light. UC
San Diego and UC Berkeley also are collaborating on a new instrument
currently operating at Lick, the Near-Infrared Optical SETI
(NIROSETI) instrument, which is the first designed to search for
signals from extraterrestrials at near-Infrared wavelengths.
Most of UC Berkeley's SETI projects collect radio data from
telescopes such as the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, the Green
Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes telescope in Australia.
The latter two are directed by Breakthrough Listen, a UC Berkeley-led
project supported by a $100 million, 10-year commitment from
Breakthrough Initiatives, founded in 2015 by Yuri and Julia Milner to
explore the universe, seek scientific evidence of life beyond Earth
and encourage public debate from a planetary perspective.
The PANOSETI research and instrumentation program is made possible by
the support and interest of Franklin Antonio. UC Berkeley's PANOSETI
efforts are supported by the National Science Foundation (1407804)
and the Marilyn and Watson Alberts SETI Chair fund. The Bloomfield
Family Foundation supports SETI research at UC San Diego in the CASS
Optical and Infrared Laboratory, while Harvard's SETI research is
supported by The Planetary Society.
Other UC Berkeley collaborators are Ryan Lee, Wei Liu, Samuel
Chaim-Weismann and Andrew Siemion, director of Breakthrough Listen.
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