Large-Scale Technosignatures Searches and the Stuff that Makes it Work

Abstract: 
The search for technological life beyond Earth is a large-scale search for unidentified spectral-temporal signatures. So far, most searches for these electromagnetic “technosignatures” have required dedicated time on telescopes or the use of archival data. A new digital back-end for the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the MeerKAT telescopes has been developed to continuously observe the sky during observations and process the data in real-time to detect these unique signals. The systems named COSMIC (the Commensal Open-source Multimode Interferometric Cluster) and BL USE employ Ethernet packet protocols, real-time calibration strategies, coherent and incoherent beamforming, and open-source Doppler search algorithms to complete this goal at high-time and high-frequency resolutions. In collaboration with NRAO and the VLA sky-survey team, we are recording during epoch 4 of the survey for one of the first all-sky searches for extraterrestrial signals, with the sensitivity improvements allowed by such a powerful telescope. The purpose of this talk is to present the hardware and software structures of COSMIC and BL USE, how they function, and our first results.