Site Engineering

Upcoming Activities

We are planning to operate Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) Moon Bounce communications again at the next ARRL EME contest, on November 27-29, 2020. Members are invited and encouraged to participate. EME is a unique communications experience by bouncing signals off of the Moon to communicate elsewhere on Earth. The contest begins on that Friday evening at 5 PM local. We will operate overnight until the Moon sets at 5:03 AM the next morning. We will have a second opportunity to operate when the Moon rises again at 3:47 PM Saturday, and sets at 6:03 AM Sunday morning. We will operate with Morse Code CW, SSB voice, and JT65C digital. Please see our post about Our 1st DSES Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) Moon Bounce Communications in mid October. We will discuss our operation and plan further at our next Engineering & Operations Meeting on November 9, on Zoom. If you are interested, please join in at our meeting, and/or contact us information(at)dses.science..

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At this time we are holding our monthly meetings as virtual meetings. Our engineering meetings are normally held on the second Monday of each month. Our science meetings are held on the fourth Monday of each month. Start time is 5:30 PM. Email notifications are sent to members prior to the meetings. If you would like information to participate, please contact us at information(at)dses.science.

Work trips to the Haswell antenna site are generally scheduled for each third Saturday of the month, with weather alternates on Sunday. This third weekend was chosen because it comes between our engineering and science meetings. Having a regular date helps our members plan ahead, especially those who must travel long distances. During the Covid-19 pandemic, work and science trips may be coordinated for other times. NOTE: Please coordinate with us before you go to the Plishner site, information(at)dses.science.

News

The slides from our DSES Science Meeting, November 23, 2020 are now online. We plan to add notes and the video soon.

News: 'This is not good': The Arecibo radio telescope just suffered even more damage that will set back searches for asteroids and aliens Nov. 9, 2020. news in Astronomy. news in Sky & Telescope. (Thanks to Bill Miller.)
[Update November 19] Arecibo radio telescope, an icon of astronomy, is lost Space.com. Legendary Arecibo telescope will close forever Nature.

Bill Miller wrote a summary report of the work done at the Plishner radio telescope site on Saturday October 31, 2020. He and Ray Uberecken were there, working mostly to prepare for the second session of the ARRL EME contest, to be held November 28 and 29.

Deriving Science from the DSES Pulsar Detections, by Richard A. Russel, published in the September 2020 Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers journal Radio Astronomy, is now available on our DSES Publications page.

Our October 26, 2020 Science Meeting notes, slides, and video are now posted.

[Updated October 25, 2020,] We operated Moon Bounce (Earth Moon Earth, EME) for the first time with our 60 foot antenna in the October 10-11, 2020 ARRL EME Contest. We have a post with photos: Our 1st DSES Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) Moon Bounce Communications. The EME operating team were Ray Uberecken AAoL, Myron Babcock KL7YY, Gary Agranat WA2JQZ, Glenn Davis, and Bill Miller KC0FHN.

Rich Russel gave this public presentation about the science of radio astronomy and the accomplishments of the Deep Space Exploration Society at the Colorado Springs Cool Science Festival on Saturday October 10, 2020. The presentation was streamed live on Facebook and YouTube. Follow the links to watch the presentation. The Colorado Springs Cool Science Festival is an 8-day regional event, designed to ignite wonder and inspire curiosity about the world around us. It attracts between 10,000 and 20,000 attendees each year.

Website Update Notes

We are posting on the Home Page our Planning Schedule for Observations and usage of the 60-foot antenna at the Plishner site in Haswell. Please coordinate usage at our engineering and science meetings, or contact the Science or Engineering Leads.

We added the DSES Memos Page. The page holds functional reference documents, useful for helping members with our work, such as procedures and equipment references.

Link to the Digital Signal Processing in Radio Astronomy – Lesson Portal by the Green Bank Observatory, NSF, and WV University, added to the Education Page.

Current experiments now in progress at the Plishner Radio Astronomy & Space Science Center site in Haswell:

60-foot dish antenna:

Current main work with the 60-foot antenna is to develop our ability to detect pulsars. We are doing this at several wavelength bands. During the winter, work will continue with observing galactic hydrogen at 1420 MHz.

We are regularly using the 60 foot dish antenna for joint observing runs for SETI with Skip Crilly at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. These joint observations are discussed in several of Skip's presentation slides. Please see our presentations page.

Jupiter Radio Science Experiment "Radio Jove":
20.1 MHz monitoring of Jupiter and its moon Io, using a 2-element phased dipole antenna - currently down, pending repair of the receiver.

Experiments in Colorado Springs:

Drift scan survey of Milky Way of HI 1420 MHz spectral line.

Development of hardware/software and techniques for detecting pulsars.

Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance Monitor (SID):
- 25 kHz VLF Solar flare monitoring