The Deep Space Exploration Society 2018 Annual Year End Report

DSES Annual Report 2018b

Please click the link to read The Deep Space Exploration Society 2018 Annual Year End Report, in PDF. Written by Bill Miller, DSES Vice President and acting Secretary.

News & Announcement Board

Upcoming Activities

DSES is planning its next annual Open House at the Plishner antenna site in Haswell for the weekend of August 9 through 11, 2019. This will be a similar event as we had during the past few years, with food, demonstrations of our equipment, talks, and socializing. More details to be announced soon.
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Work trips to the Haswell antenna site are now 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.

Our engineering meetings are held on the second Monday of each month. Members can participate remotely using Teamviewer. Our science meetings are held on the fourth Monday of each month. Start time is 5:30 PM. Please contact us if you would like information to attend.

News

These are the results of our 2019 DSES Elections: our three open Board Member seats were voted on by the eligible general voting membership in May. Our three incumbent Board Members were re-elected: Dave Molter, Floyd Glick, and Bill Miller. The club officers in turn are elected from the seven Board Members, by the Board Members. At our annual meeting on June 10 the Board elected Bill Miller as President, Gary Agranat as Vice President, Floyd Glick as Secretary, and Myron Babcock as Treasurer. Thank you everyone who participated in the elections. And congratulations to this year's officers. Minutes from the Annual Meeting are now available by DSES Secretary Floyd Glick.

The slides from our DSES May 2019 Science Meeting are now posted. Dr. Rich Russel, our DSES Science Lead, taught us about pulsars, as we are now starting to try pulsar observing with the 60 foot antenna. And Dr. Russel presented his innovative concept for doing interstellar galactic navigation using pulsars.

Ed Corn wrote a trip report for the work at the Plishner radio telescope site on the weekend of May 18, 2019.

DSES members attended the 2019 Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers Western Conference, held March 22 to 25, 2019, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Richard Russel, Skip Crilly, Hans Gaensbauer, Dayton Jones, and Tony Bigbee presented papers. Also attending were Ray Uberecken, Steve Plock, Bill Miller, Paul Berge, Brian Nelson, and Gary Agranat. There were field trips on Saturday evening to the NOAA site on North Table Mountain, where DSES originally set up in 1991 to use two 60 foot antennas there, and to the Little Thompson Observatory at Berthoud, CO. (http://www.starkids.org). On Sunday evening and Monday DSES hosted a field trip visit at its Haswell site.

Website Update Notes

Our current DSES Information Brochure (in pdf) is now online.

Active Experiments

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

60-foot dish antenna:
[August 19, 2018] The 60 foot dish antenna is now periodically being used for joint observing runs for SETI with Skip Crilly at the Greenbank Observatory in West Virginia. These joint observations are discussed in Skip's presentation slides from the 2018 SARA Western Conference at Stanford. See the slides on our Publications Page, in the Science Section.

With the pointing systems and receivers now being validated, we also are starting to use the 60-foot dish antenna for detecting astronomical radio source objects and the Milky Way at 1.4 GHz. We currently are using a SpectraCyber 1420 MHz Hydrogen Line Spectrometer. And we are starting to try RASDR4 (Radio Astronomy Software Defined Radio). A 1.4 GHz feed designed by Steve Plock is at the focus.

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. [Aug. 18. 2018]

Experiments in Colorado Springs:

430 MHz drift scan

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

More information about our currently running experiments