SETI / Breakthrough Listen REU 2021 materials

This repository contains miscellanous materials used with the SETI and Breakthrough Listen Research Experience for Undergraduates summer programs. The material was elaborated in the context of the collaboration between GNU Radio and SETI Institute.

Outline

• ata-control contains a Jupyter notebook that teaches how to control the ATA using the ata_control Python module from ATA-Utils. This was used together with Hydrogen_line_ZMQ to set up an activity where the students could freely observe different parts of the Hydrogen line of the Milky Way.

• gr-ata contains a simple flowgraph done as a demo of how the gr-ata block can be used to control the ATA.

• Hydrogen_line_ZMQ contains a ZMQ server that streams IQ data from the USRPs of the ATA GNU Radio backend and a client that plots the Hydrogen line spectrum.

• interferometry contains a demostration of two-antenna interferometry, including concepts such as lag domain and fringe rate. There is a simulation flowgraph and a live demo with the ATA.

• live-spectrum.py is used to send a real time spectrum from the USRPs over ZMQ. This contains the client and the server flowgraphs.

• Tianwen-1 uses this recording done with Allen Telescope Array of the Chinese Mars orbiter Tianwen-1 and shows how to decode the digital information transmitted by the spacecraft. This needs gr-satellites installed.

• Voyager1_GBT uses a Voyager-1 recording from Green Bank Telescope to show how to compute spectrum and waterfall data with GNU Radio