meerkat-target-selector

One of Breakthrough Listen’s primary objectives is to conduct the most comprehensive radio-frequency search for evidence of intelligent life thus far, observing 1 million nearby stars and other objects [1]. MeerKAT, the SKA precursor inaugurated last year in South Africa, is one of several instruments crucial to attaining this goal. The data from the array may be tapped off at different processing stages by many users simultaneously through subscription to data streams. This architecture provides a rare opportunity for commensal SETI observing on an array telescope. The Breakthrough Listen program on MeerKAT will be primarily commensal, and the first 16 of an eventual 128 servers have already been installed in the on-site data center at the telescope. This project will address an important component of Breakthrough Listen’s program on MeerKAT - identifying the set of targets that can be observed through commensal beamforming during particular primary science observations.

Installation Instructions:

Redis:

There are likely many ways to do this, but the simplest way to install Redis is the follow this link to their homepage and follow their instructions for your particular distribution.

Target Selector

git clone https://github.com/UCBerkeleySETI/mk_target_selector

cd mk_target_selector

python setup.py install

MySQL Database:

MySQL Server

Setup the database:

python scripts/configure_db.py -u your_username

This will prompt you for a password which you will need to enter.

You can also specify a database name in which the tables will be stored which can be added using the -d flag after python scripts/configure_db.py. Once this is set, asdf asdf asdf.

Usage:

python target_selector_start.py

References:

1. Isaacson, Howard, et al. "The Breakthrough Listen search for intelligent life: Target selection of nearby stars and galaxies." https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.06227.pdf

2. https://github.com/danielczech/meerkat-backend-interface.git forked from https://github.com/ejmichaud/meerkat-backend-interface

3. Enriquez, J. Emilio, et al. "The Breakthrough Listen search for intelligent life: 1.1–1.9 GHz observations of 692 nearby stars." https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.03491.pdf

4. SETI and the Square Kilometre Array https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.4867