2020/12/11 by J. Maire, Jerome Maire, Shelley Wright +27
Physics and Astronomy · #Coincidence #False alarm #False positive paradox #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Noise (video) #Planetary Science and Exploration #Search for extraterrestrial intelligence #Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life #Spurious relationship #Telescope #astro-ph.HE #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1117/12.2562786
published as Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 11454, id. 114543C 13 pp. (2020) · 13 pages, 6 figures
openalex publication_date 2020/12/11 · openalex created_date 2020/12/21 · arxiv created 2021/11/22 · arxiv updated 2021/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The Panoramic SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) experiment (PANOSETI) aims to detect and quantify optical transients from nanosecond to second precision over a large field-of-view (∼4,450 square-degrees). To meet these challenging timing and wide-field requirements, the PANOSETI experiment will use two assemblies of ∼45 telescopes to reject spurious signals by coincidence detection, each one comprising custom-made fast photon-counting hardware combined with (<i>f</i>/1.32) focusing optics. Preliminary on-sky results from pairs of PANOSETI prototype telescopes (100 sq.deg.) are presented in terms of instrument performance and false alarm rates. We found that a separation of >1 km between telescopes surveying the same field-of-view significantly reduces the number of false positives due to nearby sources (e.g., Cherenkov showers) in comparison to a side- by-side configuration of telescopes. Design considerations on the all-sky PANOSETI instrument and expected field-of-views are reported.