TY - JOUR
T1 - Concepts for future missions to search for technosignatures
AU - TechnoClimes 2020 workshop participants
AU - Socas-Navarro, Hector
AU - Haqq-Misra, Jacob
AU - Wright, Jason T.
AU - Kopparapu, Ravi
AU - Benford, James
AU - Davis, Ross
N1 - Funding Information:
In 2018, NASA began to consider including TS research as part of its research portfolio. In preparation for this, the agency organized a meeting (“NASA technosignatures workshop”, 1 1 held in September 2018 at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, USA) to learn about the current state of the art in the field. The workshop participants produced a report with an overall view of current possibilities in non-radio TS search [2] . In August 2020, a second workshop was sponsored by NASA (“TechnoClimes 2020”, Blue Marble Space Institute of Science 2 2 ) with the goal of producing a research agenda for TS science. This paper presents some of the conclusions of that workshop. Our aim is to establish an agenda of projects or space missions that would realize new avenues to search for TS.
Funding Information:
This study resulted from the TechnoClimes workshop (August 3–7, 2020, technoclimes.org), which was supported by the NASA Exobiology program under award 80NSSC20K1109. The authors are grateful to Joseph Lazio for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and Maria Ribes Lafoz for expert linguistic advise that led to the term “ichnoscale”. HSN acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades through project PGC2018-102108-B-I00 and FEDER, Spain funds. The Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds and the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center are supported by the Pennsylvania State University, the Eberly College of Science, and the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employers, NASA, or any other sponsoring organization.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IAA
PY - 2021/5
Y1 - 2021/5
N2 - New and unique opportunities now exist to look for technosignatures (TS) beyond traditional SETI radio searches, motivated by tremendous advances in exoplanet science and observing capabilities in recent years. Space agencies, both public and private, may be particularly interested in learning about the community's views as to the optimal methods for future TS searches with current or forthcoming technology. This report is an effort in that direction. We put forward a set of possible mission concepts designed to search for TS, although the data supplied by such missions would also benefit other areas of astrophysics. We introduce a novel framework to analyze a broad diversity of TS in a quantitative manner. This framework is based on the concept of ichnoscale, which is a new parameter related to the scale of a TS cosmic footprint, together with the number of potential targets where such TS can be searched for, and whether or not it is continuous in time.
AB - New and unique opportunities now exist to look for technosignatures (TS) beyond traditional SETI radio searches, motivated by tremendous advances in exoplanet science and observing capabilities in recent years. Space agencies, both public and private, may be particularly interested in learning about the community's views as to the optimal methods for future TS searches with current or forthcoming technology. This report is an effort in that direction. We put forward a set of possible mission concepts designed to search for TS, although the data supplied by such missions would also benefit other areas of astrophysics. We introduce a novel framework to analyze a broad diversity of TS in a quantitative manner. This framework is based on the concept of ichnoscale, which is a new parameter related to the scale of a TS cosmic footprint, together with the number of potential targets where such TS can be searched for, and whether or not it is continuous in time.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.02.029
DO - 10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.02.029
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85102065750
SN - 0094-5765
VL - 182
SP - 446
EP - 453
JO - Acta Astronautica
JF - Acta Astronautica
ER -