Showing posts with label Extraterrestrial Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Extraterrestrial Life. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 07, 2020

'Aliens Exist,' says First British Astronaut



'Aliens Exist,' Says First British Astronaut

     Aliens exist and they could be living among us, the first British astronaut into space has said.

Dr Helen Sharman, who went into space 28 years ago, said it is
By Verity Bowman
www.telegraph.co.uk
1-6-20
without a doubt that “all sorts of forms of life” are alive in the universe - but perhaps we “simply can’t see them” as they are so different to humanity.

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Will 2020 Be the Year We Find Intelligent Alien Life?



Will 2020 Be the Year We Find Intelligent Alien Life?

     In the past three decades, scientists have found more than 4,000 exoplanets. And the discoveries will keep rolling in; observations suggest that every star in the Milky Way galaxy hosts more than one planet on average.

By Leonard David
www.space.com
11-26-19
Given a convergence of ground- and space-based capability, artificial intelligence/machine learning research and other tools, are we on the verge of identifying what is universally possible for life — or perhaps even confirming the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence?

Monday, November 11, 2019

NASA Spacecraft Poised to Find Thousands of Alien Worlds



Tess Spacecraft

But will we find another Earth?

     Within just 50 light-years from Earth, there are about 1,560 stars, likely orbited by several thousand planets. About a thousand of these extrasolar planets — known as exoplanets — may be rocky and have a composition similar to Earth's. Some
By Daniel Apai
www.livescience.com
11-6-19
may even harbor life. Over 99% of these alien worlds remain undiscovered — but this is about to change.

With NASA's new exoplanet-hunter space telescope TESS, the all-sky search is on for possibly habitable planets close to our solar system. TESS — orbiting Earth every 13.7 days — and ground-based telescopes are poised to find hundreds of planets over the next few years. This could transform astronomers' understanding of alien worlds around us and provide targets to scan with next-generation telescopes for signatures of life.

Thursday, October 17, 2019

'We Found Life on Mars in the 1970s,' Claims Former NASA Scientist



Viking Lander Model

The Labeled Release experiment on the Viking mission reported positive results, although most have dismissed them as inorganic chemical reactions

     We humans can now peer back into the virtual origin of our universe. We have learned much about the laws of nature that control its seemingly infinite celestial bodies, their evolution, motions and possible fate. Yet, equally remarkable, we have no generally accepted information as to whether other life exists
By Gilbert V. Levin
blogs.scientificamerican.com
10-10-19
beyond us, or whether we are, as was Samuel Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, “alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea!” We have made only one exploration to solve that primal mystery. I was fortunate to have participated in that historic adventure as experimenter of the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment on NASA’s spectacular Viking mission to Mars in 1976.

On July 30, 1976, the LR returned its initial results from Mars. Amazingly, they were positive. As the experiment progressed, a total of four positive results, supported by five varied controls, streamed down from the twin Viking spacecraft landed some 4,000 miles apart. The data curves signaled the detection of microbial respiration on the Red Planet. The curves from Mars were similar to those produced by LR tests of soils on Earth. It seemed we had answered that ultimate question.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Scientific Community Making Search For UFOs Mainstream



Scientific Community Making Search For UFOs Mainstream

     The search for extraterrestrial activity is getting some credibility.

Notable scientists are getting behind a push to make contact with whatever might be out there.
By newyork.cbslocal.com
5-17-19

[...]

... today, this search for answers has gone mainstream. Prestigious universities including Harvard and Penn State are dedicating some of their brightest minds to this as a new field of study.

Sunday, February 24, 2019

'Astrocomb' to Search for Extraterrestrial Life



'Astrocomb' to Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Scientists develop astrocomb, a tool that will find Earth-like planets, alien life

      Scientists have developed an astrocomb, a tool that precisely measures frequencies or colours of light, which can help widen the search for Earth-like planets, and perhaps extraterrestrial life.
By The Week
2-21-19

The custom-made frequency comb, developed by researchers from National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) in the US, provides the precision needed for discovering and characterising planets orbiting M dwarf stars, which comprise 70 per cent of the stars in the galaxy and are plentiful near Earth.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

NASA Discovered Evidence of Life on Mars 40 Years Ago, Then Set It On Fire


      In the late 1970s, two Viking robots sailed to Mars, pillaged the soil and burnt any traces of life they found.

That was never the plan, of course. When NASA first landed the twin spacecraft named Viking 1 and Viking 2 on the surface of
By Brandon Specktor
www.livescience.com
7-12-18
Mars 40 years ago, scientists were ecstatic to finally start studying Martian soil for signs of organic (carbon-based) molecules that could prove the Red Planet was hospitable for life. It should've been a slam-dunk mission. The pockmarked face of Mars was constantly being pelted with tiny, carbon-rich meteorites, after all — detecting signs of that carbon was thought to have been a sure thing.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

New Satellite Will Scan the Cosmos for Alien Worlds

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Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
Illustration of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The satellite will identify thousands of potential new planets for further study and observation.GSFC / NASA

     With help from NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft, astronomers have identified more than 2,000 planets beyond our solar system over the past decade. Now the space agency is sending up a new satellite that promises to be even better at
By Denise Chow
NBC News
4-13-18
sniffing out alien worlds — with the hope that we may finally be able to find one that harbors extraterrestrial life.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to lift off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Monday, April 16, at 6:32 p.m. EDT.

Saturday, April 15, 2017

Alien Life on Saturn's Moon, Enceladus? NASA Releases New Data | VIDEO

Alien Life on Saturn's Moon, Enceladus? NASA Releases New Data
Illustration of the interior of Saturn's moon Enceladus showing a global liquid water ocean between its rocky core and icy crust. Thickness of layers shown here is not to scale. We once thought oceans made our planet unique, but we’re now coming to realize that ‘ocean worlds’ are all around us. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

     Two veteran NASA missions are providing new details about icy, ocean-bearing moons of Jupiter and Saturn, further heightening the scientific interest of these and other "ocean worlds" in our solar
By NASA
4-13-17
system and beyond. The findings are presented in papers published Thursday by researchers with NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn and Hubble Space Telescope.

In the papers, Cassini scientists announce that a form of chemical energy that life can feed on appears to exist on Saturn's moon Enceladus, and Hubble researchers report additional evidence of plumes erupting from Jupiter's moon Europa.

“This is the closest we've come, so far, to identifying a place with some of the ingredients needed for a habitable environment,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at Headquarters in Washington. ”These results demonstrate the interconnected nature of NASA's science missions that are getting us closer to answering whether we are indeed alone or not.”

The paper from researchers with the Cassini mission, published in the journal Science, indicates hydrogen gas, which could potentially provide a chemical energy source for life, is pouring into the subsurface ocean of Enceladus from hydrothermal activity on the seafloor.

The presence of ample hydrogen in the moon's ocean means that microbes – if any exist there – could use it to obtain energy by combining the hydrogen with carbon dioxide dissolved in the water. This chemical reaction, known as "methanogenesis" because it produces methane as a byproduct, is at the root of the tree of life on Earth, and could even have been critical to the origin of life on our planet.

Life as we know it requires three primary ingredients: liquid water; a source of energy for metabolism; and the right chemical ingredients, primarily carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. With this finding, Cassini has shown that Enceladus – a small, icy moon a billion miles farther from the sun than Earth – has nearly all of these ingredients for habitability. Cassini has not yet shown phosphorus and sulfur are present in the ocean, but scientists suspect them to be, since the rocky core of Enceladus is thought to be chemically similar to meteorites that contain the two elements.

"Confirmation that the chemical energy for life exists within the ocean of a small moon of Saturn is an important milestone in our search for habitable worlds beyond Earth," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The Cassini spacecraft detected the hydrogen in the plume of gas and icy material spraying from Enceladus during its last, and deepest, dive through the plume on Oct. 28, 2015. Cassini also sampled the plume's composition during flybys earlier in the mission. From these observations scientists have determined that nearly 98 percent of the gas in the plume is water, about 1 percent is hydrogen and the rest is a mixture of other molecules including carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia.

The measurement was made using Cassini's Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) instrument, which sniffs gases to determine their composition. INMS was designed to sample the upper atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. After Cassini's surprising discovery of a towering plume of icy spray in 2005, emanating from hot cracks near the south pole, scientists turned its detectors toward the small moon.

Cassini wasn't designed to detect signs of life in the Enceladus plume – indeed, scientists didn't know the plume existed until after the spacecraft arrived at Saturn.

"Although we can't detect life, we've found that there's a food source there for it. It would be like a candy store for microbes," said Hunter Waite, lead author of the Cassini study.

The new findings are an independent line of evidence that hydrothermal activity is taking place in the Enceladus ocean. Previous results, published in March 2015, suggested hot water is interacting with rock beneath the sea; the new findings support that conclusion and add that the rock appears to be reacting chemically to produce the hydrogen.

The paper detailing new Hubble Space Telescope findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, reports on observations of Europa from 2016 in which a probable plume of material was seen erupting from the moon’s surface at the same location where Hubble saw evidence of a plume in 2014. These images bolster evidence that the Europa plumes could be a real phenomenon, flaring up intermittently in the same region on the moon's surface.

The newly imaged plume rises about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Europa’s surface, while the one observed in 2014 was estimated to be about 30 miles (50 kilometers) high. Both correspond to the location of an unusually warm region that contains features that appear to be cracks in the moon’s icy crust, seen in the late 1990s by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. Researchers speculate that, like Enceladus, this could be evidence of water erupting from the moon’s interior.

“The plumes on Enceladus are associated with hotter regions, so after Hubble imaged this new plume-like feature on Europa, we looked at that location on the Galileo thermal map. We discovered that Europa’s plume candidate is sitting right on the thermal anomaly," said William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Sparks led the Hubble plume studies in both 2014 and 2016.

The researchers say if the plumes and the warm spot are linked, it could mean water being vented from beneath the moon's icy crust is warming the surrounding surface. Another idea is that water ejected by the plume falls onto the surface as a fine mist, changing the structure of the surface grains and allowing them to retain heat longer than the surrounding landscape.

For both the 2014 and 2016 observations, the team used Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to spot the plumes in ultraviolet light. As Europa passes in front of Jupiter, any atmospheric features around the edge of the moon block some of Jupiter’s light, allowing STIS to see the features in silhouette. Sparks and his team are continuing to use Hubble to monitor Europa for additional examples of plume candidates and hope to determine the frequency with which they appear.

NASA's future exploration of ocean worlds is enabled by Hubble's monitoring of Europa's putative plume activity and Cassini's long-term investigation of the Enceladus plume. In particular, both investigations are laying the groundwork for NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which is planned for launch in the 2020s.

“If there are plumes on Europa, as we now strongly suspect, with the Europa Clipper we will be ready for them,” said Jim Green, Director of Planetary Science, at NASA Headquarters.

Hubble's identification of a site which appears to have persistent, intermittent plume activity provides a tempting target for the Europa mission to investigate with its powerful suite of science instruments. In addition, some of Sparks' co-authors on the Hubble Europa studies are preparing a powerful ultraviolet camera to fly on Europa Clipper that will make similar measurements to Hubble's, but from thousands of times closer. And several members of the Cassini INMS team are developing an exquisitely sensitive, next-generation version of their instrument for flight on Europa Clipper.

Saturday, April 01, 2017

Alien Life – 7 Best Places in the Universe To Search

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Alien Life – 7 Best Places in the Universe To Search

     In 1899, Nicola Tesla claimed he had tuned in radio broadcasts from the planet Mars, history's first reported SETI signal. For most of the century-plus since, techniques have changed but the relentless focus among those seeking life beyond Earth has remained the same:
By Corey S. Powell
www.nbcnews.com
3-30-17
Mars, Mars, Mars. That fixation inspired two Viking landers, four rovers, 14 orbiters, and endless hopeful NASA news conferences, yet the evidence for Martian life remains a big round zero.

Meanwhile, other discoveries have been opening scientists' eyes to a broader universe of possibilities. Data from the Galileo and Cassini probes showed that liquid water is wildly abundant inside our solar system's icy moons. The Kepler space telescope has rapidly expanded the number of known planets, now 2,950 and counting. And as they have peeped deeper into the 200-billion-plus stars of the Milky Way, astronomers have started to realize that true ET signals might not look anything like signals at all.

This list reflects the latest thinking about where extraterrestrials might be hiding — a rich assortment of ocean moons, alien planets, and distant stars where something very odd, and possibly artificial, seems to be going on.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Dwarf Planet Ceres May Host Alien Life


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Dwarf Planet Ceres May Host Alien Life

     Organic molecules, the substance that serves as the basis for life, were discovered on the dwarf planet Ceres. Using infrared mapping technology, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft spotted the molecules in a 400-square-mile area, near the Ernutet crater.
By sputniknews.com
2-17-17

The study team reports that the material likely developed on the dwarf planet, instead of arriving through other objects like asteroids or comets.

..."It joins Mars and several satellites of the giant planets in the list of locations in the solar system that may harbor life."

Thursday, January 19, 2017

How Might First Contact (with Aliens) Actually Go?


How Might First Contact (with Aliens) Actually Go?

There are countless challenges
from finding them to figuring out how to say hello

     Making contact with an alien species would be the most important event in human history. The fabric of human culture, ranging from the arts to science to religion, would be irrevocably altered. Of course, it hasn't happened yet and there's no guarantee that it ever will. But humanity is without a doubt looking. And it may be in our best interest to find them before they find us.
By David Grossman
Popular Mechanics
1-19-17

As Wendover Productions posits, with a somewhat militaristic and very un-Star Trek view of the whole endeavor, is that when two civilizations meet, one of them tends to be destroyed, historically. And the one that comes out unscathed, that tends to be the one that made the contact:

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Planet with Possible Alien Life Discovered


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Planet with Possible Alien Life Discovered
Wolf 1061 and its orbiting planets. The habitable zone is shaded green.

By www.microfinancemonitor.com
12-20-15

    Australian astronomers are upbeat about discovering a potentially habitable planet 14 light years away, outside our solar system that measures four times bigger than the Earth. They are also optimistic to find abundant water and alien life on it.

The planet is one of the three circling a red dwarf star called Wolf 1061 and plausibly better for habitation compared to few other planets found so far and much nearer to the Earth, said researchers from UNSW in Australia. Recently found exoplanets categorized as habitable are too far at thousands of light years away.

All the three planets of Wolf 1061 are potentially rocky and have a solid surface, and the middle planet, Wolf 1061c, sits within the ‘Goldilocks’ zone where it might be possible for liquid water, which means some traces of organism as well, said lead study author Duncan Wright, from University of New South Wales in Australia. [...]

Monday, December 21, 2015

New Find on Mars Suggests 'Considerable Water Activity'

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New Find on Mars Suggests 'Considerable Water Activity'

By Bill Chappell
NPR
12-18-15

     In a finding that suggests "considerable water activity" on Mars, NASA says its Curiosity rover has found very high concentrations of silica on the red planet. The agency says it also found "a mineral named tridymite, rare on Earth and never seen before on Mars."

The discoveries took place on Mount Sharp, where Curiosity drilled into a rock called "Buckskin" to find the tridymite, and where it used its "ChemCam" laser to measure high silica levels. The odd findings led researchers to take the rare step of ordering Curiosity to retrace its path to learn more.

Explanations for the high silica levels "all require considerable water activity," says Jens Frydenvang of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Copenhagen. He adds, "and on Earth high silica deposits are often associated with environments that provide excellent support for microbial life." [...]

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Extraterrestrial Life May Only Be 14 Light Years Away

Extraterrestrial Life May Only Be 14 Light Years Away

By Ralph Mccoy
wwntradio.com
12-18-15

     We have a hunger for habitable exoplanets that's waiting to be satiated, but we may have just found a place that could live up to the hype: Astronomers from the University of New South Wales in Sydney just discovered a new, potentially habitable exoplanet just 14 light-years away form Earth, orbiting a red dwarf star, Wolf 1061. [...]

It might sound like a fairy story but a planet called Wolf 1061c, sitting in a "Goldilocks zone", may prove to be a step towards life outside Earth. Also, this finding could enable astronomers to determine whether these planets can sustain life. [...]

Saturday, November 07, 2015

Dr. Michio Kaku: Why Aliens May Exist, But Aren’t Landing on the White House Lawn

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Dr. Michio Kaku: Why Aliens May Exist, But Aren’t Landing on the White House Lawn

By Michael Sainato
observer.com
11-4-15


One of the most renowned figures in science discusses extraterrestrial life, artificial intelligence, and the future of computer technology

     A bizarre space anomaly detected by the Kepler Spacecraft has caught the attention of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). The institute recently pointed the Allen Telescope Array system 300 miles northeast of San Francisco at the star, KIC 8462852, to test the hypothesis that the anomaly may be a signature of an extraterrestrial civilization.

“If this pans out it could be the biggest story since the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire—it’s on that scale,” said Dr. Michio Kaku in a phone interview with the Observer. [...]

Are There Signals Coming from Deep Space?

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Are There Signals Coming from Deep Space

By Seth Shostak
The Huffington Post
11-5-15

     The star KIC 8462852 may have an unpronounceable name, but just about everyone with an interest in aliens has been talking about it. As of today, they can elaborate their discourse with some new results.

The conversations started about three weeks ago, when a paper written by a small battalion of astronomers pointed out that this star - an imposing 1400 light-years from where you're sitting - occasionally dips its headlights. Every few weeks or months, it will blink, temporarily dimming to as little as 80 percent of its normal brightness. There is no indication (and little likelihood) that this bizarre behavior is caused by planets orbiting the star. Even Jupiter-size worlds would only block about one percent of the star's light.

So what is going on? The astronomers who discovered this strange behavior considered several possible explanations for the dimming. Their favorite was the presence of cometary debris in orbit around the star - an idea they liked, but didn't love.

However others - and especially the press - were jumping on another, sexier bandwagon. The occasional dimming of KIC 8462852 might be due to "megastructures" - giant astroengineering projects that aliens had undertaken in their solar system. These could be space habitats or phalanxes of orbiting solar energy collectors (so-called Dyson swarms, named after the physicist who popularized the idea). They might even be giant, opaque "cut outs" whose blockage of starlight would be a beacon to other worlds, indicating that KIC 8462852 was an oasis of intelligence in the galactic desert.

All nice ideas. Exciting ideas. But how would you prove any of them? [...]

Saturday, October 03, 2015

Will Alien Life Change Christians' Perspective?

Will Alien Life Change Christians' Perspective?

By Stoyan Zaimov
www.christianpost.com
10-1-15

     Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, has commented on the recent NASA discovery that suggests there might be flowing water on Mars, by stating that finding alien life could paint a different picture to who God is for Christians.

"The important thing is to recognize that the universe is created by God, and however God did it tells us something about God's personality," Consolmagno said, according to Vatican Radio.

"If God chose to make a universe where we are the only creatures, that is interesting, that tells us something about God and us," he added.

"If God creates a universe where life is everywhere, that gives us a different picture of God, but in either way, we learn more about Who the Creator is." [...]

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Does Water = Life? Vast Global Ocean on Saturn's Moon, Enceladus

 
 
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Does Water = Life? Vast Global Ocean on Saturn's Moon, Enceladus
Illustration of the interior of Saturn's moon Enceladus showing a global liquid water ocean between its rocky core and icy crust. Thickness of layers shown here is not to scale. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

By NASA
9-15-15

     A global ocean lies beneath the icy crust of Saturn's geologically active moon Enceladus, according to new research using data from NASA's Cassini mission.

Researchers found the magnitude of the moon's very slight wobble, as it orbits Saturn, can only be accounted for if its outer ice shell is not frozen solid to its interior, meaning a global ocean must be present.

The finding implies the fine spray of water vapor, icy particles and simple organic molecules Cassini has observed coming from fractures near the moon's south pole is being fed by this vast liquid water reservoir. The research is presented in a paper published online this week in the journal Icarus.

Previous analysis of Cassini data suggested the presence of a lens-shaped body of water, or sea, underlying the moon's south polar region. However, gravity data collected during the spacecraft's several close passes over the south polar region lent support to the possibility the sea might be global. The new results -- derived using an independent line of evidence based on Cassini's images -- confirm this to be the case.

"This was a hard problem that required years of observations, and calculations involving a diverse collection of disciplines, but we are confident we finally got it right," said Peter Thomas, a Cassini imaging team member at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and lead author of the paper.

Cassini scientists analyzed more than seven years' worth of images of Enceladus taken by the spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since mid-2004. They carefully mapped the positions of features on Enceladus -- mostly craters -- across hundreds of images, in order to measure changes in the moon's rotation with extreme precision.

As a result, they found Enceladus has a tiny, but measurable wobble as it orbits Saturn. Because the icy moon is not perfectly spherical -- and because it goes slightly faster and slower during different portions of its orbit around Saturn -- the giant planet subtly rocks Enceladus back and forth as it rotates.

The team plugged their measurement of the wobble, called a libration, into different models for how Enceladus might be arranged on the inside, including ones in which the moon was frozen from surface to core.

"If the surface and core were rigidly connected, the core would provide so much dead weight the wobble would be far smaller than we observe it to be," said Matthew Tiscareno, a Cassini participating scientist at the SETI Institute, Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. "This proves that there must be a global layer of liquid separating the surface from the core," he said.

The mechanisms that might have prevented Enceladus' ocean from freezing remain a mystery. Thomas and his colleagues suggest a few ideas for future study that might help resolve the question, including the surprising possibility that tidal forces due to Saturn's gravity could be generating much more heat within Enceladus than previously thought.

"This is a major step beyond what we understood about this moon before, and it demonstrates the kind of deep-dive discoveries we can make with long-lived orbiter missions to other planets," said co-author Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at Space Science Institute (SSI), Boulder, Colorado, and visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. "Cassini has been exemplary in this regard."

The unfolding story of Enceladus has been one of the great triumphs of Cassini's long mission at Saturn. Scientists first detected signs of the moon's icy plume in early 2005, and followed up with a series of discoveries about the material gushing from warm fractures near its south pole. They announced strong evidence for a regional sea in 2014, and more recently, in 2015, they shared results that suggest hydrothermal activity is taking place on the ocean floor.

Cassini is scheduled to make a close flyby of Enceladus on Oct. 28, in the mission's deepest-ever dive through the moon's active plume of icy material. The spacecraft will pass a mere 30 miles (49 kilometers) above the moon's surface.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. The Cassini imaging operations center is based at Space Science Institute.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

British Experts Crafting a Message to Aliens

 
 
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British Experts Crafting a Message to Aliens

By Nitya Rajan
The Huffington Post (UK)
9-11-15

      A group of researchers from the UK have decided to pen a message to aliens, in the hopes of making contact.

The decision was put to a vote at the UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) conference in Leeds on 7 - 8 September.

Their to bid to make contact will enter an international competition titled Breakthrough Message -- an initiative launched in July by Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.

The aim would be to create a digital message representing humanity and planet Earth. And the grand prize for accomplishing such a feat is $1,000,000. [...]