Tag: nasa

NASA wants to take UFOs seriously — and scientifically

On Sept. 14, 2023, NASA announced plans to take a more prominent role in investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) — better known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. The agency will appoint a team of experts to collect data and develop scientific explanations of UAP. The team will be led by Mark McInerney, who had previously been NASA’s liaison to the Department of Defense on UAP.

The action comes in response to a report, also released Sept. 14, that was authored by an independent panel that NASA convened. The report’s purpose was not to conduct a comprehensive review or analysis of UAP, but to issue recommendations to NASA on how the agency can leverage its expertise to shed light on the nature of UAP with scientific methods.

At a press conference, members of the independent panel were adamant that they found no evidence for an extraterrestrial origin of UAP. Many sightings of UAP, they noted, have mundane explanations, like weather balloons or camera artifacts. However, there are still many incidents involving objects that remain unidentified due to a lack of data.

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NASA Report: UFOs Are a Threat to US Airspace, Administrator Nelson Says Aliens ‘Out There’

According to a recent NASA report, there are still unidentified objects in our skies that might pose a threat to US airspace. NASA has also named a new head for UFO research to investigate further, The Telegraph reported on Thursday.

NASA’s Search for Life, Report States UFOs Threat to US Airspace, NASA Administrator Nelson Remains Hopeful

NASA is actively searching for indications of life, whether it existed in the past or exists currently, according to Sky News. Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, is optimistic that they will identify another planet suitable for life within the vast universe.

“The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence the UAPs have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don’t know what these UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) are,” Nelson said. “The mission of NASA is to find out the unknown. We don’t know what the UAP is, but we are going to try to find out.”

The US Space Agency revealed findings from a 15-month investigation into UAPs. However, the report cautions that the available data doesn’t allow for “definitive scientific conclusions.”

An independent team of 16 researchers shared their early findings in May, News 18 reported. They stated that most UFOs can be attributed to natural occurrences. These include common things like airplanes, balloons, drones, weather patterns, or even problems with the recording equipment.

The report dismissed the 2015 “Go Fast” video captured by a Navy fighter jet pilot aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. In this video, the pilot described an object zipping across the ocean at great speed. The investigative team determined that there was no evidence of a propulsion system. It suggested that the object was likely drifting with the wind rather than exhibiting extraordinary propulsion capabilities.

However, the report’s authors cautioned that certain UFOs still defy explanation. They emphasized the need to leverage satellite data and crowd participation to delve deeper into these enigmatic occurrences.

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NASA publishes findings of a long-awaited study on UFOs today

NASA released the findings of its highly-anticipated study today, scrutinizing more than 800 sightings of UFOs across three decades — with ‘inconclusive’ results for those who ‘want to believe.’

‘To date, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, there is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UAP,’ NASA’s panel of experts wrote in their new report which was, in part, designed to recommend future investigative avenues.

The US space agency announced last year that it would review evidence regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), more commonly known as unidentified flying objects (UFOs), with the goal of advising how NASA tools could aid the search.

The panel defined UAP as sightings ‘that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective.’

But NASA’s team elaborated their scientific view that the bar for proof of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth must be kept high.

‘In the search for life beyond Earth, extraterrestrial life itself must be the hypothesis of last resort,’ the panel wrote, ‘the answer we turn to only after ruling out all other possibilities.’ 

‘As Sherlock Holmes said, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

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NASA UAP / UFO Related Internal Communications

According to NASA, “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is responsible for unique scientific and technological achievements in human spaceflight, aeronautics, space science, and space applications that have had widespread impacts on our nation and the world. Forged in response to early Soviet space achievements, NASA was built on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and other government organizations, as the locus of U.S. civil aerospace research and development.”

The following is a large archive of internal NASA related UAP / UFO communications, consisting primarily of e-mails, along with their attachments.

The cases are broken down below, along with links to the documents released.

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A mysterious green comet is approaching Earth and could be visible to the naked eye soon. Here’s how to see it.

A mysterious green comet, called Comet Nishimura, could be visible to the naked eye in mid-September.

Also known as Comet C/2023 P1, the cosmic object could be more easily visible from September 7 and will reach its peak brightness on September 17 when it will be 78 million miles from Earth. 

The comet, which got its name from the Japanese astronomer Hideo Nishimura, currently has a green tail and is gaining in intensity as it heads toward the sun, NASA reported.

This is a crucial stage. The sun can make comets brighter by freeing more gas into their tails. But it can also break them up before they reach the Earth. 

Still, NASA is optimistic. “Will Comet Nishimura become visible to the unaided eye? Given the unpredictability of comets, no one can say for sure, but it currently seems like a good bet,” NASA said in a blog post. 

Backyard astronomers are encouraged to take their telescopes out to spot the comet in case it breaks up in the coming days, comet-tracking app SpaceWalk suggested on its blog. 

For the rest of us, it’s worth turning our attention to the skies from early September in the hours before dawn. The comet is almost aligned with the sun, so the best chance of catching it is right before our star rises.

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NASA scientist is ‘absolutely certain’ there is alien life in our Solar System – and reveals why extraterrestrials are most likely to be hiding on Venus

A planet that suffers scorching 475°C (900°F) temperatures beneath a thick acidic atmosphere may be the last place you’d expect alien life in our Solar System.

But one NASA scientist claims that extraterrestrials are most likely hiding on Venus amid conditions that are unbearable for humans. 

The new theory was put forward by Dr Michelle Thaller, a research scientist at the US-based Goddard Space Flight Centre.

She says that ‘possible signs of life’ have already been seen within the carbon-dioxide filled atmosphere, adding that she was absolutely certain that life exists somewhere. 

‘We see possible signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus,’ Dr Thaller said in an interview with The Sun.

‘I never expected Venus. Venus is now one where we see something in the atmosphere that looks very much like it could be produced by bacteria.’

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Americans Love NASA, But Private Firms Do the Real Work in Space

Despite the successes of private space companies, many Americans cling to a notion of NASA as representing the country beyond the atmosphere. In fact, though, NASA relies on capabilities developed and owned by others. The Space Launch System [SLS] is supposed to restore the agency’s role, but it’s antiquated and clunky when compared to private competitors. Public opinion has yet to catch up with an innovation boom that has moved beyond misty memories of NASA in its moon-landing heyday.

“Most Americans continue to believe that the U.S. space agency NASA has a critical role to play, even as private space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are increasingly involved in space,” Pew Research reported earlier this month. “Overall, 65% of U.S. adults say it is essential that NASA continue to be involved in space exploration, the survey finds. A smaller share (32%) believe that private companies will ensure enough progress is made in space exploration, even without NASA’s involvement.”

The Biden administration is happy to play to such sentiments with its National Cislunar Science & Technology Strategy which heavily emphasizes “the NASA Artemis program, with its near-term mission to return humans to the Moon.” But the publication of that strategy last November was no accident, coinciding as it did with the successful test of the long-delayed Space Launch System and Orion crew capsule. Without the SLS, plans for NASA’s return to the moon are pipe dreams, since it has largely relied on others for reaching space since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle program.

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What NASA and the European Space Agency are admitting but the media are failing to report about our current heat wave

The current heat wave is being relentlessly blamed on increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there is a much more plausible explanation, one that is virtually endorsed by two of the world’s leading scientific organizations. It turns out that levels of water vapor in the atmosphere have dramatically increased over the last year-and-a-half, and water vapor is well recognized as a greenhouse gas, whose heightened presence leads to higher temperatures, a mechanism that dwarfs any effect CO2 may have.

So, why has atmospheric water vapor increased so dramatically? Because of a historic, gigantic volcanic eruption last year that I – probably along with you — had never heard of. The mass media ignored it because it took place 490 feet underwater in the South Pacific. Don’t take it from me, take it from NASA (and please do follow the link to see time lapse satellite imagery of the underwater eruption and subsequent plume of gasses and water injected into the atmosphere):

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. He led a new study examining the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer. That’s nearly four times the amount of water vapor that scientists estimate the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines lofted into the stratosphere. [emphases added]

NASA published the above in August 2022. Half a year later, a newer study increased the estimate of the water vapor addition to the atmosphere by 30%. From the European Space Agency:

In a recent paper published in Nature, a team of scientists showed the unprecedented increase in the global stratospheric water mass by 13% (relative to climatological levels) and a five-fold increase of stratospheric aerosol load – the highest in the last three decades.

Using a combination of satellite data, including data from ESA’s Aeolus satellite, and ground-based observations, the team found that due to the extreme altitude, the volcanic plume circumnavigated the Earth in just one week and dispersed nearly pole-to-pole in three months. [emphasis added]

Another scientific paper explains the “net warming of the climate system” on a delayed basis.  NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory further explains:

Volcanic eruptions rarely inject much water into the stratosphere. In the 18 years that NASA has been taking measurements, only two other eruptions – the 2008 Kasatochi event in Alaska and the 2015 Calbuco eruption in Chile – sent appreciable amounts of water vapor to such high altitudes. But those were mere blips compared to the Tonga event, and the water vapor from both previous eruptions dissipated quickly. The excess water vapor injected by the Tonga volcano, on the other hand, could remain in the stratosphere for several years.

This extra water vapor could influence atmospheric chemistry, boosting certain chemical reactions that could temporarily worsen depletion of the ozone layer. It could also influence surface temperatures. Massive volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa and Mount Pinatubo typically cool Earth’s surface by ejecting gases, dust, and ash that reflect sunlight back into space. In contrast, the Tonga volcano didn’t inject large amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere, and the huge amounts of water vapor from the eruption may have a small, temporary warming effect, since water vapor traps heat. The effect would dissipate when the extra water vapor cycles out of the stratosphere [Emphases added]

So there you have it: we are in for extra atmospheric heat “for several years” until the extra water vapor injected by this largest-ever-recorded underwater volcano eruption dissipates.

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NASA employee used COVID relief funds to grow weed, pay off debt

An employee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) pled guilty to federal charges Monday alleging that he used COVID relief funds earmarked for the organization to finance an illegal marijuana cultivation operation and pay off personal real estate loans, the US Justice Department announced this week.

Armen Hovanesian, a 32-year-old resident of Glendale, Arizona, made false and fraudulent statements on three loan applications made out to business entities under his control between June and October of 2020. 

Hovanesian received a total of $151,900 for loans provided by the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program (EIDL) – a program administered by the Small Business Administration (SBA) that provided financing to small businesses, renters, and homeowners in regions impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hovanesian assured the EIDL he would use the loan proceeds “solely as working capital to alleviate economic injury caused by disaster,” as per the terms and limitations of the EIDL program.

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We might have accidentally killed the only life we ever found on Mars nearly 50 years ago

Recently, I was invited to speak at a symposium organized by the Amsterdam Royal Palace Foundation, who, twice a year, brings in experts to discuss some big topic like the COVID pandemic or the future of work. This summer’s meeting was about the search for extraterrestrial life. While I focused on the search in our own Solar System, Sara Seager of MIT presented her ideas on how to look for life on planets circling other stars.

During our talks and the discussions that followed, I dropped a suggestion that some people surely will find provocative: that we already did find life on Mars nearly 50 years ago — but that we inadvertently killed it. 

The Viking lander experiments

In the mid-1970s, NASA sent two Viking landers to the surface of Mars equipped with instruments that conducted the only life detection experiments ever conducted on another planet. The results of those tests were very confusing at the time and remain so today. While some of them — particularly the labelled release experiment (which tested for microbial metabolism) and the pyrolytic release experiments (which tested for organic synthesis) — were initially positive for life, the gas exchange experiment was not.

The Viking landers also included an instrument to detect organic compounds. It saw trace amounts of chlorinated organics, which were interpreted at the time to be the result of contamination from Earth. This led Viking project scientist Gerald Soffen to utter his famous words, “No bodies, no life.” In other words, there couldn’t be Martian life without organic compounds. So Soffen concluded, as did most other scientists at the time, that the Viking project was negative as to the presence of life, or at best inconclusive.

In the half century since, the picture has changed a lot. Eight more landers and rovers have explored the Martian surface in greater detail. Thanks to the 2008 Phoenix lander, and to later confirmation by the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, we know that indigenous organic compounds do, in fact, exist on Mars. They’re in a chlorinated form, however — not what the Viking-era scientists expected — and we don’t know whether they derive from biological processes or from some abiotic chemical reactions that have nothing to do with life. Still, one might wonder how Soffen would react today: Would he still say categorically that the Viking results were negative?

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