A Planet Around Proxima Centauri Could Be Habitable, and It's Not Alone

James Grebey

Proxima Centauri is a tiny little star that, in the grand scheme of the universe, wouldn’t seem that notable except for two things: The first is that at 4.5 light-years away, it’s the closest star to our solar system. The second is that a little planet around the star just might be habitable.

Even if the planet, Proxima Centauri b, isn’t habitable, it represents an entire class of planets commonly found throughout the universe that could be habitable, according to Matteo Brogi, a Hubble Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. While speaking at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s two-day workshop, “Searching for Life Across Space and Time,” Brogi explained that new methods will allow scientists to get a better sense of what’s happening on the planet’s surface.

“We’re not only talking about the closest star to the solar system,” Brogi said on Monday, “but this is a planet that is representative of an entire category.”

Could there be life on Proxima Centauri b?

Small red dwarf stars are the most common type of star in the universe and they tend to have a couple small planets orbiting them. “There are about two and a half planets per star,” Brogi said. “Every three stars there should be a habitable planet.”

“Having a small planet around a small star is better than having it around the sun,” Brogi noted, explaining that bigger stars like our yellow dwarf sun can overshadow smaller planets, making them harder to spot and study.

Because stars like Proxima Centauri are smaller than our sun, “the classical habitable zone should be much, much, much closer to the star than in the case of a solar star,” Brogi said. “Proxima Centauri b sits exactly in the middle of the habitable zone.”

The problem with Proxima Centauri b, Brogi explained, is that it is non-transiting. This limits the amount scientists can learn about it — and it’s also the reason why we don’t have a better idea of its mass. All we know for sure, at the moment, is that it’s at least 1.27 times the mass of Earth. It could be much more.

Brogi says that high-definition spectroscopy — which studies planets by separating the planet from the star while observing the two bodies’ electromagnetic radiation — offers new prospects for ground-based characterization of the planet, which should, in turn, give us a better chance of how habitable it — or other planets like it — might be.

“Terrestrial planets around M-dwarf stars are our best short-term chance to characterize potentially habitable worlds,” Brogi said.

Photos via 

• Skatebiker, 
• ESO/M. Kornmesser

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{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

07-12-2016 om 23:40 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Weigh in On the Possibility of Life in Pluto’s Oceans

 

AOL

IN BRIEF

• Thanks to data collected by the New Horizons flyby of Pluto, scientists are now taking a serious look into the possibility of oceans on the planet, and therefore the chance for life.
• While water being present on a celestial body is a big boost for the chances of finding life, Pluto's moons are better candidates to be home to some form of organisms.

PLUTO’S WATERS

The existence of water on Pluto was first brought to our attention by the July 2015 flyby of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, when a supposed subsurface ocean was spotted on the icy dwarf planet. Since then, continuous study of the former ninth planet’s topographical structures have led to even more confirmation that there is, indeed, water on Pluto.

This subsurface ocean, which is said to exist underneath Pluto’s heart-shaped zone called the the Sputnik Planitia (or Planum), is part of the area known as the Tombaugh Regio. It’s a 1,000km (621-mile) wide frozen plane composed mostly of nitrogen ice, with some methane and carbon monoxide. Beneath it is the supposed ocean, which according to researcher William McKinnon, is laden with ammonia. McKinnon is professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and a co-author of the study published in Nature.

LIFE’S TELLTALE SIGN

Where there is water, there’s a great possibility that life could also exist. In the Sputnik Planitia, despite the presence of ammonia, McKinnon believes it’s possible for life to exist in these frozen waters. “On Earth, microorganisms in the soil fix nitrogen to ammonia, which is important for making DNA and proteins and such,” he said.

“If you’re going to talk about life in an ocean that’s completely covered with an ice shell, it seems most likely that the best you could hope for is some extremely primitive kind of organism.”

Other formations that suggested water were found along the Virgil Fossa, just west of an area called the Elliot crater, and also in the Viking Terra and in the Baré Montes. These areas showed strong signatures of water ice occurrence, according to data from New Horizons’ Ralph instrument. These areas are part of a region in Pluto that stretches approximately 450 km (280 miles), which could also sustain water under the surface.

But perhaps if water is the basis of finding extraterrestrial life, there are better chances in two of Jupiter’s moons. Titan and Europa both are said to have bodies of water, a primordial ocean of methane for the former and a frozen one containing more water than on Earth for the latter.

References: 

• The Source, 
• Nature

{ https://unsplash.com/ }

07-12-2016 om 23:24 geschreven door peter  

ESO Dark Matter Discovery Redefines Our Theoretical Models of the Universe

 unsplash

07-12-2016 om 23:05 geschreven door peter  

Vreemde blauwe wolken lichten hemel boven Zuidpool al enkele weken op. Wat heeft dit te betekenen?- HLN.be

Bron: NASA, HuffingtonPost.de

© NASA.

VIDEO Mysterieuze blauwe lichtgevende wolken zweven al enkele weken boven Antarctica, zo heeft een ruimtesonde van de NASA kunnen vaststellen. Het fenomeen is niet nieuw maar onderzoekers hebben het nog steeds niet volledig kunnen doorgronden. Bovendien duikt het omvangrijke blauwe deken veel vroeger op dan normaal en dat baart de wetenschap zorgen.

{ http://www.hln.be/ }

07-12-2016 om 22:35 geschreven door peter  

Wetenschappers hebben nieuwe theorie over hoe oppervlak van Mars werd gevormd -  HLN.be

  Bron: Penn State

De Galekrater op Mars zou ooit vol water hebben gestaan.

 © University of California Berkley.

Onderzoekers van de Amerikaanse Penn State University hebben een nieuwe theorie ontwikkeld die kan verklaren hoe de diepe valleien op de oppervlakte van Mars ontstaan zijn. Ze zien eruit als de valleien op aarde, maar die werden gevormd door water dat er duizenden jaren doorliep. En 3,8 miljoen jaar geleden, toen de oppervlakte van Mars zijn vorm kreeg, was de planeet helemaal bedekt met ijs. Of toch niet?

{ http://www.hln.be/ }

07-12-2016 om 22:28 geschreven door peter  

‘Niet van deze wereld’: Getuige ‘Britse Roswell’ verbreekt na 36 jaar de stilte

Een gepensioneerde Amerikaanse luchtmachtofficier claimt dat hij bijna vier decennia geleden in een Brits bos iets onverklaarbaars heeft meegemaakt.

Steve Longero onthulde maandag dat hij in 1980 getuige is geweest van het incident in Rendlesham Forest in het Engelse Suffolk, ook wel het ‘Britse Roswell’ geheten.

Militairen zagen daar naar eigen zeggen drie avonden achter elkaar een ongeïdentificeerd vliegend object.

‘Het was alsof het ons bekeek’

Steve Longero (Facebook)

“Ik denk dat het niet van deze wereld was,” zei Longero over het object.

Hij hield op 26 december 1980, de eerste avond dat de UFO werd waargenomen, de wacht.

“We hadden een zeer geavanceerd alarmsysteem, dat ineens afging,” herinnerde hij zich.

“Het ding bleef boven de bomen hangen en wij vroegen ons af wat het was,” vervolgde hij. “Het was net alsof het ons volgde, alsof het ons bekeek. Het leek iets te zijn dat ons bekeek.”

Lichten

Hij zei dat de UFO fluorescerende rode en groene lichten had.

Eén van zijn collega’s, kolonel Charles Halt, schreef onlangs een boek over het incident getiteld ‘The Halt Perspective’.

“Kolonel Halt kwam later pas,” zei Longero. “Dat was toen ze iedereen bij elkaar riepen en ons vertelden wat we moesten doen.”

Koude Oorlog

“We konden niet geloven wat we hadden gezien,” voegde hij toe.

De UFO-waarneming werd gedaan toen de twee NAVO-bases in het gebied – Bentwaters en Woodbridge – in opperste staat van paraatheid waren vanwege de Koude Oorlog.

In 2005 trok de Britse bosbouwcommissie geld uit voor een ‘UFO Trail’ in Rendlesham Forest.

Het mysterie rond het incident is nog altijd onopgelost.

[The Sun]

© Copyright (c) NineForNews.nl

07-12-2016 om 22:06 geschreven door peter  

The mystery of Queensland’s eerie Min Min lights

The Min Min lights have confounded the people of Western Queensland for a century.

“WE’VE heard about the lights all our lives,” says Genevieve Hammond, who lives in Boulia, an outback Queensland town, 1700 kms west of Brisbane.

Seeing the “eerie” light — often described as intensely bright floating balls — has been said to reduce grown men to tears.

It’s just one example of the folklore that has grown around them. Local kids were warned to behave or the glow would get them; Aboriginal people suspected them of being spirits while local legend decreed if the light ever caught up with you, you would surely perish.

Ms Hammond had heard the stories but she’d never seen the lights until she went camping with her husband John in the vast tree-starved flatness of western Queensland’s Channel Country.

The sky was clear, the night was cold and there was nothing and no one near. Yet the Hammonds weren’t alone.

“We were on a remote cattle station,” Ms Hammond, who runs Boulia’s Desert Sand motel, told news.com.au.

“We were camping out and we saw this greenish oval shaped blurry light bobbing up and down.

Boulia locals have become accustomed to the weird light that seems to follow people around.

Source:News Limited

“It was parallel to the horizon, about a kilometre away, and seemed to be a metre from the ground. It moved very slowly to the left and then came back on itself and it went on like this for about 15 minutes.

“It was silent and very eerie. We were trying to think, could it be a neighbour? A car?” she said. “But the nearest homestead in that direction was 120 kms away. The next day Johnno went over to where the light was and there was nothing.

Shelley Norton is Boulia Shire Council’s Tourism Officer. In the last year four visitors had reported encounters with the light, she said. “They come in and they don’t know what they’ve seen but you can guarantee that it’s the Min Min light.”

Boulia is ground zero for the glowing Min Min light.

Source:News Limited

Many visitors come looking especially for the light with the last sighting in September off the Boulia to Winton road.

“A family were camping and the husband got up in the middle of the night and went out to look at what he thought was the moon. Then he turned around and saw the actual moon. It was like there were two moons. Then one disappeared.

“Sometimes it’s a lone object that stays the same distance away, other times it seem to follow people, then splits into two or three and dances above the tree tops,” Ms Norton said.

“It’s very spooky and no one knows what it is.”

Boulia Mayor Rick Britton said the mysterious lights were the town’s claim to fame.

“Everyone has their quirk; Julia Creek has Burke and Wills and Birdsville the races. Boulia is renowned as being the land of the Min Min lights.”

The lights were first reported to have been seen above the ruins of the Min Min Hotel, 100km west of Boulia, in 1918. Although, it’s likely to have been seen by local Aboriginal people long before that.

The Mayor of Boulia Shire, Rick Britton, said the Min Min lights were rare but had been seen by many locals.

Picture: Steve Pohlner

Source:News Corp Australia

Since then they have been reported in many parts of the outback but glow ground zero is the Channel Country near Boulia.

There are many theories as to what he Min Min lights are. Fluorescent gases released from the barren earth, clouds of bioluminescent insects, a flock of fireflies perhaps, maybe even UFOs.

But Jack Pettigrew, a neuroscientist at the University of Queensland, thinks he’s solved the riddle.

“I experienced the phenomenon myself as well as hearing about it from graziers.”

He stumbled across it quite by accident more than a decade ago when he was searching for a rare bird that appears only at night near the town.

He and his team saw what they thought were the eyes of a fox reflected in their headlights.

“We were surprised that the bright spot of light was still there when we turned off the headlights.”

In his research paper, Mr Pettigrew described the light as having “fuzzy edges in rapid motion like a swarm of bees”, differing colours and that it moved “with a mind of its own”.

Caught in the Min Min’s glow, grown men could cry, he said.

“They would never be identified but the fear was evident,” he told news.com.au, “It was very scary.”

They’re not spirits or UFOs, said Mr Pettigrew, but they are something very strange indeed.

He believes the lights are a nocturnal form of the rare Fata Morgana mirage, a phenomenon where ideal climactic conditions can see light travel over vast distances and even cross horizons.

An image of a standard mirage where, typically, hot surfaces appear to be water.

Picture: AlamySource:Alamy

In a Fata Morgana mirage objects can appear far closer then they are in reality and can even seem to float above the horizon.

Source:YouTube

The Fata Morgana is thought to be the cause of a range of strange sightings including startled sailors seeing the Irish cliffs appear in the middle of the ocean and beachgoers witnessing boats hovering above the sea.

Queensland is no stranger to odd meteorological phenomenon. Across the Gulf of Carpentaria the unique Morning Glory clouds, perfectly formed and hundreds of kilometres long, roll across the sky.

Mirages are fairly common, such as when hot road surfaces appear to reflect the sky.

But the Fata Morgana only occurs when, unusually, the air is colder on the ground than above. Called a temperature inversion (because air is usually warmer at ground level) under certain circumstances light can be bent across the atmosphere creating projections of images from hundreds of kilometres away that would be otherwise invisible.

Mr Pettigrew tested the theory by driving his car 10km into the desert and parked it behind a small hill to ensure it was completely obscured.

Outside of Boulia, Jack Pettigrew witnessed a classic Fata Morgana where a ridge of far away hills. above, appeared and then slowly melted away.

Picture: Jack Pettigrew.

Source:Supplied

“When I pointed the vehicle in the direction of the camp, observers saw a light floating above the horizon.” Sure enough the lights changed colour and trembled. When he switched off the headlights, the apparition vanished.

He concluded the mysterious Min Min he originally saw was likely to be the projected headlights from a road as much as 350km way. They later found at a road train had passed along that road at the same time.

The next morning, Mr Pettigrew saw an even more arresting sight. As dawn broke, in the distance, he saw a row of hills where none had existed before. When the ground warmed up the hills - which in reality were far further away - melted into the ground.

While this wasn’t a Min Min it supported his theory that the area was perfect for various forms of the Fata Morgana.

The flat surface and gullies of the Channel Country trapped cold air and threw up less obstacles to block the mirage.

Boulia markets itself has the heart of the land of the Min Min light. Notoriously difficult to predict, a museum in the town — the Min Min Encounter — tells the story of the lights.

Mr Pettigrew told news.com.au he wasn’t convinced the town wanted to find a reason behind the lights and preferred it to remain an unsolved mystery to attract tourists.

But Mayor Britton seemed to be warming to the mirage hypotheses. “The different temperatures in the atmosphere create something like a house of mirrors, like a submarine telescope,” he said.

Nevertheless, some townsfolk had other explanations for the light, Mr Britton said.

“There was an old character here and he said he’d thought a lot about. In his serious opinion it must be — an emu with a torch stuck up his backside.”

benedict.brook@news.com.au

{  http://www.news.com.au/ }

07-12-2016 om 21:59 geschreven door peter  

07-12-2016 om 21:48 geschreven door peter  

Water was on Mars for hundreds of millions of years – sufficient time for ALIEN evolution

WATER existed on Mars for hundreds of millions of years, researchers have found in what could be the biggest hint to date that life once existed on the Red Planet.

{ http://www.express.co.uk/ }

07-12-2016 om 21:40 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers reveal the best place to look for aliens is… in giant CLOUDS

THE best place to find alien life might be in the dust clouds of failed stars, a new theory suggests.

07-12-2016 om 21:30 geschreven door peter  

Are we in a BLACK HOLE? Astonishing claims entities could be portals to other universes

OUR UNIVERSE may be inside a black hole which may even contain OTHER universes, scientists have claimed.

07-12-2016 om 20:49 geschreven door peter  

07-12-2016 om 20:35 geschreven door peter  

07-12-2016 om 20:21 geschreven door peter  

COMPLETE OUDE STAD ONTDEKT OP MARS

{ http://niburu.co/ }

07-12-2016 om 20:11 geschreven door peter  

UFO Hunters Claim USAF Secretly Testing Night Vision Alien Technology In Nellis Air Force Base

By Kalyan Kumar Tech Times

Some UFO hunters have come up with video evidence that the U.S. Air Force is allegedly conducting night vision alien technology tests at the Nellis Air Force Base. This followed sighting of UFO’s at the training range of the high security area. 

( David McNew | Getty Images )

The U.S. Air Force is conducting late night tests of alien UFO technology in secret at the Nellis Air Force Base, according to UFO hunters who reported heavy UFO activity in the military area near Las Vegas in southern Nevada.

UFO hunter and eyewitness Steven Barone, who — in Nov. 16 — uploaded on YouTube a video that he shot from his backyard on the night of Nov. 15, said he saw alien UFOs circling in the night sky above the Nellis AFB.

Barone asserts it as a clear case of stealth UFO activity at the base and a trial of "night vision technology".

The highly secretive Area 51 base of the USAF is located at the Nellis AFB's Test and Training Range.

Eye Witness Claim Endorsed By Veteran

The claim of the eyewitness on UFO activity was corroborated by veteran UFO hunter Scott C. Waring. He said that the video was explicit and three alien UFO crafts were indeed flying over the Nellis base.

"These objects are flying over a USAF base in that area so no one can travel over there to take a look," Waring said in a blog post of UFO Sightings Daily on Dec. 4.

He also said that the USAF was testing alien technology procured from extraterrestrial allies.

"It looks like the USAF is testing some of the alien craft that was given to the USAF in good faith."

He also recalled the crash of a similar craft in 2008 at Needles, California and wondered why the USAF still has not gained the expertise in flying them.

The vast military area is spread over more than 5,000 square miles in the southern Nevada desert.

Reverse-Engineering Plan Of Propulsion Technology

Meanwhile, some UFO researchers said that Pentagon has been recovering UFOs from crash sites for reverse engineering. A case in point was the crash site outside Roswell in New Mexico, where an alien saucer crashed in the late 1940s.

Some UFO hunters also allege that the restricted area in the Nellis AFB houses a secret community of technologically advanced aliens called Tall Whites.

They say the Tall Whites are in a pact with the U.S. government for exchanging advanced aerospace technology in lieu of other resources.

They also allege Tall White Aliens are living in an underground base at the Nellis AFB and the alien scientists, engineers, and technicians are backing Pentagon's aerospace projects.

Warin said the alien UFOs were given by the Tall Whites who are now operating from a secret base at the Nellis AFB.

 TAG:

• UFO, 
• Night Vision, 
• US Air Force, 
• Alien Technology

{ http://www.techtimes.com/ }

07-12-2016 om 18:21 geschreven door peter  

RENDLESHAM MYSTERY: UFO key witness speaks for FIRST TIME and says object WAS alien

A KEY witness in the UK's most baffling mass UFO sighting has gone on record for the first time about what he saw hovering over an air base 36 years ago.

{ http://www.express.co.uk/ }

07-12-2016 om 18:04 geschreven door peter  

Gold UFO Comes Within 100 meters of the space station, Dec 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: December 5, 2016

Location of sighting:  Earths orbit, at space station

 

Wow! This golden cigar UFO was seen on live space station cam yesterday. It was caught by the watchful eye of Streetcap1 of Youtube. As proof to this being a real object, the UFO is slightly touching the light...lighting up one end of the UFO (above photo). That is proof that this is a solid object and its shadows are due to the light from the sun. Awesome catch, and I wonder what aliens are doing up there...investigating the thoughts of the astronauts, or were they invited guests that came aboard the ISS?

Scott C. Waring

 

Streetcap1 states: 

This is an unidentified flying object near the ISS. It eventually just disappears. You may notice some very fast red flashes near it. I have uploaded it just as was broadcast so many people must have seen it too. Streetcap1.

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

07-12-2016 om 17:48 geschreven door peter  

EXCLUSIVE

BY JON DILLON

A NEW witness has broken his 36 year silence to speak out about Britain’s most famous UFO incident.

Steve Longero was told to keep quiet by his superiors following the infamous Rendlesham Forest incident in Suffolk.

 

GETTY IMAGES

 

 

But now the retired U.S. Airforce police officer has gone on the record for the first time and said: “I think it was something not from this world.”

The incident – dubbed the British Roswell – took place over three nights between 26 and 28 December, in 1980.

Military personnel from nearby RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge, including the deputy base commander, witnessed strange lights in the forest and hovering above the twin NATO airbases which were on high alert as the Cold War was at its peak.

Steve, who served as a police sergeant in the USAF, was guarding the weapons storage area when the alarms started going off.

He said: “While on duty that night, we had a very sophisticated alarm system and everything just went off.

“And then I could see these lights over the treetops, and I was thinking, what’s going on? Then they started sending people out there and at first it was hard to believe, all these bright lights. It was hard to take in.

"Well from what I remember the lights, fluorescent lights, kind of a glow, like a reddish glow. I remember going out there.”

The Rendlesham Forest incident: Britain’s most famous UFO sighting

The Rendlesham Forest incident took place in December 1980 over a series of at least two nights.
On December 26, 1980, military personnel at the twin bases of RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk saw a strange light in Rendlesham Forest, which lies between the two bases.
Three men were sent out to investigate where two of them encountered a small, triangularshaped craft.
One man, Jim Penniston, got close enough to touch the side of the object.
He and another of the airmen present, John Burroughs, made sketches of the craft for witness statements
Two nights later Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt and his team then encountered the UFO.
He said later: "Here I am, a senior official who routinely denies this sort of thing and diligently works to debunk them, and I'm involved in the middle of something I can't explain."

Despite an MOD investigation the Rendlesham Forest incident remains unexplained.

GETTY IMAGES

 

ALAMY

 

Steve went out into the forest where he remembers seeing a large group of other military personnel had already gathered including Staff Sgt Jim Burroughs, Airman First Class Edward Cabansag and Airman First Class Larry Warren.

Describing the UFOs, he said: “They looked like fluorescent coloured lights, like red and green, glowing lights and that’s what they looked like.I could see them hovering over the treetops like an eye that was almost following everybody.”

He added: “It was real kind of quiet and this thing hovering over the trees, and you were like kind of tracking it and like ‘what is this?’. And it was like following, it was like watching us, that’s what it looked like to us. It seemed like something watching us.

“From what I remember it was like aglow, it was really glowing like a reddish, greenish light. It was really glowing, like something was really hot and it was just glowing.”

JONNY DILLON

 

He also recalled seeing Colonel Charles Halt there, who made a tape recording describing how beams of light were being shone down by the UFO. He has written an explosive new book called The Halt Perspective describing his close encounter.

Mr Longero said: “Col Halt came afterwards, after all that was called in. I remember him turning up, that’s when they kind of gathered everyone around and said this is what we are going to do, and everybody kind of dispersed and did what they were told to do.

"I remember we had a little briefing right there and everybody was just like, we just could not believe what we were seeing. Your adrenalin was flowing and I remember people saying like ‘what is that?’.

NOT KNOWN

 

Rubbishing theories that the lights in the woods were caused by a lighthouse on the east coast, he laughed: “I don’t think so. Not unless the lighthouse could move. Unless they could float that thing in the air.

“And then, as people were getting close to this thing it kind of came nearer to us and then it would go forward and then go back and all of a sudden it just disappeared, like something out of Star Trek, it was like warp speed and we were all ‘what was that?’ it was gone and then that’s when they started doing all their investigations. After we secured the area they said okay, you’re gone, get out of here.”

Steve said he was debriefed a few days later and was told not to talk about what he saw as the base had nuclear weapons on site.

UFO investigator Philip Mantle, who interviewed Steve for Outer Limits Magazine, said: “Steve does not claim to be anything special but he wanted to emphasise that there were a lot of others involved who were witness to the events in question, many of whom have yet to add their voice to these events.

“Steve has confirmed the open secret that nuclear weapons were stored at RAF Bentwaters at the time although he did not personally witness any lights being shone onto the WSA.

“He has confirmed much of what Colonel Halt has already said on the record and he is in no doubt that Larry Warren was there.

“What is clear is that despite the best efforts of some this case will continue to be hotly debated for many years to come.”

{ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/ }

07-12-2016 om 01:35 geschreven door peter  

NASA Just Ordered a Robot That Can Repair Satellites in Orbit

Written by BECKY FERREIRA

When your bike or car needs a tune-up, it’s easy enough to bring it down to a repair shop. But if your vehicle is hurtling through orbit, hundreds of kilometers above the planet, it’s a lot trickier to arrange a maintenance check or refueling operation.

NASA intends to tackle this challenge with its Restore-L spacecraft, which is designed to grasp, repair, gas up, and re-deploy its fellow orbiting robots. On Monday, the agency announced that it would award a $127 million contract to the private satellite company Space Systems/Loral of Palo Alto, California, to build this orbital helper bot in time for a projected launch in 2020. This maiden flight of the Restore-L will test out the spacecraft’s ability to rendezvous with and subsequently service a government asset in orbit.

READ MORE: To Clean Up Dangerous Orbital Trash, We May Need Space Harpoons and Satellite Claws

"Restore-L effectively breaks the paradigm of one-and-done spacecraft," said Frank Cepollina, the associate director of NASA Goddard’s Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office (SSCO), in a statement.

"It introduces new ways to robotically manage, upgrade, and prolong the lifespans of our costly orbiting national assets. By doing so, Restore-L opens up expanded options for more resilient, efficient, and cost-effective operations in space," he added.

If successful, Restore-L could also lend its talents to other endeavors, like cleaning up space debris or testing out asteroid capture platforms. It’s also the latest example of NASA partnering with the private sector to reduce operation costs and diversify America’s spacefaring portfolio.

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TOPICS: 

• nasa, 
• Restore-L, 
• space, 
• spacecrafts, 
• satellite

{ http://motherboard.vice.com/ }

07-12-2016 om 01:06 geschreven door peter  

An Astrolinguist Explains How to Talk to Aliens

Written by DANIEL OBERHAUS

Released in US theatres just a week ago, Arrival is quickly shaping up to be the science fiction movie of the year, a turn of events that almost no one—including the author himself—would’ve guessed based on its premise.

The story follows linguist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner) as they attempt to communicate with a pair of extraterrestrials whose spacecraft has just landed in Montana. For most of us, Arrival was just another entertaining alien flick, but for a handful of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researchers who are actually tasked with figuring out how to communicate with extraterrestrials, the film felt more like a documentary than a drama.

“I am so envious of Louise Banks because she gets to have a face to face with ET,” Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) International president Douglas Vakoch told Motherboard. “But in the scenarios that SETI and METI folks deal with there’s no possibility of that. Our idea of a snappy exchange with extraterrestrials is a decade—and that only works if the nearest star is populated.”

Prior to becoming the president of the recently founded METI International, which focuses on the controversial science of sending messages into space, Vakoch was the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute in California. For a large part of his career, he has been trying to figure out how to communicate with an intelligent extraterrestrial species when you don’t even know the first thing about them and a message takes decades to reach its destination.

Although Amy Adams’ character makes it look easy in Arrival, the real art and science of talking to aliens—known as astrolinguistics or METI—is much more complicated, involving a healthy mix of linguistics, mathematics, physics, and imagination.

In Arrival, Renner’s character ribs Adams for her approach to communicating with the aliens, telling her that she does linguistics “like a mathematician.” Although this throwaway comment was made in jest, in real life that’s more or less how it’s done. As Vakoch pointed out, one of the luxuries enjoyed by Adams in the film is that she is able to communicate in real time with the aliens. But for the METI researchers sending messages into the cosmos, they are expecting decades—if not centuries—to elapse between sending a message and receiving a response, which fundamentally changes the way they think about constructing a message.

In the first place, it means that a message sent into the cosmos needs to be incredibly robust and ideally entirely self-referential. Unlike Arrival, Earthlings don’t have the ability to teach the recipients of their messages anything about it because the delay in communication is so long. So not only do METI researchers have to send the content of the message, but they also have to send instructions for how to read it, and these instructions must somehow be intelligible to the aliens as well.

What this means is that rather than trying to figure out how the structure of an alien’s language might uniquely shape their worldview (the theoretical basis of Arrival known as linguistic relativism) and basing a message off of that, METI researchers go in the opposite direction.

“We're looking for a cosmic Rosetta stone,” said Vakoch. “But the question is: What do us and the extraterrestrials both have in common?”

As you might expect, this question leads most METI researchers to languages rooted in mathematics and physics, which one would expect to be known to an alien civilization capable of mastering the technology to receive our message in the first place.

When a 20th century Dutch mathematician named Hans Freudenthal created LINCOS, the first language expressly designed for communicating with extraterrestrials, he used mathematical principles to discuss everything from the nature of time to what it means to love. In 2013, a Dutch mathematical astronomer named Alexander Ollongren created a second version of LINCOS, which communicates similar ideas couched in the language of symbolic logic and lambda calculus. In both of these instances, the lingua cosmica is self-contained and rooted in supposedly universal principles (mathematics and logic)—but it still might be unintelligible to an alien.

“Even if humans and extraterrestrials both have math and science, they're not necessarily interchangeable,” said Vakoch. “Maybe science starts out at different places depending on the biology or particular needs of the organism. There is a subtle truth that Arrival points toward, and that is the way we construct and talk about the world may reflect something idiosyncratic about our species.”

To illustrate his point, Vakoch cites the emergence of non-Euclidean geometry in the 19th century. For two millennia, Euclid’s view of a flat universe reigned supreme and pivoted on his fifth postulate, which states that two parallel lines will never intersect. But when a handful of European geometers in the 1800s replaced this axiom with its opposite—that two parallel lines actually can intersect—they fundamentally changed our view of reality by making space curved instead of flat.

The important point is that both geometries are internally consistent and have been used for innumerable scientific and mathematical discoveries. So just because we’re speaking the language of science or math to aliens doesn’t necessarily mean we’re talking about the same science and math.

With this in mind, Vakoch advocates for exploring dozens of different ways of trying to communicate with ET. He thinks that the idea of trying to create a self-contained message that can be delivered all at once is a product of the human desire to see a send and reply happen within one generation. If we abandon this idea and accept that interstellar communication is likely to happen over the course of centuries or millennia, it opens up radically new ways of attempting to establish communication with aliens.

The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico was used to send the first message into space.

Image: Meredith P./Flickr

In the half a century that elapsed between the first and second versions of LINCOS, there have been no shortage of ideas for how to talk to extraterrestrials. Some have relied on aural or visual components, such as the Voyager spacecraft which contained sound and images on a record. Likewise the first radio communication intended for aliens, known as the Arecibo message, was also an image which depicted pixelated humans and the Arecibo telescope. Unfortunately, these types of messages are banking on the idea that aliens will have aural and visual systems like us—but given that sight has independently evolved dozens of times on Earth alone, this idea might not be as farfetched as it seems.

Other common ideas take the form of massive data dumps or sending out computer programs that will be capable of being run by the aliens once they’ve got a basic grip on human coding paradigms. This was the idea behind CosmicOS, a computer program that would essentially use a role-playing game to teach aliens about Earth and that one time the entirety of Craigslist was sent into the cosmos (more of a publicity stunt than anything, but maybe aliens need a new divan?). Other strategies go back to hard science, like the RuBisCo Stars message which sent the DNA sequence for the protein used in plants for photosynthesis.

Whether any of these signals will ever reach or be intelligible to extraterrestrials is impossible to say, which is why Vakoch and his colleagues at METI International are focusing on exploring as many different message constructions as possible in the meantime. They hope to begin transmitting messages into the cosmos by the end of 2018, but for now the important thing is to have an open mind and active imagination, which for Vakoch is one of the main takeaways from Arrival.

“The thing I most liked about Arrival is that it captures the sort of openness to a new way of understanding the nature of reality that we need to be capable of to understand another civilization,” said Vakoch. “That's what we hope for in SETI and METI: that over the course of decades or centuries we’ll be able to come to understand how another civilization understands and talks about its world.”

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TOPICS:

•  space,
•  Earth,
• aliens, 
• arrival, 
• seti,
• METI, 
• language, 
• linguistics

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07-12-2016 om 00:59 geschreven door peter