SETI TEAM INCREASES NUMBER OF STARS THAT MIGHT HOST LIFE BY 200X

Branching Out

The search for extraterrestrial life just got a whole lot more expansive — a team of scientists keeping an ear out for alien transmissions just ballooned their operation to examine 200 times the number of star systems it had previously.

The Breakthrough Listen Initiative, an effort to intercept radio transmissions sent out by extraterrestrial civilizations, is now listening to 288,315 star systems instead of its previous 1,327, according to preprint research shared online last week. In all, the change represents a major upgrade to one of the more prominent attempts to find intelligent life in the Milky Way.

Outside Voices

The University of Manchester scientists behind the project made the improvements after combing through existing European Space Agency data about the locations and distance from Earth of celestial bodies within 33,000 lightyears, which is the range of their radio telescope.

“Knowing the locations and distances to these additional sources,” Manchester researcher and team leader Michael Garrett said in a press release, “greatly improves our ability to constrain the prevalence of extraterrestrial intelligence in our own galaxy and beyond. We expect future SETI surveys to also make good use of this approach.”

Honing In

The idea is to identify extraterrestrial civilizations by picking up radio broadcasts, so figuring out how feasible it is for each star system to get a message to Earth helped them narrow down their search while adding the new candidates.

“Our results help to put meaningful limits on the prevalence of transmitters comparable to what we ourselves can build using twenty-first-century technology,” study coauthor Bart Wlodarczyk-Sroka said in the release.

Eyes on the Storm: NASA Aids Disaster Response to Hurricane Laura

Credits: NASA's Earth Observatory

Early in the morning on Aug. 27, Hurricane Laura made landfall along the Louisiana and Texas coastline, bringing 150 m.p.h. winds, flash floods and heavy rainfall with it. On the ground, emergency personnel mobilized to respond to the Category 4 storm. But for NASA’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites, it was business as usual.

Those satellites – as well as several from NASA’s international partner space agencies – constantly orbit Earth, using sophisticated sensors to collect data about what’s going on down below. When Hurricane Laura hit, NASA already had eyes on the storm.

“We use that cutting-edge NASA science to address disasters,” said Lori Schultz, a remote-sensing scientist with the University of Alabama who is leading NASA’s efforts on this storm for the NASA Earth Applied Sciences Disasters Program. The program seeks to provide disaster response and management personnel with relevant, up-to-date information to help communities prepare for disasters and manage recovery efforts.

“Basically, we ask: can we answer a question that needs to be answered?” said Schultz. Because of NASA’s abundance of remote-sensing data and partnerships with other space agencies around the globe, NASA is in a unique position to get a broader view of the storm’s impacts than what first responders can see from the ground. “Sometimes we can answer questions that nobody else can,” Schultz said.

Schultz and the rest of the NASA Disasters team are busy processing and analyzing the data collected by satellites passing over Hurricane Laura before, during, and after it makes landfall. They’re using data collected by the NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat satellites, the NASA-JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement satellite that peers through the clouds to observe rain rates, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 1 and 2, and others to create flood maps, assess coastal erosion and pinpoint damaged areas.

If the clouds clear over the next few days, NASA’s team will also use data collected by the MODIS instrument aboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites to further assess flooding damage. They may also use data from the VIIRS instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite, a joint project with NASA and NOAA.

That data will be processed, packaged, and made widely available to those who need it most. To do so, NASA partners with response agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and regional agencies directly affected by the storm.

Credits: NASA's Earth Observatory

Data are posted on the NASA Disasters Mapping Portal, which makes it easy for partners to view and analyze the data, as well as download in a standardized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) format to use in their own analysis tools.

NASA’s Disasters Program creates easily accessible information and distributes it to those working to manage disasters – hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, severe storms and weather, fires, earthquakes, volcanoes and oil spills. That information helps disaster management personnel prepare for these events and plan recovery efforts. NASA also uses these events to study extreme storms and natural disasters and their impact on our planet – and prepare for events in the future.

INDIA’S SPACE CHIEF: WE FOUND OUR LANDER MONTHS BEFORE NASA

Taking Credit

Back in September, the Indian Space Research Organization announced that it had found its Vikram lander, which it had lost contact with days earlier as it prepared to land on the Moon — and said it was trying to reestablish contact with the lost lander.

Months later, NASA made a similar announcement: that it had spotted the wreckage of the lander, with the help of amateur space enthusiast Shanmuga “Shan” Subramanian, who analyzed images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Now, it seems as though ISRO’s leadership feels that NASA is getting too much credit for the discovery.

“After the landing date itself, our website had given that our own orbiter has located Vikram,” ISRO chief Kailasavadivoo Sivan told reporters on Wednesday, as quoted by India Today. “Our own orbiter had located Vikram lander. We had already declared that on our website, you can go back and see.”

Located Again

Is that a fair analysis? It’s open to interpretation.

NASA didn’t claim it was the first to spot the lander, and to be fair, India seemed pretty hazy in September about whether its lander had crashed or landed but lost contact.

The clearest takeaway: India’s crashed lander was a disappointment, so maybe its leadership is looking for distraction.

AIR FORCE ONE’S SUCCESSOR COULD GO 5X THE SPEED OF SOUND

Nyoom!

A coming iteration of Air Force One, the high tech plane reserved for shuttling the President of the United States around the world, may be able to reach nauseatingly-fast speeds up to Mach 5.

The U.S. Air Force just awarded a contract to the aerospace startup Hermeus, Business Insider reports, which calls for the first hypersonic version of Air Force One. The company already has a prototype engine built and tested, and now it’s just a matter of building the rest of the plane.

Drawing Owls

Hermeus has been working on its hypersonic engine for over a year and completed tests in March, Business Insider reports. But now that it has this Air Force contract, it will need to make sure that its Mach 5 plane also meets certain rigorous standards.

Hermeus thinks it can all be done with existing technology.

“We want to do engineering, not science,” COO Skyler Shuford told Ars Technica last year.

Distant Vision

For better or worse, Hermeus’ hypersonic Air Force One is at least ten years down the road, Business Insider reports. Boeing is already set to deliver the next Air Force One in 2021, and Hermeus’ model would serve as that plane’s eventual replacement.

That means that unless American democracy utterly collapses, we’ll never get to see what Mach 5 would do to President Trump’s notoriously unusual hairstyle.

NASA Astronaut Jeanette Epps Joins First Operational Boeing Crew Mission to Space Station

NASA has assigned astronaut Jeanette Epps to NASA’s Boeing Starliner-1 mission, the first operational crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on a mission to the International Space Station.

Epps will join NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada for a six-month expedition planned for a launch in 2021 to the orbiting space laboratory. The flight will follow NASA certification after a successful uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 and Crew Flight Test with astronauts.

The spaceflight will be the first for Epps, who earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1992 from LeMoyne College in her hometown of Syracuse, New York. She completed a master’s degree in science in 1994 and a doctorate in aerospace engineering in 2000, both from the University of Maryland, College Park.

While earning her doctorate, Epps was a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Project fellow, authoring several journal and conference articles on her research. After completing graduate school, she worked in a research laboratory for more than two years, co-authoring several patents, before the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruited her. She spent seven years as a CIA technical intelligence officer before her selection as a member of the 2009 astronaut class. 

NASA assigned Williams and Cassada to the Starliner-1 mission in August 2018. The spaceflight will be the first for Cassada and third for Williams, who spent long-duration stays aboard the space station on Expeditions 14/15 and 32/33.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is working with the American aerospace industry as companies develop and operate a new generation of spacecraft and launch systems capable of carrying crews to low-Earth orbit and to the space station. Commercial transportation to and from the station will provide expanded utility, additional research time and broader opportunities for discovery on the orbital outpost.

For nearly 20 years, the station has served as a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight. As commercial companies focus on providing human transportation services to and from low-Earth orbit, NASA will concentrate its focus on building spacecraft and rockets for deep-space missions

Follow Epps on social media at -

https://www.instagram.com/jeanette.epps/

NASA: A fridge-size asteroid is headed toward Earth one day before the November election

• 

  A photo of Earth taken by NASA's imaging camera

• An asteroid has a slim chance of the Earth's atmosphere November 2.

• That's one day before The Us Election.

• Because of it's small size,the asteroid,dubbed 2018VP1,would birn off while hurting toward the planet.

An asteroid has a slim chance of entering the Earth's atmosphere on November2,oneday before the US election,according to NASA.

Named 2018VP1,the aseroid is pretty tiny,according to ,according to NASA data .

Its has only a0.41% likelihood of entering Earth's atmosphere,but celestial object that size tend to burn up anyway before reching the ground;NASA told Business Insider.

"Asteriod 2018Vp1 Is very small, approximately 6.5feet, and poses no threat to Earth"a NASA representative told Business Insider.That's about 2 meters long,like a refrigerator."If it were to enter our planet's atmosphere, it would disintegrate due to it's extremely small size."

2018VP1 has had a few close encounters with Earth before,dating back to 1970.It most recently visited in November 2018,roughly when it was discovered at California's Palomar Observatory.

it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size," NASA said in a statement. "NASA has been directed by Congress to discover 90% of the near-Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters (459 feet) in size and reports on asteroids of any size."

NASA says that, "based on 21 observations spanning 12.968 days," the agency has determined the asteroid probably -- phew! -- won't have a deep impact, let alone bring Armageddon.

"It's quit an accomplishment to find these tiny close-in asteroids in the first place, because they pass by so fast,"said Paul Chodas, the director of the Center for Near-Earth Object studies at NASA's JET propulsion Labortory in southern California.

"There's typical only a short window of a couple of days before or after close approach when this small of an asteroid is close enough to Earth to be bright

enough but not so close that it moves too fast in the sky to be detected by a telescop,"he said.

Between the covid19 pandemic,a reckoning with racial justice,sky high depression and anxiety,election season and other recent events,people are joking about the asteroid's perceived embodiment of 2020.

INDIA WANTS TO SEND THIS LEGLESS HUMANOID ROBOT INTO SPACE / ISRO

Meet Vyommitra

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has unveiled a legless robot called “Voymmitra” that it wants to send into space on an uncrewed mission later this year. The eerily humanoid robot can reportedly speak two languages, according to Business Insider.

“Vyommitra will simulate human functions, will interact with the environmental control and life-support system,” ISRO chairman K Sivan told the Times of India. “Our robot is like a human, and will be able to do what man can do, although not as extensively,” Sivan added.

Gaganyaan 2022

The humanoid will be launched on the first uncrewed test flight of India’s planned Gaganyaan crewed orbital spacecraft.

“I can be a companion of the astronauts, recognize them and respond to their queries,” Vyommitra can be heard saying in a clip uploaded to Twitter.

But its own movement will be limited.

“It’s called a half humanoid because it doesn’t have legs,” ISRO scientist Sam Dayal told India Today. “It can only bend side wards and forward.”

The Humanoids

The mission is part of India’s greater ambitions to send Indian astronauts to space by 2022 — if all goes according to plan — first announced by prime minister Narendra Modi in 2018.

It wouldn’t be the first time a nation has sent a humanoid robot into space. Russia sent its gunslinging humanoid robot FEDOR to the International Space Station in August