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‘DSIT rightly categorises the discovery of extraterrestrial life as a black swan scientific event,’ said Mr Pope. ‘It’s arguably the ultimate black swan scientific event. The societal impact of finding extraterrestrial life is impossible to overstate. It would arguably be the biggest and most important scientific discovery of all time, and the most impactful.
https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/government-plans-for-finding-alien-life/ar-BB1nlCnU
Forests of Space Antennas on Two Continents Come Together to Properly Look for Aliens
5 Jun 2024, 13:52 UTC
On an official level, SKAO is described as an "international space exploration and astronomy project" backed by at least ten countries: Canada, Australia, China, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK.
Its main goal is to explore the Universe in ways that were not possible before and to give us a better understanding of its evolution and the laws of fundamental physics.
The observatory is ground-based, and it will rely on several arrays of antennas to get intimate data about the massive space that surrounds our planet.
These antennas will come together to form to telescopes, one over in Australia (SKA-Low) and the other in Africa (SKA-Mid) - both in the Southern Hemisphere, from where the Milky Way can be studied best.
Each of the two telescopes is meant to cover different frequency ranges, and their missions are slightly different as well. Yet, when combining the data from the two, astronomers are hopeful they'll change the world as we know it.
That's the not-so-pretentious name the people behind the project gave a telescope unlike anything else you'll see in our world. It's being put together in Western Australia and its main mission is to look back in time to the beginning of the Universe.
SKA-Low is not a telescope in the traditional sense, meaning a dish of some kind. In fact, it's not even a singular piece of equipment: it will be comprised of no less than 131,072 tree-like antennas that are presently being spread on the lands of the Wajarri Yamaji Aboriginal Australians.
The 131,072 antenna trees will be grouped in 512 stations of 256 antennas each. Some of these stations will form the core of the system, which will be 0.62 miles (one km) across, but the rest of them will be placed in three spiral arms radiating from the core.
Because there are so many of them, these metal trees will form a positively massive forest, with the maximum distance between the two most distant antennas being 40 miles (65 km). Each antenna is 6.5-feet (two meters) tall.
The SKA-Low will be used to map the structure of the early Universe, being a witness to the birth and death of long-gone stars.
Over on the African continent, in a region of South Africa called Karoo, another forest of antennas is being put together. This one is much smaller in size, as it only comprises 197 antennas, but they will be spread out on a much greater area, with a max distance between antennas of 93 miles (150 km).
The component parts of the SKA-Mid are not wire trees, but traditional dishes. Although almost all of them are brand new, the network will also include the MeerKAT radio telescope, a 64-antenna-strong setup located in the Northern Cape.
SKA-Mid will be tasked with more complex jobs like timing pulsars and tracking gravitational waves, but more importantly than anything, it will be the one to look out for signs of alien life in the coldness of our galaxy.
Work on the SKAO project only truly began back in 2018, but talk about it has been around for much longer, from as far back as the 1980s. Given the complexity of the design (its makers describe it as the "most ambitious ground-based astronomy project ever undertaken"), it already involves a large number of partner companies and institutions (over 100 at per the latest count) from much more than just the ten countries mentioned at the beginning of this piece.
The latest to join the SKAO effort is Canadian company MDA Space. The name may be familiar, as most recently it came up as being involved in the Lunar Dawn Moon rover project together with Lunar Outpost, Lockheed Martin, General Motors, and Goodyear.
For the observatory, MDA will contribute something called the Correlator Beamformer. The fancy name describes an engine that should be capable of collecting and processing the data returned by the antennas in huge quantities.
It should also allow for processing times thousands of times faster than average computer download speeds.
The system will go into the SKA-Mid telescope, where it will be used to "align and process the signals from each pair of dishes to allow the creation of images and other science products from the telescope."
At the time of writing plans are for the telescopes to reach a first light stage in 2027, and they should start operation at full throttle a year after that. So far we are not aware of any delays in the project, so everything seems to be on track.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/forests-of-space-antennas-on-two-continents-come-together-to-properly-look-for-aliens-234981.html
Astrophotographer captures planetary parade with the moon in stunning photo
June 4, 2024
The much-hyped planetary alignment of June may not have been the jaw-dropping naked-eye spectacle some made it out to be, but it still made for some stunning astrophotography.
Josh Dury of Somerset, England caught the planetary parade on June 1, 2024, from atop Crooks Peak, a popular and historic outcropping of rock in the Mendip Hills.
As Space.com night sky columnist Joe Rao pointed out, the planetary alignment was overhyped on social media as some of the planets would be quite difficult to see at all, much less to the unaided eye. Luckily, with the aid of some clever photography, Dury was able to photograph Jupiter, Uranus, Mercury, Mars, Neptune and Saturn as they lined up alongside a crescent moon.
Dury was able to produce this image by taking multiple exposures and combining them into one image. Some of the planets in this planetary alignment were quite close to the sun in the early morning sky, meaning different types of camera settings were needed to capture each one.
"On Saturday morning when I captured this photograph, I was amazed to see Saturn, the moon and Mars," Dury told Space.com via email. "I needed to capture separate exposures in order to capture the fainter planets as well as Jupiter, Uranus and Mercury closer to the glare of the sun; this image is therefore a composite to capture this perspective."
Despite having taken scores of photographs of the night sky, Dury says capturing this image was a great opportunity to consider humanity's place in the cosmos.
"It is quite amazing in taking a moment to step back and appreciate the sheer scale and perspective of our place in the universe," Dury said.
https://www.space.com/planetary-parade-planets-moon-night-sky-june-1-photo
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Starliner lifts off on crewed test flight
June 5, 2024
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft is in orbit on its first crewed flight after two recent launch scrubs and years of development delays.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 10:52 a.m. Eastern June 5 on the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission.
Starliner separated from the Centaur upper stage 15 minutes after liftoff and completed an orbital insertion burn with its own thrusters 16 minutes later, placing the spacecraft into low Earth.
“With Starliner’s launch, separation from the rocket and arrival on orbit, Boeing’s Crew Flight Test is right on track,” Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s commercial crew program, said in a company statement shortly after orbital insertion.
On board Starliner are NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. The spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the International Space Station at about 12:15 p.m. Eastern June 6.
The spacecraft will remain at the station for at least eight days before undocking, landing several hours later in the southwestern United States.
In addition to Wilmore and Williams, Starliner has about 360 kilograms of cargo on board. That includes a new pump for a urine reprocessing system on the International Space Station added to the spacecraft last week after the existing pump on the station failed.
The 70-kilogram pump is taking the place of two suitcases of clothes and hygiene supplies.This was the third launch attempt for the CFT mission.
The first attempt May 6 was scrubbed about two hours before the scheduled liftoff when an oxygen relief valve in the Centaur upper stage started oscillating. ULA rolled the rocket back to its integration building to replace the valve.
While that work was underway, Boeing investigated a helium leak in one thruster in Starliner’s service module.
The company and NASA concluded that the thruster could fly as-is, but in that process discovered what the agency called a “design vulnerability” in the spacecraft’s propulsion system that required development of a new backup model to ensure the spacecraft could perform a deorbit burn should a rare combination of failures occur. The second CFT launch attempt June 1 was halted a little less than four minutes before liftoff.
ULA determined that a power supply in a ground computer rack malfunctioned, and replaced and retested that system. That work pushed the launch back to June 5.
The launch comes after years of development delays with the spacecraft, which suffered problems ranging from faulty software and corroded valves to parachute components with inadequate safety margins and flammable tape used in spacecraft wiring.
Those problems required Boeing to fly two uncrewed test flights rather than one as originally planned.
Boeing received a $4.2 billion fixed-price contract in September 2014 to complete development of Starliner and fly six operational missions to ferry crews to and from the ISS.
SpaceX, which received a $2.6 billion contract at the same for its Crew Dragon spacecraft, launched its first crewed mission, Demo-2, in May 2020. The company is now on its eighth operational mission to the ISS.
https://spacenews.com/starliner-lifts-off-on-crewed-test-flight/
NASA exoplanet hunter finds 'weird' world surviving a star's relentless bombardment — it's named Phoenix
June 5, 2024
A strange planet discovered with NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has astronomers confused. Despite getting relentlessly bombarded with radiation from its red giant parent star, the world has, against all odds, hung on to its atmosphere.
It is also smaller, older and hotter than scientists thought possible for such a planet.
In truth, the extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," should be a bare husk of rock due to its proximity to the star TIC 365102760, located around 1,800 light-years away from Earth.
Yet the world, nicknamed "Phoenix," has emerged from the flames of its host star with a nice and puffy atmosphere.
Phoenix, or TIC 365102760 b as the planet is officially designated, is part of a rare class of planets called "hot Neptunes." these are worlds with radii smaller than Jupiter's, but larger than Earth's.
And, unlike the solar system's ice giant of the same name, hot Neptunes dwell relatively close to their host stars. Phoenix might be an incredible survivor, but the roughly 10 billion-year-old planet's luck and resilience won't last forever.
The team that discovered it predicts it will spiral into its giant star in around 100 million years.
The discovery of Phoenix shows the diverse variety of exoplanets that exist across the universe, and demonstrates that a planetary system can evolve in many ways.
"This planet isn't evolving the way we thought it would.
It appears to have a much bigger, less dense atmosphere than we expected for these systems," team leader and Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Sam Grunblatt said in a statement.
"How it held on to that atmosphere despite being so close to such a large host star is the big question."
What can Phoenix tells us about Earth's future
TIC 365102760 is a red giant star, which means it has spent around 10 billion years converting hydrogen to helium at its core. When the hydrogen fuel for this nuclear fusion process was exhausted, the energy supporting the star against its own gravity also ended.
This meant the star's core would have collapsed while its outer layers, where nuclear fusion was still happening, swelled to as much as 100 times the star's original width.
Phoenix orbits this star at a distance of about 5.6 million miles away, or around 0.06 times the distance between us and the sun. That means the peculiar exoplanet has a year that lasts just 4.2 Earth days.
Plus, with a width around 6.2 times that of Earth and a mass about 20 times that of our planet, Phoenix also has an unexpectedly low density. It's around 60 times less dense than the densest hot Neptune exoplanet discovered thus far.
The advanced age and low density of Phoenix indicate that some process must have been stripping its atmosphere much slower than scientists previously believed possible for a world so close to its star.
"It's the smallest planet we've ever found around one of these red giants and probably the lowest mass planet orbiting a [red] giant star we've ever seen," Grunblatt said. "That's why it looks really weird. We don't know why it still has an atmosphere when other 'hot Neptunes' that are much smaller and much denser seem to be losing their atmospheres in much less extreme environments."
The sun itself will undergo a similar red giant transformation in around 5 billion years, expanding out as far as the orbit of Mars and consuming the inner rocky planets, including Earth.
The Phoenix findings, made possible by filtering out unwanted starlight from TESS observations, could therefore help scientists better predict what will happen to Earth's atmosphere before our planet meets its final fate.
"We don't understand the late-stage evolution of planetary systems very well," Grunblatt said. "This is telling us that maybe Earth's atmosphere won't evolve exactly how we thought it would."
Phoenix is a rare find. Planets of such small sizes are difficult to see via the dips in light they cause as they cross, or "transit," the face of their stars. As this is the technique TESS uses to find planets, the NASA spacecraft is generally better at seeing large and dense planets.
The discovery of Phoenix validates the space explorer's ability to see smaller and puffier planets when the data is correctly handled.
Grunblatt and colleagues have already used their newly developed method to observe dozens of smaller worlds — and this hunt will continue.
"We still have a long way to go in understanding how planetary atmospheres evolve over time," he concluded.
The team's research was published on Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal.
https://www.space.com/phoenix-exoplanet-nasa-star-bombardment
Lawyer names exact date US government will have to reveal UFO secrets – and it's soon
19:00, 4 JUN 2024
A top lawyer who represents some of the leading UFO whistleblowers has sensationally revealed when the US government will spill its alien secrets.
Daniel Sheehan, who had been pushing for “disclosure” of the Pentagon’s interactions with extraterrestrials for several years, told the Freedom Pact podcast that the information has to be released by October 18 this year.
Daniel said an original 64-page document, signed unanimously by a cross-party group of senators, was whittled down to a much shorter bill, but that legislation contains a vital deadline for disclosure.
He explained that the bill was passed into law on December 22 last year, starting the clock ticking on a 300-day deadline. “The reality is the 24-page bill that was passed by the House and therefore has been passed into law and signed by President Biden,” he continued.
Daniel went on: “The law has now mandated that all six of our United States military services, all 18 of our United States intelligence agencies, all 32 of our United States defence department agencies are all ordered to gather together every single piece of information they have acquired pertaining to the UFO phenomenon and non-human intelligence that is understood to be responsible for it.
“They are to gather that all together and have it available in a digitised and retrievable form by October 18 of 2024.”
The bill reportedly covers any previously-secret UFO data more than 25 years old. T
hat would take in some of the most famous close encounters, such as the Roswell Incident, the Phoenix Lights and perhaps the most convincing sighting of all, the little-known 1957 RB-47 encounter.
UFO commentator Chris Lehto says the US government is now in a 'Catch 22' situation – they can't declare the information secret without acknowledging that it exists
Daniel claims that the US government is “setting up a controlled disclosure programme to get this information rolled out to the American people, and to the world, over a seven-year period”.
He claims to represent a number of whistleblowers within the US military who have yet to reveal their names publicly. One told him how a crashed alien spacecraft appeared to “distort space and time” and seemed to be “bigger on the inside” like Dr Who’s Tardis.
In a 2023 interview he said that one of his sources had been involved in the retrieval of a 30ft saucer-shaped craft that was embedded in the earth. He explained:
“They had a guy go into it. He got in there, and it was as big as a football stadium. It was freaking him out and started making him feel nauseous, he was so disoriented because it was so gigantic inside.
“It was the size of a football stadium [inside], while the outside was only about 30 feet in diameter.”
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/lawyer-names-exact-date-government-32958592