Categories
Universe Today

UFO panel says NASA needs better data about anomalies

A panel of independent experts took a first-ever look at what NASA could bring to the study of UFO sightings — now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — and said the space agency will have to up its game.

The 16-member panel’s chair, David Spergel, said he and his colleagues were “struck by the limited nature of the data.”

“Many events had insufficient data,” said Spergel, an astrophysicist who is the president of the Simons Foundation. “In order to get a better understanding, we will need to have high-quality data — data where we understand its provenance, data from multiple sensors.”

During today’s public hearing, panelists said NASA could contribute to the UAP debate by setting standards for sighting data, creating a crowdsourcing platform for sightings, and reducing the stigma that has discouraged people from reporting and studying anomalous sightings. Some of that stigma was experienced by the panelists themselves.

“It’s disheartening to note that several of them have been subjected to online abuse due to their decision to participate on this panel,” said Daniel Evans, NASA’s assistant deputy associate administrator for research, who served as the space agency’s liaison to the panel. “A NASA security team is actively addressing this issue.”

Categories
GeekWire

Axiom crew finishes space station science mission

The second crew to be sent into space as a profit-making proposition for Texas-based Axiom Space came back to Earth tonight in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule after spending nine days on the International Space Station.

The Ax-2 trip came a year after Axiom’s first crewed space mission, and marked several firsts: Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson became the first woman to command a private-sector space mission as Axiom’s director of human spaceflight, and mission specialist Rayyanah Barnawi became the first Saudi woman in space.

Tennessee business executive John Shoffner and Saudi fighter pilot Ali Alqarni rounded out the crew. Shoffner paid his own fare, which was thought to amount to tens of millions of dollars, while Barnawi and Alqarni flew with the backing of the Saudi government.

The trip began on May 21 with the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, and ended today with the crew’s departure from the space station and splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast. While crew members waited for a recovery ship to pick up their Dragon capsule, which was dubbed Freedom, Whitson described the descent from orbit as a “phenomenal ride” — the same phrase she used after liftoff.

“We really enjoyed all of it,” she told SpaceX’s Mission Control.

Categories
Universe Today

Virgin Galactic’s space plane aces its final flight test

After a two-year hiatus, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity resumed flying crew members beyond a 50-mile-high space milestone, marking the end of a years-long flight test program and setting the stage for the start of commercial service as soon as next month.

It was the first launch of the Unity rocket plane from its VMS Eve carrier airplane since July 2021, when company founder Richard Branson took a ride. Branson said he was “proud” to be watching from Spaceport America in New Mexico when Unity took flight.

During today’s suborbital flight test, known as Unity 25, the rocket plane sent two pilots and four other Virgin Galactic employees to a maximum height of 54.2 miles, at a top speed of Mach 2.94.

Categories
GeekWire

Gravitational-wave sleuths look for more cosmic crashes

After three years of upgrading and waiting, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory has officially resumed its hunt for the signatures of crashing black holes and neutron stars.

“Our LIGO teams have worked through hardship during the past two-plus years to be ready for this moment, and we are indeed ready,” Caltech physicist Albert Lazzarini, the deputy director of the LIGO Laboratory, said in a news release.

Lazzarini said the engineering tests leading up to today’s official start of Observing Run 4, or O4, have already revealed a number of candidate events that have been shared with the astronomical community.

“Most of these involve black hole binary systems, although one may include a neutron star,” he said. “The rates appear to be consistent with expectations.”

One such event, called S230518h, was detected last week. Researchers say that if they can confirm the data, the event was most likely caused by the merger of a faraway black hole and a neutron star.

The twin LIGO gravitational-wave detectors at Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La., will be joined for O4 by the Virgo detector in Italy as well as the KAGRA observatory in Japan. Virgo is scheduled to take part in the run starting later this year. KAGRA will parallel LIGO’s observations for the next month, take a break for some upgrades, and then rejoin the run.

Categories
Universe Today

SETI researchers are simulating alien contact

Is it a multimedia art project? Or a rehearsal for alien contact? Let’s call it both: Researchers specializing in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, are working with a media artist to stage the receipt of an interstellar message — and a global effort to decode the message.

The project, titled “A Sign in Space,” is orchestrated by media artist Daniela de Paulis in collaboration with the SETI Institute, the European Space Agency, the Green Bank Observatory and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (also known as INAF).

The metaphorical curtain rises on May 24, when ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter transmits an encoded radio message from Martian orbit to Earth at 19:00 UTC / noon PDT.

Categories
GeekWire

SpaceX sends Axiom’s crew No. 2 to the space station

SpaceX and Axiom Space teamed up today to send four spacefliers — including the first Saudi woman in orbit — to the International Space Station for a 10-day trip focusing on zero-gravity research.

SpaceX’s two-stage Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 5:37 p.m. ET (2:37 p.m. PT) at the end of a trouble-free countdown, sending a Crew Dragon capsule toward a space station rendezvous.

After stage separation, the Falcon 9’s first-stage booster flew itself back to a landing zone near the launch pad while the second stage pushed the Crew Dragon into orbit. That marked the first time a Falcon 9 booster made a touchdown on land (as opposed to at sea) after launching a crewed mission.

“It was a phenomenal ride,” Axiom mission commander Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who holds the U.S. record for cumulative time in space, told Mission Control from zero-G.

The mission, which is Texas-based Axiom Space’s second expedition to the space station, combines public and private-sector initiatives: NASA, SpaceX and Axiom are coordinating operations in orbit. Mission pilot John Shoffner, a Tennessee business executive who’s also a race car driver and competitive skydiver, purchased one of the seats on the Crew Dragon at a cost that’s thought to be somewhere in the range of $55 million.

The Saudi government is paying the fare for the Ax-2 mission’s two other crew members: Rayyanah Barnawi, Saudi Arabia’s first female spaceflier, is a biochemist specializing in stem cell research. Ali Alqarni is a Saudi Air Force fighter pilot. Only one other Saudi citizen has previously been to space: Prince Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud, who flew on the shuttle Discovery in 1985.

Categories
GeekWire

Blue Origin’s team wins $3.4B from NASA for lunar lander

An industry team led by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won a $3.4 billion NASA contract to provide a second type of landing system for crewed as well as uncrewed lunar landings.

The decision announced today settles a years-long controversy over how astronauts would get to the moon’s surface: SpaceX’s Starship system would be used for the first two crewed landings during the Artemis 3 and 4 missions, currently scheduled for as early as 2025 and 2028. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon system would be used for Artemis 5, currently set for 2029.

All those missions would target the moon’s south polar region, which is thought to be one of the moon’s most promising places for long-term settlement. Both types of landers could be available to NASA for missions beyond Artemis 5.

“We are in a golden age of human spaceflight, which is made possible by NASA’s commercial and international partnerships,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the agency’s HQ in Washington, D.C. “Together, we are making an investment in the infrastructure that will pave the way to land the first astronauts on Mars.”

In a tweet, Bezos said he was “honored to be on this journey with NASA to land astronauts on the moon — this time to stay.”

Categories
GeekWire

Experiment blazes a trail for growing stem cells in space

Space: The final frontier … for stem cells? Seattle’s Allen Institute for Cell Science says cells from its collection are going into space for the first time on a private mission to the International Space Station.

The Allen Cell Collection’s assortment of human induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPSCs, will be the focus for one of more than 20 experiments being sent into orbit on a flight organized by Texas-based Axiom Space.

Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will command the Ax-2 mission — Axiom’s second trip to the space station — and her crewmates will include Tennessee business executive John Shoffner as well as Saudi astronauts Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will loft the crew into orbit in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for what’s expected to be a weeklong stay on the station. Liftoff is set for May 21 at 5:37 p.m. ET (2:37 p.m. PT) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The fare for each rider on last year’s Ax-1 mission was around $55 million, and although the ticket price for Ax-2 hasn’t been announced, it’s probably in a similar range.

The stem-cell study is part of a series of NASA-funded experiments led by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. This experiment is expected to break new ground when it comes to growing IPSCs in space and modifying the cells’ DNA for therapeutic purposes.

Categories
Universe Today

Astronomers want your help to identify risky asteroids

You, too, can be an asteroid hunter — thanks to a citizen-science project launched by the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. And you might even get a scientific citation.

The project is enlisting human spotters to verify potential detections of space rocks moving through the field of view of the Catalina Sky Survey’s telescopes. The NASA-funded survey is charged with keeping track of more than a million asteroids, with a principal goal of identifying near-Earth objects that could pose a risk to our planet.

More than 14,400 near-Earth objects, or NEOs, have been discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey during the past 30 years, including 1,200 that were identified just in the past year. That adds up to nearly half of the known NEO population.

The problem is, astronomers know there are still lots of unknown asteroids out there — too many for them to spot without an assist from amateurs. “We take so many images of the sky each night that we cannot possibly look through all of our potential real asteroids,” Carson Fuls, a science engineering specialist for the Catalina Sky Survey, said in a NASA news release.

That’s where the Daily Minor Planet can make a difference.

Categories
GeekWire

Stratolaunch hits milestone in its hypersonic quest

California-based Stratolaunch, the venture created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, released a separation test vehicle for the first time this weekend during an experimental flight of the world’s largest airplane.

The event marked a significant milestone in Stratolaunch’s quest to create an air-launch system for rocket-powered hypersonic vehicles.

The May 13 outing was the 11th flight test for Stratolaunch’s flying launch pad — a twin-fuselage, six-engine airplane with a record-setting 385-foot wingspan. The plane is nicknamed Roc in honor of a giant bird in Middle East mythology.

Roc carried the Talon-A separation test vehicle, known as TA-0, during three previous test flights. But this was the first time TA-0 was released from Roc’s center-wing pylon to fly free. The release took place during a four-hour, eight-minute flight that involved operations in Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Western Range, off California’s central coast.