Lifeboat Foundation

Inside a nondescript building at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA engineers are assembling the most powerful space telescope ever created. Once completed, the James Webb Space Telescope will be the largest space observatory in the known universe, with 100 times the seeing power of its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

In October 2018, the Webb will be launched into deep space with an ambitious mission. “Sometimes as analytical astronomers we shy away from saying, ‘We’re searching for life,’” says the deputy project scientist Dr. Amber Straughn. “But, that’s what we’re doing.” Atlantic senior editor Ross Andersen speaks with the NASA team seeking to answer some of our most fundamental questions: Where did we come from? Are there other life-sustaining planets out there? Are we alone in the universe?

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What matters is why it was developed and how it is used.

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The James Webb Space Telescope will finally crack the mystery of Tabby’s Star. We think.

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It’s looking less likely that a swarm of comets or an “alien megastructure” can explain a faraway star’s strange dimming.

The star (nicknamed “Tabby’s Star,” after its discoverer, Tabetha Boyajian) made major headlines last October when Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, suggested that it could be surrounded by some type of alien megastructure. A more likely idea — one that’s far less exciting — is that the star is orbited by a swarm of comets. But scientists can’t be sure either way.

Now, Bradley Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, has probed the star’s behavior over the past century by looking at old photographic plates. Not only does the star’s random dipping date back more than a century, but it also has been gradually dimming over that period — a second constraint that makes it even harder to explain. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life].

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VIDEO: Was the Ancient Aliens guy right?

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It seems like every day, a video or image emerges that appears to show a UFO near the International Space Station. And it generally — OK, always — turns out not to be a UFO. It’s normally space debris, light reflections from the station windows, an antenna attached to the station, etc.

But wouldn’t it be interesting if someone actually launched a satellite into Earth orbit (illustrated above), with the specific mission of trying to detect and prove unknown objects are actually out there?

Continue reading “Warning Space Aliens: Earth’s UFO- Hunting Satellite Is Coming For You” »

Conspiracy theory fans never tire of spotting rocks which look like people, crabs or bears on Mars — but NASA’s Spirit Rover might have just spotted something really important.

The cauliflower-like minerals found inside a Martian crater may have been created by aliens, researchers from Arizona State University have said.

Continue reading “Weird Cauliflower Shapes On Mars ‘Could Have Been Made By Aliens’, Astronomers Claim” »

Over the last 12,000 years or so, human civilization has noticeably reshaped the Earth’s surface. But changes on our own planet will likely pale in comparison when humans settle on other celestial bodies. While many of the changes on Earth over the centuries have been related to food production, by way of agriculture, changes on other worlds will result, not only from the need for on-site production of food, but also for all other consumables, including air.

As vital as synthetic biology will be to the early piloted missions to Mars and voyages of exploration, it will become indispensable to establish a long-term human presence off-Earth, namely colonization. That’s because we’ve evolved over billions of years to thrive specifically in the environments provides by our home planet.

Our physiology is well-suited to Earth’s gravity and its oxygen-rich atmosphere. We also depend on Earth’s magnetic field to shield us from intense space radiation in the form of charged particles. In comparison, Mars currently has no magnetic field to trap particle radiation and an atmosphere that is so thin that any shielding against other types of space radiation is negligible compared with the protection that Earth’s atmosphere affords. At the Martian surface, atmospheric pressure never gets above 7 millibars. That’s like Earth at an altitude of about 27,000 m (89,000 ft), which is almost the edge of space. And it’s not like the moon is a better option for us since it has no atmosphere at all.

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With a growing number of Earth-like exoplanets discovered in recent years, it is becoming increasingly frustrating that we can’t visit them. After all, our knowledge of the planets in our own solar system would be pretty limited if it weren’t for the space probes we’d sent to explore them.

The problem is that even the nearest stars are a very long way away, and enormous engineering efforts will be required to reach them on timescales that are relevant to us. But with research in areas such as nuclear fusion and nanotechnology advancing rapidly, we may not be as far away from constructing small, fast interstellar space probes as we think.

There’s a lot at stake. If we ever found evidence suggesting that life might exist on a planet orbiting a nearby star, we would most likely need to go there to get definitive proof and learn more about its underlying biochemistry and evolutionary history. This would require transporting sophisticated scientific instruments across interstellar space.

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