Lifeboat Foundation

And Europe currently has no operational rocket at its disposal.

Europe’s workhorse Ariane 5 rocket aced its final launch, as its maker Arianespace now looks ahead to the debut of its long-delayed Ariane 6. The Ariane 5 rocket took off from the European Spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, at 6 p.m. ET, July 5. Arianespace and The European Space Agency (ESA) had originally intended for the final launch of Ariane 5 to take place after the debut of Ariane 6.

Continue reading “Ariane 5 aces final launch, paving the way for debut of Ariane 6” »

In the next two decades, human beings will return to the moon, set foot on Mars, and launch telescopes capable of detecting extraterrestrial life. NASA’s outgoing head scientist Thomas Zurbuchen oversaw much of the planning for these projects, and space agencies around the world are pursuing similar goals collaboratively. Brian Greene is joined by Zurbuchen, Japan’s Masaki Fujimoto, Europe’s Kirsten MacDonnell and Australia’s Aude Vignelles, as they reveal their plans for what promises to be a New Golden Age of Space Exploration.

This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Continue reading “The Golden Age of Space Exploration” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKzqgmz_XKs

Four people were locked in a simulated mission to Mars.

We might have accidently killed life on Mars during the Viking experiments nearly 50 years ago.

Posted on BigThink, direct link at https://www.searchforlifeintheuniverse.com/post/we-might-hav…-years-ago

Science fiction often paints a terrifying picture of the future—think aliens decimating humanity, à la The War of the Worlds. But sometimes the future becoming the present can be pretty amazing—who doesn’t love successful space launches majestically catapulting humans skyward?

Or take Earth’s oceans, which are currently in the middle of a technological revolution that, outside of some very nerdy circles, has gone largely unnoticed.

“We’re at the cusp of a proliferation of lots of autonomous vehicles in the ocean,” said Alex De Robertis, a biologist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “Things that were science fiction not so long ago are kind of routine now.” That includes saildrones, which look like oversized orange surfboards, each with a hard, carbon-fiber sail (called a wing) and a stash of scientific equipment.

For centuries, scientists have been involved in studies and research to detect signals of extraterrestrial life or aliens on other planets, resulting in the detection of strange noises and sightings, but have you ever wondered about the possibility of the situation being reversed?

Researchers believe that for extraterrestrials to detect radio signal leaks from Earth, they would need to be technologically more advanced than humans, according to a new study reported by The Independent.

The experts predicted what extraterrestrial life would see on Earth from as close as six light years away by simulating the radio signal leakage from cell towers.

Phosphorus detected far from the Milky Way’s center seems to extend the zone where life could exist in the galaxy by thousands of light-years.

Inside Earth’s most alien vision.

A new effort to detect extraterrestrial life will listen for radio pulses coming from the galactic nucleus. Pulsars, which are stars that naturally emit narrow-frequency pulses, are also intentionally used by humans in technology like radar.

These pulses are a useful means of communication over great distances and a desirable target to listen for when looking for extraterrestrial civilisations because they stand out against the ambient radio noise of space.

A recent study that was released on May 30 in The Astronomical Journal by researchers described their approach to looking for alien life.