A U.S. government report found that there was no evidence to conclude that the more than 140 unidentified flying object sightings in recent years involved extraterrestrial beings. The government was unable to determine whether the flying mysteries were atmospheric events distorting readings from sensors, confusions in judging objects in motion, spacecraft from other potential hostile …
Sure UFOs Exist. But There’s No Reason To Conclude That Aliens Are Flying Them
It seems to happen with some regularity. Claims that Unidentified Flying Objects are visiting us have captured the public imagination once more and a big reveal is expected soon. That will come, oddly, from a government report required to be released by the end of June that will supposedly detail the many sightings made by …
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Breakthrough Listen Searches The Crowded Center of the Milky Way for Possible Signals From Intelligent Beings
Searching for technologically advanced civilizations inhabiting distant exoplanets is the astrobiological equivalent of swinging for the fences. While much of the search of extraterrestrial life is now focused on microbes and chemical biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres that would likely be byproducts of life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) takes a very different approach. …
Novel Sights and Sounds on Mars
The helicopter Ingenuity has now flown three times on Mars and has proven itself to be a dependable (for now) and potentially ground-breaking addition to Mars science. Ingenuity, brought to Mars as part of the Perseverance rover landing, took off early Sunday morning on its third and most ambitious Martian mission yet. The 4-pound …
The Hows and Whys of Mars Sample Return
One of the fondest dreams and top priorities of space science for years has been to bring a piece of Mars back to Earth to study in the kind of depth possible only in a cutting-edge laboratory. While the instruments on Mars rovers can tell us a lot, returning a sample to study here on …
The Space Telescope That Could Find a Second Earth
What will it take to capture images and spectra of a distant world capable of harboring life? By Marc Kaufman Air & Space Magazine | Subscribe April 2021 Share to Facebook For all the excitement surrounding the search for distant exoplanets in recent years, the 4,000-plus planets confirmed so far have been unseen actors …
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What Happened to All That Water on Ancient Mars? A New Theory With a Surprising Answer
Once it became clear in the past decade that the surface of ancient Mars, the inevitable question arose regarding what happened to it all since the planet is today so very dry. And the widely-accepted answer has been that the water escaped into space, especially after the once thicker atmosphere of Mars was stripped away. …
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars — The Third Martian Arrival in a Week
Mars is receiving visitors these days. Quite a few of them. The most prominent visitor is NASA's Perseverance rover, which made a difficult but smooth precision landing at 3.55 ET this afternoon. The rover now sits in Jezero Crater, in an area that clearly once had lots of water flowing. The site was selected, in …
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New Insights Into How Earth Got Its Nitrogen
Scientists have long held that many of the important compounds and elements that make life possible on Earth arrived here after the planet was formed and was orbiting the sun. These molecules came via meteorites and comets, it was thought, from the colder regions beyond Jupiter. But in a challenge to that long-accepted view, a …
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More Weird and Wild Planets
The more we learn about the billions upon billions of planets that orbit beyond our solar system, the more we are surprised by the wild menagerie of objects out there. From the start, many of these untolled planets have been startling, paradigm-breaking, mysterious, hellish, potentially habitable and just plain weird. Despite the confirmed detection of …
Many Worlds 