NASA’s Parker Probe spacecraft completed a maneuver yesterday called a perihelion about 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) above the surface of the sun reaching the same distance it reached on Nov. 5, 2018, during its first perihelion on its ultimate mission to plunge into our star’s sizzling atmosphere and unlock the mysteries at the center of our solar system. Traveling closer and deeper into the sun’s atmosphere than any mission before it, the probe will ultimately touch within four inches of the solar surface over the course of its seven-year mission.
“That is a terrible, terrible thing, to create an event that sends debris in an apogee that goes above the International Space Station,” said NASA director Jim Bridenstine. “And that kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight that we need to see happen.”
Could there be fossils on the surface of Europa, Jupiter’s storied moon that Arthur C. Clarke harshly warned Sapiens not to attempt a landing on? NASA is building an antenna that will take that long journey aboard its Europa Clipper, a spacecraft that will conduct detailed reconnaissance to see whether the icy orb could harbor conditions suitable for life. Scientists believe there’s a massive salty ocean beneath Europa’s icy surface that reaches 100 kilometers below the base of the ice –a depth 10 times greater than the Marianas Trench.
In recent months several leading astrophysicists from NASA to Harvard have suggested aliens are not science fiction: that advanced and ancient technological civilizations may exist but be beyond our comprehension or ability to detect. Silvano P. Colombano at NASA’s Ames Research Center proposes that we may have missed signals when it comes to looking for UFOs.
“The discovery of plumes is one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona about near-Earth asteroid Bennu. “And the rugged terrain went against all of our predictions. Bennu is already surprising us, and our exciting journey there is just getting started.”
A fireball exploded above the Bering Sea at about noon local time on December 18, 2018 from an asteroid with 10 times the energy of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb at a speed of 32 km/s (20 miles per second). The event went unobserved until military satellites spotted light the explosion released. The fireball was also spotted by Peter Brown at Canada’s University of Western Ontario, who announced his finding on Twitter. Brown looked at data taken from around 16 different infrared stations that were originally set up to listen for covert nuclear tests.
