Science
Russian astronaut on the ISS claims to see UFOs in new footage – Global News
Ivan Vagner, a Russian cosmonaut currently orbiting the Earth aboard the International Space Station (ISS), claims to have captured footage of potential UFOs while recording video of the aurora borealis.
“Space guests, or how I filmed the new time-lapse,” Vagner wrote in a tweet featuring the video on Wednesday morning.
The one-minute video shows the aurora borealis passing near Antarctica and Australia, Vagner says.
“However, in the video, you will see something else, not only the aurora,” he wrote.
The footage shows the curved edge of the Earth at night, with the green swirl of the aurora moving across its surface and several star pinpoints visible in the background.
“At 9-12 seconds, 5 objects appear flying alongside with the same distance,” Vagner wrote in a followup tweet. “What do you think those are? Meteors, satellites or … ?”
He added that the video was shot in a time-lapse, so the brief flash of the “objects” actually lasted for about 52 seconds in real time.
Vagner did not claim to see the phenomenon as it happened, and no one else aboard the ISS has acknowledged it. He also did not indicate exactly when the footage was captured.
Whatever the phenomenon was, it does appear as a string of lights arranged in a clear, angled line in the video.
Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, shared the video on its own Twitter account on Wednesday.
“An interesting and at the same time mysterious video made by cosmonaut of Roscosmos Ivan Wagner … from the International Space Station,” the agency tweeted, along with a thoughtful emoji.
Vagner says he flagged the video to Roscosmos management, and that it’s currently being examined by experts at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Roscosmos spokesperson Vladimir Ustimenko has confirmed that the video is under review, according to the Russian news agency TASS.
“It is too early to make conclusions until our Roscosmos researchers and scientists at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences tell us what they think,” Ustimenko said. “It was decided to hand over those materials to experts, who will tell us what that was in their opinion.”
Vagner, 35, is a first-time crew member aboard the ISS, where he and fellow Russian Anatoli Ivanishin are working with Chris Cassidy, the American commander of the expedition.
NASA did not mention Vagner’s video in a blog update about the mission on Wednesday. The blog says Vagner recently worked on the station’s orbital plumbing “before exploring ways to improve Earth photography techniques.”
Cassidy has not tweeted anything about Vagner’s video, and Ivanishin is not on Twitter.
Aliens and UFO sightings have long been derided as taboo topics for people in tinfoil hats. However, the subject has slowly crept into the mainstream in recent years, particularly after the New York Times revealed that the U.S. government funded research into the topic for several years and that the research was still going on.
One former contractor told the Times that he’d briefed Pentagon officials on the retrieval of “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
The Pentagon has since acknowledged that it has recorded encounters with “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAP).
The U.S. Department of Defence officially released three videos last April that show some of the UAPs in action. The videos were originally leaked by Tom DeLonge, the former Blink-182 frontman who co-founded an alien research organization.
The phenomena remain unexplained, despite rampant speculation about visitors from other planets. U.S. officials have said they’re being more forthcoming about UAPs because they could be a threat. They also want military members to report potential encounters, rather than ignoring them because of a stigma around the topic.
The Pentagon announced on Aug. 14 that it had launched a UAP task force to “improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs.”
The task force’s goal is to “detect, analyze and catalogue UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”
There remains no definitive proof that aliens have visited Earth, and all unidentified foreign objects — or unidentified aerial phenomena — remain unexplained, as their names say.
A tongue-in-cheek effort to “Storm Area 51” and “free” captive aliens also failed last year, despite plenty of enthusiasm for the idea.
© 2020 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
Science
Federal government announces creation of National Space Council – CBC News
Canada’s space sector received a boost from the federal government in its budget, both in terms of money and vision.
The 2024 budget included a proposal for $8.6 million in 2024-25 to the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) for the Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP), which invests in technologies for humanity’s return to the moon and beyond.
In addition to the funding, the federal government also announced the creation of a National Space Council, which will be “a new whole-of-government approach to space exploration, technology development, and research.”
For Space Canada, an organization comprised of roughly 80 space sector companies including some of Canada’s largest, such as Magellan Aerospace, Maritime Launch and MDA, it was a welcome announcement.
“We’ve been advocating for it since the inception of our organization, and we were really very happy, and we applaud the federal government’s commitment announced in the budget,” said Brian Gallant, CEO of Space Canada.
Gallant said that investment in space is an investment in Canada.
“Two-thirds of space sector jobs are STEM jobs. These are good paying solid jobs for Canadians. And on top of that, we have approximately $2.8 billion that is injected into the Canadian economy because of the space sector,” he said.
The U.S. formed its National Space Council in 1989, but it was disbanded in 1992 and reestablished in 2017.
In the 2023 budget, the government announced proposed spending of $1.2 billion over 13 years, that was to begin in 2024-25, to the CSA’s contribution of a lunar utility vehicle that would assist astronauts on the moon. The as–yet–developed vehicle could help astronauts move cargo from landing sites to habitats, perform science investigations or support them during spacewalks on the surface of the moon.
It also proposed to invest $150 million over five years for the LEAP program.
MDA, the company behind Canadarm, was also pleased with the announcement.
“Canada has an enviable global competitive advantage in space and the creation of a National Space Council is critical to Canada maintaining that leadership position,” CEO Mike Greenley said in an email to CBC News.
“Space is now a rapidly growing, highly strategic and competitive domain, and there is a real and urgent need to recognize its importance to the lives of Canadians and to our economy and national security.”
The next project for MDA is Canadarm3, which will be part of Lunar Gateway, a international space station that will orbit the moon. It will serve as a sort of jumping-off point for astronauts heading to the moon and eventually beyond.
“The Lunar Gateway is a great opportunity for Canada and for MDA Space to not only provide the next generation of Canadarm robotics but to clearly plant our flag as a core national and industry participant in the Artemis era,” Greenley said.
Lunar Gateway is set to begin construction no earlier than 2025, according to NASA.
Science
Astronomers discover Milky Way's heaviest known black hole – Xinhua
JERUSALEM, April 16 (Xinhua) — Astronomers have found BH3 is by far the heaviest known stellar black hole in the Milky Way galaxy, 33 times the mass of the Sun.
An international research team found the black hole when looking into the latest data group recorded in the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, Israel’s Tel Aviv University (TAU) said in a statement on Tuesday.
The black hole is located 1,500 light-years away from Earth, said TAU, whose researchers participated in the study of the newly discovered binary system.
In binary systems, a visible star can be found orbiting a massive but unseen companion, indicating the latter is a black hole.
Binaries have revealed around 50 suspected or confirmed stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way, but scientists think there may be as many as 100 million in our galaxy alone, according to NASA.
Stellar-mass black holes are formed when a star runs out of its nuclear combustion fuel and collapses.
The massive black hole BH3 was detailed in the open-access journal Astronomy & Astrophysics for further study.
Science
'Almost hit my son' – Space junk crashes through Florida home – BBC.com
“It almost hit my son” – three years ago the International Space Station threw out refuse into space, expecting it to undergo “a natural re-entry”.
But a heavy piece of debris crashed through a home in Naples, Florida, narrowly missing the householder’s son.
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