Europe just invested over $380 million in an alien-hunting space mission to Jupi

[astr0144]

Europe just invested over $380 million in an alien-hunting space mission to Jupiter.




In the ultimate quest for life beyond Earth, some of Jupiter's largest moons hold great potential, and Europe plans to explore that potential in the coming years. What's more, their mission just hit a major milestone.
On July 17, the European Space Agency — Europe's version of NASA — announced that they were issuing a contract to award the U.S.-equivalent of $384 million to the European-based company Airbus Defense and Space.

Jupiter has become one of the most likely neighborhoods in our solar system with the right ingredients for extraterrestrial life. That's because scientists have recently come to suspect that three of Jupiter's moons —Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—could harbor vast oceans underneath their icy, outer surfaces.

But to know if there are actual microbial, or even shrimp-sized, aliens swimming on these moons will require a mission unlike any yet attempted.

Under this latest contract, which ESA and Airbus are scheduled to sign at the end of the summer, Airbus will be responsible for the development, testing, launch campaign, and in-space commissioning of ESA's "JUpiter ICy moons Explorer," or JUICE, mission.

What we know about JUICE so far




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.Ganymede moon
(NASA/JPL/DLR) False-color image of Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede.

The JUICE mission is scheduled to launch in 2022 and reach Jupiter's system by 2030. At the point, the spacecraft will begin flying over all three of the giant planet's water moons.
The spacecraft will give an especially close look at Ganymede — the largest moon of Jupiter and, in fact, the largest moon in the entire solar system.

"The mission will culminate in a dedicated, eight-month tour around Ganymede, the first time any icy moon has been orbited by a spacecraft," ESA wrote in a statement announcing the new contract with Airbus.

Last March, a team of researchers using the powerful Hubble Space Telescope found strong evidence to suggest that Ganymede not only has water underneath its surface, but it could harbor a single, global ocean that is 60 miles thick and contains more water than all of Earth's oceans combined!

To seek out signs of life on Ganymede, as well as Callisto and Europa, ESA plans to dress up the JUICE spacecraft with a total of "10 state-of-the-art instruments," including:

Cameras that can snap pictures of the surface in search for any geysers that could be spewing organic-rich water off the planet into space.
Spectrometers, which can help scientists determine the type of material, such as nitrogen or carbon, that comprises the surface.
Ice-penetrating radar, to assess how deep the oceans on these moons really are.
Sensors that can measure the level of radiation these moons absorb as they orbit around Jupiter, which has a belt of intense radiation that wraps around its equator and extends deep into space. Radiation could be an alternative heat source — since the sun is so far away — for the cold waters on these moons.
NASA's involvement and future missions




.europa
(NASA/JPL-Caltech) This artist's rendering shows a concept for NASA's "Clipper" mission to Europa in which a spacecraft would make multiple close flybys of the icy Jovian moon, thought to contain a global subsurface ocean.

NASA will be helping out with the mission by designing one of the instruments on board. But NASA isn't going to let ESA steal the show.
NASA is also working on their own mission to Jupiter's watery moons, but it will focus on Europa more than either Ganymede or Callisto.

Unlike JUICE, which is planned to fly over Europa twice, NASA's "Europa Clipper" mission hopes to flyby the moon a total of 45 times over the course of three years.

NASA has yet to give the Clipper mission the green light, but the mission team hopes to get the thumbs up later this year, according to writer Stephen Clark for Spaceflight Now.

If completed, the Clipper mission is scheduled to launch the same year as ESA's JUICE mission: 2022.

Between these two spacecrafts, we'll learn more about these watery moons than we ever knew before. What's more, the information these two mission collect about these moons' surface features and oceanic characteristics (like temperature and salinity) could pave the way for future missions that would land a probe on the surface.

In other words, the hunt for alien life in the 21st century is just beginning.


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-just-invested-over-380-154736702.html

[ArMaP]

Thanks for the heads-up.

Here's the page for that mission, with more information.

[zorgon]

We need to look for Alien ship to ship communication in our solar system

[astr0144]

Nice find ArMap.

This seems certainly a very exciting venture.

I only hope that I /we are still here to see the results.

With so much being suggested about possible life on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn..that will be maybe the next huge thing in space exploration in our lifetimes.

Or will we  get conclusive evidence from elsewhere that Life exists elsewhere before that adventure happens I wonder.

It would also be good if they were able to send probes to Saturns moons to arrive around the same time.

Thanks for the heads-up.

Here's the page for that mission, with more information.

Well "Z" when Matrix arrived I was hoping that he was going to show us the way with a ET craft..

or that Bob Lazar's crafts is proven to us as the real deal..or Some of Johns suggestions could be proven to us beyond doubt.. or at least could do so before 2030..  

We need to look for Alien ship to ship communication in our solar system

[astr0144]

The $100 Million Alien Listening Project May Be a Huge Waste of Time.

This is also another expensive project to try to find ET...Ref to it may have been posted elsewhere.

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The launch of the $100 million Breakthrough Initiative project to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been supported by many leading scientists including Stephen Hawking and astronomer royal Martin Rees. But there is no evidence—and few convincing theories—to suggest that intelligent, communicative aliens actually exist. So are listening projects really the best way to search for extraterrestrial life?

The possibility of life outside our own planet has been the subject of debate for centuries, with the essence of the problem crystallized by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. His now famous "Fermi paradox" runs simply: If intelligent life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, then why do we see no evidence for it?

Colonizing the galaxy—hard but possible

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We now know that planets around other stars are very common. Since the first discovery of a planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi in 1995, around 2,000 exoplanets have now been found. Most of these are close by—within a few hundred light years.

Statistical analysis of the results from the Kepler spacecraft suggest that as many as one-fifth of all sun-like stars have Earth-like planets in their habitable zones, where conditions are such that liquid water could exist.

So if planets are so plentiful, then what about life? The Drake equation, formulated by Frank Drake in 1961, attempts to answer this question by suggesting there could be many civilizations in the Milky Way that we should be able to communicate with.

However, while many of the terms in the equation are now known fairly well, others are highly uncertain. But let's assume for a moment that such civilizations do exist. If they do, then might we notice them? A straightforward way for an alien civilization to make itself known is simply to colonize the galaxy. Let's consider how long this might take, assuming technology that is not too far away.

It would be possible now to build probes that could be sent out into space to search for other planets, land on them and build replicas of the probe that could in turn be sent out to other planets, and so on.

At the sort of speeds we can now imagine, such as that achieved by the New Horizons spacecraft (60,000 km/h), it would take a mere 18,000 years to travel a distance of one light-year. Let's assume such a probe were sent to a planet 10 light years away, arriving after 180,000 years. It then builds 10 copies of itself, and sends them off to other planets, each a further 10 light years away. In this way it would take only 5,000 probe generations to fill the entire galaxy—an accomplishment that would be achieved in less than a billion years.

But it's not hard to imagine that an advanced civilization might produce space probes that could travel significantly faster than ours currently do, so colonizing the galaxy in just a few hundred million years is not unlikely.

But here's the thing: The Milky Way has existed for around 10 billion years, and we know that some planets exist around stars that are almost this old. So if intelligent life really is common, the likelihood is that it evolved elsewhere to our stage of intelligence several billion years ago, giving it plenty of time to colonize the galaxy. So where is everybody?

Are we all alone...

Entire books have been written exploring the various solutions to the Fermi paradox, but they fall into the following general categories.

Rare Earth: It may be that there are no civilizations in the galaxy any more advanced than we are. Perhaps the combination of astronomical, geological, chemical and biological factors needed to allow the emergence of complex, multicellular life is just so unlikely that it's only happened once.

Doomsday: Perhaps life and civilizations emerge often, but it is the nature of "intelligent" life to destroy itself within a few hundred years. The human race certainly has no shortage of ways of accomplishing this, whether it's via physical, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction, or as a result of climate change, or even a nanotechnology catastrophe. If life doesn't persist very long on any planet, we shouldn't expect to see much evidence of it around the galaxy.

Extinction: Even if we don't wipe ourselves out, perhaps the universe conspires to eliminate civilizations on a regular basis? It's clear on Earth that there have been at least five mass extinctions. Some of these may have been triggered by the impact of massive asteroids, but other possible extinction-causing events might include nearby supernovae or gamma-ray bursts.

...Or are the aliens just hiding?

There is another class of possible solutions to the Fermi paradox that boil down to the fact that alien civilizations do exist, but we simply see no evidence of them.

Distance scales: Perhaps civilizations are spread too thinly throughout the galaxy to effectively communicate with each other? Civilizations may be separated in space, and also in time, so two civilizations just don't overlap during the time that they're each active.

Technical problems: Maybe we're not looking in the right place, or in the right way? Or maybe we just haven't been looking for long enough? Perhaps we've not recognized a signal that's out there, because the alien civilization is using technology that we simply cannot comprehend.

Isolationist: Perhaps the aliens are out there, but they're choosing to hide themselves from us? Perhaps everyone is listening, but nobody is transmitting? It may be that other civilizations know we're here, but the Earth is purposely isolated, as if we're some kind of exhibit in a zoo.

Finally, there are of course the more extreme possibilities such as that the galaxy that we observe to be empty of life is a simulation, constructed by aliens. Or perhaps the aliens are already here among us. Such speculation is great for science fiction, but without evidence, it's not worth pursuing further.

My own hunch is that life is indeed common in the galaxy, but intelligent life is rare—either because it doesn't evolve very often, or it doesn't last very long once it does. For that reason I think that SETI programs are probably doomed to fail—although I would love to be proved wrong.

Instead, I think the best chance of finding life elsewhere in the galaxy is through spectroscopy of the atmospheres of transiting terrestrial planets. That will be carried out by missions such as the European Space Agency's PLATO spacecraft, due for launch in 2024. Such life may just be a green slime that we can scrape off a rock with our finger, but its detection would truly transform our view of the universe, and ourselves.


http://www.newsweek.com/100-million-alien-listening-project-may-be-huge-waste-time-356207

===================
Stephen Hawking Teams Up With Russian Billionaire for $100 Million Alien Search

Stephen Hawking is teaming up with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, to head up a $100 million project to search for extraterrestrial life in the biggest alien hunt ever staged.

The Cambridge physicist was at the Royal Society in London on Monday to launch the Breakthrough Initiatives, a group of research projects which will scan the 100 galaxies closest to the Milky Way over the next 10 years.The project is being funded solely by Milner, an entrepreneur whose previous investments include Facebook, Twitter and Chinese online retailer Alibaba, and whose net worth is estimated to be $3.4 billion by Forbes.

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Two of the world's most powerful telescopes have been secured for the project, which commences in January 2016. The Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and the Parkes Observatory in Australia will scour the skies for radio emissions from nearby galaxies, which could indicate the presence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Simultaneously, California's Lick Observatory will undertake the world's broadest search for optical laser transmissions coming from other planets.

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According to the project backers, the research will cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programs, surveying one million of the stars closest to Earth for signs of life. All the data generated from the project will be publicly available and the researchers will use open-source software, meaning that anyone with a telescope could potentially join in the search.

Lord Martin Rees, the British Astronomer Royal since 1995 and a former president of the Royal Society, is working alongside Hawking and a number of other world-leading astronomy authorities on the project. He told Newsweek that, while there are no guarantees that the project will be successful, even in failure it would still have huge implications for the Earth's place in the cosmos.

"It's of course a gamble, but it will stand a far better chance than any previous searches," says Lord Rees. "And if we are indeed alone, we can be less cosmically modest. Our Earth could be the most important place in the cosmos from which life could spread through the galaxy."

Malcolm Fairbairn, a researcher in particle physics and cosmology at King's College London, thinks the project is well worth Milner's huge investment."If the human race did discover intelligent life out there, it would change everything about how life on Earth would go ahead. It would change our own perspective on ourselves and on each other and it would change the way that we view ourselves in the universe," says Fairbairn.

The project is a landmark in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) movement. Much of the research conducted into alien life is done by the SETI Institute, which is based in California and runs on private donations and support. The Breakthrough projects will run alongside SETI@home, a crowdsourced research program where volunteers donate computer hours to search for radio signals from space.

NASA's chief scientist recently predicted that humanity would find signs of alien life within the next 10 years and would have definitive evidence in the next 20-30 years

http://www.newsweek.com/stephen-hawking-teams-russian-billionaire-100-million-alien-search-355877

[rdunk]

NASA's chief scientist recently predicted that humanity would find signs of alien life within the next 10 years and would have definitive evidence in the next 20-30 years

I am personally' convinced that NASA/JPL is already well aware of the fact that alien/extraterrestrial life exists, simply because they have many many photos exhibiting such "definitive evidence" already. NASA/et-al has worn themselves out in messing with their photos, in trying to keep the "evidence" in the closet. But even so, there is still way too much in their photos that makes such fact/evidence of alien "humanoid life" undeniable. The list of discovery anomalies is just too long and too varied to discount them completely, and intelligent design/existence is confirmed in them!!