NASA Policy to Suspend Contact with Russia 'Unprecedented'

This image from a NASA space shuttle mission shows the International Space Station in orbit. 

The space station is the size of a football field and home to six astronauts. 

Image taken: Feb. 10, 2010.

Credit: NASA

NASA's order to employees to suspend most contact with Russian government representatives is the latest U.S-Russia political development in the ongoing crisis over Ukraine, but the new policy may not have many on-the-ground effects for people working at the American space agency, according to one space historian.

A NASA statement released Wednesday (April 2) directed U.S. space agency officials to suspend contact with Russian government representatives, but ongoing operations on the International Space Station are exempt from the new policy.

The statement was released hours after a leaked NASA memo stating the same policy. Other U.S. government agencies are also curtailing contact with Russian government officials, NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries told reporters.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, and NASA do engage in some other scientific collaboration, but most partnerships between the two organizations take place within the space station program.

Previously, all contact with the Russian space agency was directed through the European Space Agency (ESA) and that will be the likely 'fallback' scenario in this case.

NASA Deep Impact: Contact With Comet-Hunting Spacecraft Lost

An artist's conception show's a close-up look at NASA's comet-hunting Deep Impact spacecraft.

Credit: Nasa

NASA's veteran Deep Impact probe may have chased its last comet.

The spacecraft's handlers lost contact with Deep Impact — which slammed an impactor into Comet Tempel 1 in 2005, made a close flyby of Comet Hartley 2 in 2010 and recently observed ISON, a "comet of the century" candidate — sometime between Aug. 11 and Aug. 14, mission team members announced last Tuesday (Sept. 3).

"The last communication was on August 8. After considerable effort, the team on August 30 determined the cause of the problem," principal investigator Mike A'Hearn of the University of Maryland wrote in a brief mission update Tuesday.

"The team is now trying to determine how best to try to recover communication."



The issue stems from a software glitch that reset Deep Impact's computer, A'Hearn told reporters at prestigious scientific journal Nature.

Things are serious, he added: Deep Impact is apparently spinning out of control after recent attempts to put the probe into hibernation mode were unsuccessful.

It's unclear how much time the mission team has to bring Deep Impact back in line. Depending on how the probe's solar panels are oriented, Deep Impact's batteries could run out of juice in a matter of days or keep going for several months.

"How long we have depends on the state the spacecraft is in, and we don't yet know that," A'Hearn told reporters. "Could be that it is too late already — could be we have another month or more."

Deep Impact launched in January 2005 on a mission to rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1. In July of that year, the spacecraft sucessfully smashed an impactor into Tempel 1, allowing scientists to study the icy object's composition.

SETI: Astronomers Resume Search for Intelligent Alien Life

Allen Telescope Array

CREDIT: SETI.org

Astronomers have rebooted their search for intelligent life on alien planets, and they've got thousands of targets to scan.

After hibernating for more than seven months, a set of radio telescopes run by the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute has once again begun listening for signals from the many alien planet candidates discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope, researchers announced Monday (Dec. 5).

"This morning, at 6:18, we began re-observing the Kepler worlds," Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, said Monday during the Kepler Science Conference here at NASA's Ames Research Center. "We're just extremely excited to be back on the air today."

SETI's Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is a set of 42 radio dishes located about 300 miles (500 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco. It began scanning the heavens for "technosignatures" — electromagnetic signals that could betray the presence of an intelligent alien civilization — in 2007.

SETI researchers recently started using Kepler's discoveries to guide the ATA's activities. Kepler launched in March 2009 on a mission to hunt for Earth-size planets in their parent stars' habitable zone, that just-right range of distances where liquid water — and perhaps life as we know it — could exist.

In January of this year, Tarter said, the SETI team started training the Allen array on the 54 planet candidates Kepler had detected in the habitable zone to date.

The work didn't last long, however. SETI had to shut the ATA down in April after budget problems forced the Institute's former partner, the University of California, Berkeley, to withdraw from the project.

SETI launched a crowdfunding site, www.setistars.org, in an attempt to get the array back up and running. And the public came through, donating enough money to take the ATA out of mothballs. As of Monday, citizens had chipped in more than $230,000.

Some funding help has also come from the United States Air Force, which is interested in using the array to track satellites and space debris, SETI officials said.

Many new worlds to scan
On Monday, the Kepler team announced the discovery of 1,094 new exoplanet candidates, bringing to 2,326 the total number of potential alien worlds the instrument has detected in its first 16 months of operation.

Researchers have confirmed only about 30 of these candidate planets to date, but Kepler scientists have estimated that at least 80 percent of them will end up being the real deal.

The ATA will take special interest in Kepler's candidates in the habitable zone, Tarter said. But SETI researchers hope to scan every last one of the potential planets to minimize the chances that we're blinded by our assumptions about where life "should" be.

"What we think we know actually might be a barrier to finding what is actually out there," Tarter said. "We intend to systematically explore all of these candidates."

The search of the Kepler candidates will involve scanning 9 billion different channels in a broad window of microwave frequencies. It should take two to three years, at $1.2 million per year, to search for signals from every potential alien world from the study, Tarter said.

It's exciting to focus the ATA on likely alien solar systems rather than just point the dishes toward stars and hope for the best, she added.

"We now know where to look for planets," Tarter said. "We're going to take the public's quest for technosignatures to the next level."

Pioneer & Voyager; are we sending Mixed Messages?

NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, which launched in 1972 and 1973, carried this design, which was etched on a 15x23-cm gold-anodised aluminium plate. The plaque was intended to inform any extraterrestrials who might come upon it when and where the spacecraft launched (using 14 pulsars as a reference point). "There's also an image of a man and woman - perhaps the most cryptic for an extraterrestrial to understand," says Vakoch. "The response NASA got [to that image] was quite surprising to them. Some were concerned that NASA was sending pornography into space." (Illustration: NASA)

NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which launched in 1977.

Sounds and images intended to portray the diversity of life and cultures on Earth were encoded on a phonograph record made of gold-plated copper. A committee chaired by Carl Sagan assembled its contents: 115 images, a variety of natural sounds, music from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings in 55 languages.

Each record is encased in a protective aluminium jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and how to play the record.

"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilisations in interstellar space," said Sagan. "But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet." (Image: NASA)

"Like other messages that have been created for extraterrestrial audiences, the starting point of the Voyager recording was something we would expect extraterrestrials to have in common with us - and that's basic math and science," says Vakoch. (Illustration: Frank Drake)

This illustration of DNA (top left) shows how "the chemistry of Earth is tied into our genetic material", says Vakoch.

Human reproduction is also the focus of multiple Voyager images, from the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm to a developing foetus to a silhouette of a man and a pregnant woman. "There's an emphasis on reproduction in the Voyager recording, but also considerable caution in depicting nude human beings," says Vakoch. "The image [of the man and woman] nicely portrays our ambivalence about sexuality." (Illustrations: Jon Lomberg)

This image illustrates "licking, eating and drinking" (Image: National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center)

There are some Voyager images that relate to health and the human body, including this X-ray of a hand, says Vakoch - "but nothing that explicitly says, 'Our bodies are frail.'"

"The Voyager recordings intentionally minimise negative aspects of [human culture]," says Vakoch. "There was an intentional decision not to include a picture of a nuclear mushroom cloud [or] poverty and disease."

But long-lived alien civilisations are the ones most likely to be around to intercept our messages. "If they're older, perhaps they're also much more advanced than we are," says Vakoch. "What would we have to say that would be of interest to them?"

"I think the greatest thing we have to offer is to be honest about our current level of development, to highlight that we're not sure that we're even going to survive the next century . . . but that we have enough faith that we will continue to exist that we are making an effort to reach out to other civilisations." (Image: National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center)

This illustration of vertebrate evolution shows representatives of the major vertebrate groupings, including amphibians, birds and mammals.

The image of the man and woman at top right is quite similar to the drawing that was on the Pioneer plaque, with one difference - in the Pioneer image of the early 1970s, the man is raising a hand in greeting, but in this image from a few years later, the woman is waving hello. "Just in the span of a few short years, we saw a responsiveness in NASA to [include] a more adequate representation of women by showing a woman not as passively standing next to a man but as being a member of a couple that was actively sending greetings to other worlds," says Vakoch. (Illustration: Jon Lomberg)

NASA really made an effort with Voyager to include images and sounds from around the world. "What's unique about the Voyager recording is there's really an emphasis on describing the breadth of human experience," says Vakoch. "Really it's the best portrayal of human diversity of any messages that have been sent out in space."

Still, the diversity it displays is limited – there are no images representing homosexuality, for example. "I think any interstellar message is in part a reflection of its times," he says. "It may well be that if NASA sends out another image in the future, it may include a picture of two men or two women holding hands." (Images: United Nations)