Gizmorama - May 28, 2014

Good Morning,

Scientists claim that intelligent alien life will be discovered in next 20 years. Prepare yourselves!!! We're going to have visitors.

Learn about this interesting story and more from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Citizen scientists hope to reconnect with 1970s NASA space probe --*
WASHINGTON (UPI) - The International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 -- ISEE-3 for short -- is a 35-year-old NASA space probe that's been abandoned in space. Since 1981, the year in which it last executed a mission for the American space agency, the probe has been orbiting aimlessly.

Now, a group of citizen-scientists with Skycorp, Inc., in Los Gatos, California, want to recapture the spacecraft and put it back to work. And in signing a resent agreement with the group allowing them to at least try, NASA essentially said: "Hey, why not?"

To take on the mission, the group has raised some $143,000 on the crowd-funding site RocketHub. The attempt to contact and control ISEE-3 will be more than expensive; it will be extremely challenging. Scientists at Skycorp will need to develop retro software that can talk to technology from the 1970s.

At last check, the probe's instruments were still functional, but there's no guarantee the probe will be able to communicate with Earth. Still, Skycorp engineers are trying. The group has a team currently staked out at Arecibo Observatory, in Puerto Rico, attempting to reestablish contact with ISEE-3 as it makes its closest approach to Earth in the last 30 years.

If the probe responds to the scientists' signal, the group will then attempt to control it -- which they now have permission to do thanks to the agreement signed this week with NASA.

If controllable, the scientists will have put the probe back into a stable orbit before they can attempt to inaugurate any missions.

It's a long shot, for sure, but NASA sees it at as another way to shore up cooperation between citizen scientists and the space program -- a program that's had its budget slashed in recent years.

"The intrepid ISEE-3 spacecraft was sent away from its primary mission to study the physics of the solar wind extending its mission of discovery to study two comets," said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "We have a chance to engage a new generation of citizen scientists through this creative effort to recapture the ISEE-3 spacecraft as it zips by the Earth this summer."

As part of the agreement, any new data collected by ISEE-3 with the help of Skycorp will be made public.


*-- Intelligent alien life will be discovered in next 20 years, scientists say --*
WASHINGTON (UPI) - The news out of Washington yesterday: expect aliens in 20 years.

Leading alien experts arrived on Capitol Hill on Tuesday donning not tin foil hats but suits and ties, probably ones with little planets and spaceships on them.

The experts -- scientists at the California-based Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute -- addressed Congress as part of hearing hosted by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Specifically, the experts brought committee members up to speed on the ongoing search for alien life -- not the little green people from the movies, but microbial life within our own solar system and intelligent life beyond.

The experts are optimistic.

"At least a half-dozen other worlds (besides Earth) that might have life are in our solar system," explained Seth Shostak, an astronomer from SETI. "The chances of finding it, I think, are good, and if that happens, it'll happen in the next 20 years, depending on the financing."

"It would be bizarre if we are alone," said Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI Research Center in Berkeley.

Shostak and Werthimer said we will likely discover alien life in one of three ways: by discovering microbial life within our own solar system, by detecting radio signals from distant life forms, or by analyzing the output of methane or oxygen in the atmosphere of exoplanets.

But the scientists likely broke the hearts of several hundred True Believers when they denied aliens had already visited Earth.

"I don't think that that would be something all the governments would have managed to keep a secret," Shostak said. "If they were really here I think everyone would know that."

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