Space Business Booming
About the same day the Discovery space shuttle was undocking from the International Space Station, it was announced a new telescope was being developed in Europe to hunt for aliens. Billions of dollars are being spent to cover such a vast area of space expertise that it is a “pick n’ choose” to decide what to write about anymore. But the best part of the entire space program are the groups of men and women working internationally as one unit 214 miles above us for one purpose—the International Space Station—even sharing candy bars together!!
During the nine-day mission, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kibo lab became 71 percent, complete with two windows and its own airlock for next year’s delivery of Kibo’s external experiment platform with three spacewalks and lots of work completed. The space shuttle will land on Saturday above the southern part of Pacific Ocean, just east of Australia with its seven crewmembers with Garrett Reisman of NASA returning from his three month mission. In his place is U.S. astronaut Gregory Chamitoff who remained with two Russian crewmates. A scheduled landing is planned at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, after the space shuttle undocked at 7:42 a.m. EDT from the ISS.
Meanwhile, amidst all this Europe is preparing a to meet ET, who they feel is just a solar system away from us. Called the Low Frequency Array, or LOFAR–25,000 small antennas are being built in a combined effort by the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, France and the United Kingdom that will be completed in 2009. Presently we have a telescope to search out ETs, called the Arecibo Observatory located in Puerto Rico, which has been unsuccessful. It is almost at a dead end and may have to shut down, due to the National Science Foundation reducing its budget. In comparison, the LOFAR will scan a lower-frequency range than did Arecibo’s electromagnetic spectrum. The reason for this new range is it is the one which Earth broadcasts their television and radio signals.
“LOFAR can extend the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to an entirely unexplored part of the low-frequency radio spectrum, an area that is heavily used for civil and military communications here on Earth,” said Michael Garrett, general director of ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and professor of radio techniques in astronomy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “In addition, LOFAR can survey large areas of the sky simultaneously — an important advantage if SETI signals are rare or transient in nature.”
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
