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NASA Releases Name of Its First-Ever "UFO Czar" After Threats
With government interest in unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) skyrocketing, NASA has announced its first-ever "UFO czar" after initially declining to do so out of concerns for his safety.
In a press release last week, NASA named its new director of UAP research, longtime civil servant Mark McInerney, in response to calls for the agency to "play a more prominent role in understanding" the phenomena — and, it seems, because people started threatening the agency and people associated with it.
Last week, the agency held a press conference pegged to the release of an independent report about UAPs and announced that it was appointing a head of UAP research. However, NASA refused to name that person at the time because members of the study panel had been subjected to jeers and threats, as Politico and other outlets reported.
"That’s in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there, because science needs to be free," Dan Evans, NASA's assistant deputy associate administrator, told reporters at the time. "Some of [the incidents] rose to actual threats."
The incident highlights how much of a hot-button topic UAPs have become as of late. With government organizations like NASA taking recent reports of UFO sightings more seriously, we've seen a resurgence of conspiracy theories surrounding the existence of government cover-ups, and other far-fetched theories pertaining to the existence of extraterrestrial life.
Despite NASA's efforts to protect McInerney's identity, the agency eventually gave in to the pressure.
Nicola Fox, an associate NASA administrator, put it even more bluntly when asked directly by reporters about the new director's identity, saying "we will not give his name out."
Later that same day, however, NASA sent out an update that named McInerny as its new director with no apparent explanation as to the about-face.
It's still unclear why the agency released McInerny's name after initially declining to do so, and Futurism has reached out to NASA for clarity about that decision.
The institutional need for a "UFO czar" came as a recommendation from the study, which was led by David Spergel of the Simons Foundation. Among other things, the study panel called on NASA to work in tandem with other government agencies — including the Pentagon, for which McInerney used to be a liaison at NASA — to study UAPs, as Time reports.
As Spergel told the magazine, folks "harassed some of our panel members," which he rightfully characterized as "very inappropriate behavior."
On the whole, it's a win for the pursuit of science in the face of the persistent stigma surrounding UFO research — but NASA's lack of disclosure about why McInerny was initially not named only serves to muddle the issue.
Given the jeers and abuse, it's clear that NASA still has a long way to go before its investigations into UAPs are fully taken seriously by the public, something that will only serve to impede the scientific process.
More on UFOs: Pentagon Launches Website to Watch Declassified UFO Videos
When the OSIRIS-REx probe arrived at asteroid Bennu, it found a body that looked and behaved quite differently from what scientists had expected.
When NASA started planning its first mission to snatch an asteroid sample, the space rock science community was abuzz with excitement over another asteroid mission — Japan's Hayabusa. In 2010, for the first time in history, that mission triumphantly delivered to Earth a fragment of an asteroid, a space rock called Itokawa. A few years earlier, Hayabusa, had mapped the whole of Itokawa, revealing a landscape strewn with boulders but also featuring smooth beach-like plains, or ponds, of gravel and sand.
It was these images of Itokawa that guided the design of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission. But as it turned out, despite some superficial resemblance, the asteroid that OSIRIS-REx was to head for turned out to be completely different.
Related: Queen legend Brian May helped NASA ace its asteroid-sampling mission, new book reveals
"The strategy for planning with OSIRIS-REx was to take Itokawa and all of the observations of asteroid Bennu that we had made of it before," Kevin Walsh, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute and lead scientist of the Regolith Development Working Group of the OSIRIS-REx mission, told Space.com. "So we would look at the different way [the two asteroids] reflect light and the different way they reflected radar, and every indication was that Bennu would have more ponds of fine grains than Itokawa."
It wasn't until OSIRIS-REx arrived at asteroid Bennu, two years after its 2016 launch from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida that the mission team discovered that their assumptions were "totally wrong," said Walsh. Instead of wide plains of sand and gravel interspersed with accumulations of boulders, the spacecraft's cameras revealed a "bouldery hellscape" that had none of the smooth open areas on which they envisioned OSIRIS-REx to touch down and collect its sample.
The mission's chief scientist Dante Lauretta told Space.com in an earlier interview that the team had concerns the sample collection might not be possible at all.
"When we designed the spacecraft, we had a design targeting accuracy [for the landing] of about 50 meters [164 feet]," Lauretta said. "The thermal properties, also the radar properties [of Bennu], really looked like a smooth surface. So when I first saw that [the surface was completely different], I really thought we might be in trouble there."
As the team grappled with the question whether their precious spacecraft could possibly safely touch down amid the towering boulders that rose against Bennu's feeble gravity into heights unseen on Earth, they received support from an unexpected source. Legendary guitarist of the rock band Queen and well-known astronomy aficionado Sir Brian May reached out to Lauretta to express his interest in the mission. May, who holds a PhD in astronomy, which he famously completed after a 30-year hiatus enforced by Queen's rise to fame in the 1970s, is also known for his interest in stereoscopic imaging. It was this skill he offered to the OSIRIS-REx team, which was at that time struggling to find a boulder-free-enough area to land the spacecraft on.
Stereoscopic imaging replicates the ability of human eyes to perceive surrounding space in three dimensions. Dedicated stereo cameras help Martian rovers navigate their exploration site. But the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft wasn't fitted with a stereo camera. May, however, knew his way around this issue by selecting images of various spots on Bennu taken from different angles and processing them for 3D viewing.
"Once you have a stereo image of that particular potential landing site, you can really make that instinctive judgment as to whether things are going to work out," May told Space.com in an earlier interview. "You see that there is this boulder, how much slope there is, how dangerous it is to get on and to get off."
With May's help, the OSIRIS-REx team eventually identified a sufficiently obstacle-free crater to attempt the sample collection. Still, the team had to remotely reprogram the spacecraft to accomplish the feat. Instead of the originally envisioned 164-foot-wide (50 m) landing side, the van-sized spacecraft had to squeeze into the merely 33-foot-wide (10 m) Nightingale Crater.
"When we launched, we planned to use a laser altimeter for the guidance down to the asteroid because we were expecting these big smooth areas," Lauretta said. "We just thought that we would need to know that we were coming down at the right rate towards the surface. Instead, we had to completely change the strategy, using the onboard cameras and performing an extensive mapping campaign, sometimes mapping features as small as a couple of centimeters to put into the spacecraft's memory so that it could make real decisions and guide itself down to the safe location."
The descent was smooth. But when OSIRIS-REx's sample collection device pressed into the asteroid's surface, something unexpected happened. Contrary to expectations, the surface behaved almost like a swamp. Within a few seconds, the spacecraft sank 19 inches (50 cm) deep into Bennu. As the sample collection head sucked in the sample and the spacecraft's backaway thrusters fired, a huge wall of debris rose from the crater, engulfing the ascending spacecraft.
The OSIRIS-REx team only learned about what happened when images from on-board cameras reached Earth. The researchers later admitted that the stirred-up gravel could have damaged the retreating spacecraft.
Walsh described the touchdown as "scientifically interesting, although operationally challenging." Just like the team misjudged Bennu's surface, it turned out that they also misjudged its density. The surface layer was unexpectedly fluffy, behaving more like water than solid material, something the analysis of measurements from Bennu's orbit didn't indicate.
Related stories:
— Asteroid sample incoming: OSIRIS-REx team preps for September landing of Bennu bits
— NASA conducts crucial drop test ahead of Sept. 24 arrival of OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample
— Farewell, Bennu! NASA spacecraft leaves asteroid to bring pieces of space rock to Earth
"When we did our calculations, initially we were taking the density of all of Bennu, which is 1.1 grams per cubic centimeter," said Walsh. "But our models showed afterwards that to be able to compress the surface so much and drive the tag head so deep into the surface, the surface density would have to be like 0.4 grams per cubic centimeter. And so it was less than half as dense as the entire body."
Scientists still don't know why Bennu's surface has this waterlike quality. Walsh thinks that smaller sand-like particles may have filtered through the gaps between the bigger rock fragments into the asteroid's interior, leaving a lot of empty space in the asteroid surface layer. That would explain the unexpectedly low density of the surface, but also the overall density of the asteroid that appears to be much higher than that of the surface.
Despite the challenges, OSIRIS-REx collected much more of the asteroid material than the mission aimed for, and the spacecraft will drop off this cargo at Earth on Sunday, Sept. 24. Lauretta hopes to release the first scientific results from the sample analysis by the end of this year. And chances are that Bennu will surprise researchers again.
A rare glimpse of success in the moon-landing pursuit came on Aug. 23, when India became the first nation to touch down near the lunar south pole with its Chandrayaan-3 mission. There, the country's robotic lander-rover duo spent a lunar day exploring the nearby region. The solar-powered explorers confirmed the presence of sulfur, an infrastructure-building ingredient that could be key to future camps; measured lunar temperature by inserting a probe into the soil for the first time; and likely detected a moonquake. In early September, the mission team put the duo into sleep mode, in hopes that fully charged batteries would push through the bitter night and wake up at the next lunar sunrise.
In 2026, China is planning to send its Chang'e-7 spacecraft on an ambitious endeavor to the lunar south pole. According to the mission plan, the spacecraft will consist of an orbiter, a lander, a rover, and a small, flying probe that will hunt for water ice in shadowed regions. Later this decade, NASA's Artemis moon program aims to land a crew near the south pole for a weeklong mission, with an Australian rover piggybacking on one of the missions.
Home, home on the moon?
For many nations engaged in the new space race, the goal is not just to visit the south pole — but to build a permanent presence there.
"With 50 years of technological progress, anybody can go to the moon — this time, to stay," Jack Burns, director of the NASA-funded Network for Exploration and Space Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Live Science.
NASA's Artemis program, for example, aims to build a cabin on the moon for astronauts to live and work for two months at a time, when they will hone technology by using local resources, like water ice, for life support and rocket fuel generation.
"The idea of manufacturing in space is very interesting to a lot of people, but nobody has really done it yet," Barstow said. "And that, I think, is where we are sitting right now. We all know what we want to do. We can even conceive how we might do it. But we have to do those first engineering tests and see if we actually can."
Related: New poppy seed-sized fuel pellets could power nuclear reactors on the moon
Future space missions will grapple with the challenge of building materials that are both lightweight and strong enough to sustain launch loads. "We don't yet have the facilities to do that," Barstow said. Although getting to the moon's south pole is more challenging than a straightforward path to its equator, we already have the technology to do so. For example, the only way to land on the moon's south pole would be to perform a rocket-powered controlled descent. "The principles of that are fairly straightforward," Barstow said. The more pressing challenge will be nailing down how to land safely.
Ultimately, the pursuit to establish a sustainable presence on the moon will also serve as a stepping stone to get to Mars, scientists say.
Although we may have the technology to send humans to visit the Red Planet, the costs involved are extremely high, and "no one government has the appetite for investing that amount of money that it requires just now," Barstow said. The logistics and human cost of establishing a Mars colony are also an open question in need of extensive research. With the race back to the moon finally kicking off in force, it may still be decades before any "Eagle" lands on Mars.
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