Link About It: This Week’s Picks

Photographing the Milky Way, using lava as a building material, studying alien signals and more from around the web

New Study Sheds Light on 45-Year-Old Alien Signal Mystery On 15 August 1977 at 10:16PM EST, Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope scanned the Sagittarius constellation and detected a signal that was 20 times stronger than average, background emissions. When astronomer Jerry Ehman reviewed the findings the next morning, he wrote “Wow!” next to it, unknowingly naming the signal and its subsequent mystery. Since …

JUICE Craft to Search for Life on Jupiter’s Galilean Moons

The European Space Agency plans to send the JUICE (short for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) spacecraft on an expedition to three of Jupiter’s 79 moons for various reasons—one being the potential for life. As the vessel’s name suggests, it will be surveying the icy Galilean moons—from deep ice wells on Ganymede, to an ocean on Callisto and abnormalities within the “most promising place to look for …

Self-Driving Protection From Asteroids

Autonomous technology has come for the final frontier. The European Space Agency’s new self-driving spacecraft could potentially protect our planet from catastrophic impacts with asteroids. The project, dubbed Hera, is in the process of getting outfitted with autonomous tech that, when installed, will enable the craft to use sensors to read nearby debris and objects to determine what (if anything) is an inbound target. The …