A lot has happened in the last week, so here’s a quick catch-up. First, trailblazing aviator Wally Funk — who was one of the aspiring astronauts in the Mercury 13, the first female inspector for the FAA and who briefly held the record for being the oldest person to go to space, among other accomplishments — died at 87. You can read more about her incredible life here. This week also brought a new batch of declassified UFO files, and China’s Tianwen-2 sent back its first image of the asteroid it’ll attempt to collect a sample from.
The latest unsealed UFO files are here
Since the beginning of May, the US Department of Defense has been uploading files relating to unidentified anomalous (or aerial) phenomena (UAPs) — aka UFOs — on a public database that you can freely comb through. The fourth batch of unsealed documents dropped on Friday and it includes reports from NASA, the Department of Energy, the CIA, the Department of Defense (or Department of War, as it’s sometimes called now) and the FBI going back decades. Whatever your thoughts are on the origins of these phenomena, it’s pretty interesting stuff.
There are scans of paper documents that contain firsthand accounts of sightings, in some cases with illustrations and photos, along with a slew of videos in the latest batch. The administration has said it’s committed to bringing transparency around the government’s knowledge of UAPs and will continue to release the declassified documents on a rolling basis. Just this month, it was announced that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is establishing a panel dedicated to studying UAPs and their potential national security risks. This panel will be led by Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist who for years has led efforts to search for signs of extraterrestrial life (and made some pretty controversial claims about possible evidence of its existence).
Tianwen-2 snaps a close-up of one of Earth’s quasi-moons
Last spring, China launched a space probe on a mission to a near-Earth asteroid and back, and this week, the country announced the spacecraft Tianwen-2 has reached its target. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) shared an image on Monday of asteroid 2016HO3 taken from just 12.4 miles away (20 kilometers). Tianwen-2 is expected to remain in the asteroid’s vicinity for several months and land on the surface to collect a sample that will be delivered back to Earth in late 2027.
China’s upcoming attempt to grab material from the surface of an asteroid follows successful sample return missions by the US and Japan in recent years, which have yielded insights into the conditions that existed in the early solar system. Asteroid 2016HO3, also known as Kamo’oalewa, is what’s called a quasi-satellite. This is because it “loops around our planet, but never ventures very far away as we both go around the sun,” explained Paul Chodas, the long-time manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Lab, when the object was announced back in 2016. It’s expected to remain in sync with Earth for a few hundred years before eventually drifting away.
Asteroid 2016HO3 is very small, with a diameter estimated to be in the ballpark of 100 feet, though the observations by Tianwen-2 should allow for more precise measurements soon. After leaving the asteroid next year, the spacecraft will depart for the main-belt comet 311P.
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