To expand the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, NASA is providing scholarships for researchers who try to discover life on planets outside our solar system
The scholarships, announced on Wednesday by NASA, are named after Carl Sagan, one of the founders of the American Planetary Society, a renowned astrophysicist and popularizer of space exploration.
The exoplanet search, which will be led by fellows with at least a Ph. D., will be supported by the data NASA expects to receive from the Kepler space telescope.
The launch of this apparatus, capable of simultaneously tracking up to 100 thousand stars, is scheduled for 2009. The scholarships themselves in the amount of $ 60,000 will be awarded to 4 or 5 applicants annually.
Currently, scientists know more than 300 exoplanets located in 246 planetary systems. “How many of these worlds have life? This is a long-term question,”says Charles Beikman, director of the NASA Institute for Exoplanet Research. Nevertheless, he is sure, "science in the 21st century is quite capable of answering it."
It is noteworthy that not so long ago, the American astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who participated in the Apollo mission on February 14 and 9, 1971 and spent 9 hours on the lunar surface, said in an interview with Kerrang Radio that NASA had been hiding the facts of alien visits to Earth for 60 years.
According to Mitchell, the famous Roswell incident was a real disaster of an alien spacecraft and "all this has been hidden by our governments for the past 60 years, but information about it is gradually leaking out, and some of us have been told something about it."
A NASA spokesman has already responded to the 77-year-old astronaut's claims, stating the following: “NASA is in no way engaged in hiding information about the life of aliens on our planet or anywhere in the universe. Dr. Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his views on this issue."
It is worth noting that Mitchell is widely known for his interests not only in aliens, but also in extrasensory perception. In particular, Mitchell claimed that during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, he conducted a telepathic communication session with his friends on Earth. In 1973, Mitchell founded a private organization, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, dealing with the problems of psychophysics, and subsequently repeatedly expressed his opinion that psy-phenomena unrecognized by official science are real, and also stated that he was "on 90% believe that most of the thousands of UFOs recorded since the 1940s are aliens from other planets."