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NASA was forced to repudiate viral reporting from several media outlets that the space agency was preparing to announce the discovery of alien life.
Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate—who was heavily quoted in the Anonymous video—spoke out on Monday to confirm that NASA isn’t sitting on what is potentially the biggest space discovery ever.
Contrary to some reports, there’s no pending announcement from NASA regarding extraterrestrial life.
— Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) June 26, 2017
Are we alone in the universe? While we do not know yet, we have missions moving forward that may help answer that fundamental question.
— Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) June 26, 2017
But Zurbuchen’s comments did not rule out the chance of discovering alien life forms in the future, something that NASA is actively working on.
In 2018, it will launch its James Webb Space Telescope, which will be able to observe biosignatures—water, gases and other chemical fingerprints—that could point to life on other planets.
In its video, Anonymous quoted testimony given by Zurbuchen to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in April, in which he said that the organization was “on the verge of making one of the most profound, unprecedented discoveries in history.”
But Zurbuchen was clear in his written testimony to the same committee that “while we haven’t found definitive signs of life elsewhere just yet, our search is making remarkable progress and astrobiology is a focus of a growing number of NASA missions.”
So though NASA, alongside other experts, such as British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, remain optimistic of finding life on other planets, NASA is not there yet.
Agencies/Canadajournal
