The University of Sydney (USyd) is looking for aliens, starting with our neighbouring star system, Alpha Centauri.
As part of an agreement signed with satellite and space services company EnduroSat, USyd is going to start looking for potentially habitable planets, with the chance of finding life in the stars. The mission is called TOLIMAN, which is the Arabic name for Alpha Centauri.
Projects like this are in no way new. Humanity has been looking for extraterrestrial life for hundreds of years, and even when there are no aliens involved in a headlining story, humans are prone to thinking there are aliens somehow involved.
But let’s come back to USyd trying to find aliens in space. The program is backed by Breakthrough Initiatives in California, a program set up to support projects investigating if there’s other life in the universe. USyd will use a satellite to discover and analyse exoplanets existing in goldilocks zones far from Earth.
Goldilocks zones are parts of space where the conditions for life have been properly catered for. A comfortable amount of sunlight, mixed with temperatures that aren’t too punishing for life forms to evolve. The planets around Alpha Centauri A and B will be analysed during the mission.
“Modern satellite technology will allow us to explore our celestial backyard and perhaps lay the groundwork for visionary future missions spanning the interstellar voids to the Centauri system,” mission leader Professor Peter Tuthill from the University of Sydney said.
“Any exoplanets we find that close to Earth can be followed up with other instruments, giving excellent prospects for discovering and analysing atmospheres, surface chemistry or even fingerprints of a biosphere – the tentative signs of life.”
Anyway, the satellite being deployed by USyd and its partners to find aliens will use EnduroSat’s MicroSat technology. Prolonged observation sessions with this technology will be supported by download speeds of above 125Mbps, so that photos can be beamed down to scientists as quickly as possible.
Good luck finding the aliens, TOLIMAN. The truth is out there.