NASA and the Vatican will unite for an unusual reason. Although science and religion are two subjects that are quite far from each other, the United States Space Agency turned to the religious city to make a particular request and ask them to use its facilities.
Precisely, NASA wants to investigate Bennu, one of the most dangerous asteroids around planet Earth, since it has a diameter of 500 meters. In 2018, the space agency collected samples of it thanks to the OSIRIS-REx probe, but now it needs to delve deeper into the subject and they resorted to the help of the Vatican authorities to use its facilities.
And although they stated that the chances of this asteroid crashing into the Earth’s surface are 1 in 2,700, they want to make sure they know more about the phenomenon in any situation. For this reason, it was learned that NASA asked the Vatican to be able to use the observatory that the Catholic Church owns and which is located in the city where the Pope resides.
It was created in 1891 with the mission of “research astronomy and disseminate publicly to advance scientific understanding of our universe”. In addition, it has thousands of asteroid samples, which is why NASA requires these elements to delve deeper into the phenomenon.
The Vatican observatory.
It’s official: the NASA statement that confirms what many expected
NASA announced that on Thursday it will provide a press conference to give details about the report they made on extraterrestrial life, as the agency’s administrator had announced, Bill Nelson, during his trip to Argentina weeks ago. The conference It will be at 10 in the morning in the eastern United States, 11 in Argentina.
The message will be given at NASA headquarters in Washington, “to discuss the findings of an independent Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) study team that it commissioned in 2022,” the agency indicated in a statement. The conference will be led by the director, Bill Nelson; the associate administrator, Nicola Fox; the deputy administrator for research, Dan Evansand president of the Simons Foundation and chair of NASA’s UAP independent study team, David Spergel.
30 minutes before the press conference, the team that conducted the study will publish the report. The objective of the document, they maintained, “is to inform NASA about what possible data could be collected in the future to shed light on the nature and origin of UAPs. “The report is not a review or evaluation of previous unidentifiable observations.”
“NASA defines UAP as observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as airplanes or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective“, they explained from NASA, and added: “There is currently a limited number of high-quality observations of UAP, making it impossible to draw firm scientific conclusions about its nature.”
