It was a Thursday night and I had a date. Or, so I thought. Instead,

Nasa has convened a public meeting to discuss sightings of unexplained phenomena in the sky. The space agency has convened a panel to examine sightings of what it calls UAPs, or unidentified aerial phenomena, which many refer to as UFOs. Now the group has given its first public discussion, ahead of a report due to be published later this year. The space agency said the work was aimed at making it easier for people to report those UAPs, as well as to examine what exactly they might be. But representatives said that the panel involved in the work had received sustained abuse that had got in the way of that work. “Harassment only leads to further stigmatisation of the UAP field, significantly hindering the scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate/ Nonetheless, Nasa said that it would be working to examine those reports of UAPs. “The presence of UAPs raises concerns about the safety of our skies, and it’s this nation’s obligation to determine if these phenomena pose any potential risks to airspace safety,” said Daniel Evans, Nasa’s assistant deputy associate administrator for research. The work is about safety but also the space agency’s “responsibility to be honest and forthright and to follow the science”, he said. But the data on UAPs has so far been “fragmented”, according to the panel’s chair, David Spergel, with problems of imprecision and having information spread across different agencies. Those issues meant that it was difficult to provide conclusions on every reported UAP event. He called for better data and joined other panelists in arguing that it should become less stigmatised for people to come forward about their sightings. Numerous panelists said that there was a “stigma” about reporting such phenomena that made it difficult to fully examine what might be going on. The 16-member panel includes experts in everything from physics to astrobiology, and began its work last June. Wednesday’s session is the first public hearings by the group – which itself represents the first such inquiry into unidentified aerial phenomena by Nasa. The NASA study is separate from a newly formalized Pentagon-based investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, documented in recent years by military aviators and analyzed by U.S. defense and intelligence officials. The parallel NASA and Pentagon efforts - both undertaken with some semblance of public scrutiny - highlight a turning point for the government after decades spent deflecting, debunking and discrediting sightings of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, dating back to the 1940s. The term UFOs, long associated with notions of flying saucers and aliens, has been replaced in government parlance by “UAP.” While NASA‘s science mission was seen by some as promising a more open-minded approach to a topic long treated as taboo by the defense establishment, the U.S. space agency made it known from the start that it was hardly leaping to any conclusions. “There is no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin,” NASA said in announcing the panel’s formation last June. In its more recent statements, the agency presented a new potential wrinkle to the UAP acronym itself, referring to it as an abbreviation for “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” This suggested that sightings other than those that appeared airborne may be included. Still, NASA in announcing Wednesday’s meeting, said the space agency defines UAPs “as observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective.” U.S. defense officials have said the Pentagon’s recent push to investigate such sightings has led to hundreds of new reports that are under examination, though most remain categorized as unexplained. The head of the Pentagon’s newly formed All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has said the existence of intelligent alien life has not been ruled out but that no sighting had produced evidence of extraterrestrial origins. Additional reporting by agencies Read More Nasa says Jeff Bezos will build moon lander to take astronauts to the Moon Opinion: The real reason companies are warning that AI is as bad as nuclear war Electric car drives for 100 hours non-stop on futuristic road Opinion: The real reason companies are warning that AI is as bad as nuclear war Electric car drives for 100 hours non-stop on futuristic road US and China ‘intertwined like conjoined twins,’ says Musk

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Mars is often called the Red Planet, but a recent image captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover from the surface would go some way to contradicting that. Earlier this year, Perseverance snapped a sunset from Mars in which the Sun looks blue, a sight which would never be seen from our own planet. The photograph was taken on the rover’s 842nd day on the planet, and shows a Martian horizon with the sun setting behind causing an eerily cool glow. Because of Mars’ distance from the Sun, it gets less sunlight than we do on Earth. Even at its sunniest, it gets less than half our quota of light from the star. And the planet’s atmosphere, which is weaker than Earth’s, is mainly made up of carbon dioxide, with a small amount of nitrogen and a trace of oxygen. This gaseous mix and weak atmosphere causes the light to scatter in a blue haze across the sky. It’s the same process which gives us our blue sky during the daytime, when the light has less atmosphere to penetrate before it reaches our eyes. On Earth, this changes when the sun dips below the horizon, and the light has more atmosphere to penetrate, filtering our blue and violet wavelengths, leaving only reds and oranges. Meanwhile on Mars, the sunlight interacts with the dust hanging in the atmosphere, scattering red light during the day. At twilight, that red light is filtered away, leaving blues. Atmospheric scientist Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University told Science Alert: "The colours come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently. “When the blue light scatters off the dust, it stays closer to the direction of the Sun than light of other colours does. “The rest of the sky is yellow to orange, as yellow and red light scatter all over the sky instead of being absorbed or staying close to the Sun.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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