The sample that OSIRIS-REx took from the asteroid Bennu continues to give us new information about the past of this small space rock and the early Solar System. After the sample was opened a few weeks ago, signs began to appear that Bennu may have had a wet past. There is now another finding to add to that.

Researchers have said that magnesium-sodium phosphate has been found. It came as a surprise because the ship hadn’t seen it from orbit. It makes the case for Bennu being a broken piece of a much bigger, primitive ocean world even stronger.

The Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa-2 picked up a piece of an asteroid from Ryugu and found phosphate minerals on it. Earth rocks have also had them in them. But the Bennu sample stands out because the grains are so pure and big.

An asteroid called Bennu may have been wet in the past because of the phosphates and other elements and compounds that are found on it. Dante Lauretta, co-lead author of the paper and chief scientist for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said this in a statement. “Bennu might have lived in a wetter world in the past.” But this hypothesis needs to be looked into more.

One of the people who worked on the study and is in charge of OSIRIS-REx at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said, “OSIRIS-REx gave us exactly what we hoped for: a large, clean asteroid sample rich in nitrogen and carbon from a world that used to be wet.”

For many reasons, the team thinks of Bennu as a part of the ocean world. For example, serpentinite is present. This is a type of rock that forms when hot rocks meet water, like on Earth’s mid-ocean ridges. Additionally, a lot of the substances that dissolve appear to have moved with the help of water. The fact that phosphates are real can be added to that list.

The team suggests a body with a lot of liquid water, maybe with a hard or icy exterior. A good example is Enceladus, Saturn’s icy moon. Bennu’s parent body would be about 250 kilometers (155 miles) across, which is half of it. In the past, objects have struck the 1,630-foot-wide Bennu, which measures 500 meters.

“We are still thinking of ways to test [the wet parent body hypothesis].” But, according to Professor Lauretta, it’s the most likely place where these rocks formed. He said this in an exclusive chat in March.

The sample is still being sent to labs in the US and around the world. The valuable material was being moved around for a long time before it arrived. The team shared 58 results from the first study in March, and every week there are new discoveries. It will be possible to get even more science as the number of scientists grows.

“The rocks from Bennu are enticingly beautiful,” said Harold Connolly, who is the co-lead author of the study and a sample scientist for the OSIRIS-REx mission at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. “Every week, the OSIRIS-REx Sample Analysis Team finds new, sometimes surprising information that helps us understand where Earth-like planets came from and how they changed over time.”

The study is written up in the Meteoritics & Planetary Science magazine.

Living in space nonstop for almost 24 years, with astronauts and cosmonauts living on the ship since October 10, 2000, when astronaut Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev took their first steps on board the International Space Station (ISS).

There will come a time when everything good has to end, and NASA is now making plans for that time to come. The US space agency said on Wednesday that it has chosen SpaceX to design and build the Deorbit Vehicle. This vehicle will be used to safely bring the space station down to Earth when its time is up.

If the US Deorbit Vehicle is chosen for the International Space Station, it will help NASA and its partners make sure that the end of station operations is a safe and responsible one in low Earth orbit. “This decision also backs up NASA’s plans for future commercial destinations and lets people keep using space close to Earth,” said Ken Bowersox, who is the associate administrator for the Space Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. “For the benefit of everyone, the orbital laboratory is still a model for science, exploration, and working together in space.”

The first parts of the ISS were sent into space in 1998. When their work is done in 2030, they will have been in space for two years longer than they were supposed to. The skeleton of the space station is made up of these parts, which means the ISS can’t go on after 2030.

“A lot of the space station can be fixed or replaced in space, and other parts can be sent back to Earth to be fixed and then sent back into space again.” “These parts include the science hardware, communications gear, life support gear, and solar arrays,” NASA says. “However, the primary structure of the station, such as the crewed modules and the truss structures, cannot be repaired or replaced practically.”

The space station moves in and out of sunlight, and spaceships dock and undock from it. This puts stress on the structures.

“These forces were accounted for in the original 30-year structural life estimate, and while NASA’s flown experience indicates the actual forces imparted to the station have been less than originally forecast, there is still a finite lifetime available in the primary structure,” said NASA.

As the space station has aged, leaks have started to appear, even though it has worked very well for a long time. Five space agencies worked together on an amazing project to run a lab high above our heads at about 28,000 kilometers per hour (17,500 miles per hour). NASA is now planning for the end of the project. SpaceX will run the project, which could be worth $843 million, but NASA will own and run the Deorbit Vehicle and mission to take the old space station out of orbit.

Humanity has been trying to find signals from extraterrestrial civilizations for more than a century. Prior to focusing our eyes and ears on the galaxy and universe beyond, early efforts in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) concentrated on listening for messages from within the Solar System.

There have been no alien signals found thus far in these searches. While one signal remains enigmatic, it most likely stems from a human or natural source. But given that we (aside from our stray signals) don’t broadcast ourselves on a regular basis, is it unreasonable to assume that alien civilizations would do the same?

Messaging for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or METI, is introduced. While it wouldn’t be accurate to state that humanity hasn’t communicated with the cosmos, there have undoubtedly been a few. The Golden Records are audio and visual files that NASA’s Voyager I and Voyager II spacecraft “selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.” Aliens will probably never find these. However, we have also sent other signals, like the Arecibo Message, which was directed about 21,000 light-years from Earth toward the globular star cluster M13. With only 210 bytes of data, the message was small but contained information about the 4 billion people that lived on Earth at the time, a stick figure of a person, a double helix, and a drawing of the Arecibo radio telescope that sent the message.

The organization METI International was founded in 2015 with the intention of communicating with extraterrestrial civilizations. They delivered a similar message to the super-Earth exoplanet GJ273b in October 2017, which is only 19 light-years away from Earth and may be habitable.

This is where METI becomes a little contentious. A map of the solar system was also included in the Arecibo message, and there are (very speculative) reasons why we might not want to communicate with aliens in our cosmic backyard or even send a return address.

The explanation of the Fermi paradox offered by what is now widely referred to as the “Dark Forest Hypothesis” is one of the reasons METI is controversial.

In short, it looks like the universe is full of planets that might be habitable, but we have never picked up a signal from an alien civilization.

The very dark Dark Forest Hypothesis, which is explained in Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, says that alien civilizations hide their existence because you can’t be sure what other civilizations want. There’s no way for you to know if they are hostile or friendly, or what their intentions are.

It’s possible that you, as a friendly civilization, find an alien civilization that is also friendly and about the same level of development as yours. You know you’re nice, but you don’t know if they’re also calm. Even worse, because of how far away these civilizations are and how long it takes to receive light and signals from them, you have no idea how their society has changed since the signal from them reached yours. In the meantime, they may have made huge technological leaps. This means that even if the planet you are looking at seems peaceful and not too far ahead of yours, everything could have changed by the time the light gets to you.

On top of that, there is the pressure of resources. According to the books, you also know from your own planet that life uses and spreads all the resources it can find. But there are only so many resources in the universe.

You still have to deal with the fact that you don’t know if they know that you are peaceful if you decide that they are peaceful. Since they think or even just suspect that you are bad, it makes sense that they would try to kill you before you could kill them. You could talk to them, just like you can here on Earth, to reassure them even more of your plans. In space, though, it could take hundreds or even thousands of years for your new message to get there. During that time, they could have began an attack to destroy you. With this many red flags, Liu comes to the conclusion that the only smart thing for a civilization that wants to stay alive is to hide in the forest and kill any civilizations that make noise, before they kill you.

Scientists are serious about the idea of hostile aliens, even though the idea became popular in fiction. In 2015, Stephen Hawking started a project to look for alien civilizations. He talked about why it might not be a good idea to say hello back.

According to Space.com, Hawking told the crowd, “We don’t know much about aliens, but we know a lot about humans.” “If you look at history, interactions between humans and less intelligent creatures have often been terrible for them, and interactions between civilizations with advanced and primitive technologies have also been bad for the less advanced.” If someone reads one of our messages, they might be billions of years ahead of us. They will be much stronger if that’s the case, and they might not value us more than we value bacteria.

However, the Dark Forest theory is still a long way from being proven. It is important to think about hostile aliens when deciding whether to contact other species and who should make that decision. David Brin, an American author and scientist, asked “whether small groups of zealots should bypass all institutions, peer critique, risk appraisal, or public opinion, to shout ‘yoohoo’ into a potentially dangerous cosmos.”

In a way, the fact that METI exists could be used to show that the Dark Forest Hypothesis is wrong. Let’s say there are very advanced societies out there. Assuming that some people in these advanced civilizations have access to advanced broadcast technology is a reasonable thing to do. Another reasonable guess is that if they were that advanced, they would have built this civilization with science instead of magic.

The civilizations would probably gather information about other star systems in the same way that we do, unless they have a good reason for not wanting to know about life beyond their own planet. Assuming that this information and broadcast technology aren’t somehow limited across all civilizations, there must be some people who would be crazy enough to try to get in touch with other civilizations. While obviously speculating wildly, it’s possible that an alien METI species that likes to take risks might try to warn other, younger civilizations about how the universe is like a dark forest. Also, we haven’t heard from these actors, which could mean that the long silence has a different cause than the Dark Forest Hypothesis.

That, or the METI problem, might only happen in new civilizations that send out messages every so often before we learn about the universe’s dark side and do everything we can to stay quiet.