10 Moments In Space Exploration That NASA Still Hasn't Explained

[00:00:00]NASA still has no clear answer for the strange object captured during a shuttle mission in 1996, the eerie sounds heard by Apollo 10 astronauts near the moon, and mysterious signal that vanished after a single 72 second transmission, from unexplained objects drifting outside spacecraft to discoveries that challenge everything we thought we knew about the universe. These are 10 moments in space exploration that NASA still hasn't explained. In 1996, NASA's Columbia space shuttle captured something strange while orbiting Earth.

[00:00:30]Nearly 30 years later, three images from that mission have brought the mystery back into the spotlight. Just the other week, the Pentagon released its third batch of UAP files, and this story was one of the ones included. The newly released photos show a bright object floating above the planet's surface. You see this small triangular wedge-shaped object near the edge of the Earth. In the next image, it changes position and orientation, like it's slowly rotating in space. The images were taken in during the STS-80 mission, a shuttle flight that ran from November 19th to December 7th, 1996. The images were labeled as unexplained. Does NASA [music] think it was an alien craft? Not necessarily. It just [snorts] means there isn't enough information to identify exactly what it was. The object could be anything from debris, ice, a piece of equipment drifting outside the shuttle to, yes, something much harder to explain. In May of 1969, Apollo 10 flew all the way to the moon as a final dress rehearsal of sorts for the historic landing. While astronauts Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan were orbiting the far side, they ran into something strange. Because they were behind the massive bulk of the moon, they were totally blocked from any radio contact with Earth. It was total silence till a strange high-pitched whistling noise started coming through their headsets.

[00:01:48]>> That did out in space, didn't it?

[00:01:51]Do you hear that, that whistling sound?

[00:01:55]>> The sound was so deeply eerie, the crew actually debated whether they should even tell NASA about it cuz they were worried people wouldn't believe them.

[00:02:02]Well, years later in NASA offered an explanation. They said the noise was just normal electromagnetic interference caused by the radios on the lunar module and the command module interacting with each other. So, case closed, right?

[00:02:14]Well, some later astronauts, like Al Worden from Apollo 15, openly doubted that theory arguing that experienced pilots know what radio static sounds like and that this wasn't it. Back in the early '70s, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft on a groundbreaking mission to explore the outer edge of our solar system.

[00:02:33]Everything was going smoothly until the late '80s when navigation teams noticed both spacecraft were drifting off course. Wasn't a huge detour, but like a tiny consistent drag that was pulling both probes back toward the sun. And for nearly 30 years, this mystery, dubbed the Pioneer anomaly, had top NASA scientists completely stumped. Cuz the drag was by identical on both spacecraft, researchers began to kind of panic wondering if our fundamental laws of gravity and physics were totally wrong. Conspiracies started to form around the idea that the probes had run into an invisible wall of dark matter or some other unknown force. By 2012, researchers came out with the most widely accepted explanation, that heat coming from the spacecraft's own power source was reflecting off the back of its antenna creating a tiny amount of force that slowly pushed the probe in the opposite direction. Over time, that small push was enough to affect its path through space. Even so, the mystery lasted for decades. During the Gemini 4 mission in 1965, astronaut James McDivitt was orbiting Earth when he looked out his window and saw this cylindrical object floating in the void.

[00:03:41]What made it truly bizarre was that it had long arm-like extensions or poles protruding straight out of its main body. McDivitt immediately grabbed a camera and snapped a few quick photos before the object drifted away into the darkness. When the film got back to Earth, was developed, the images were a little bit disappointing, blurry, kind of washed out, and it didn't clearly show the distinct shape McDivitt described. And NASA quickly stepped in and said McDivitt had just caught a glimpse of the spent Titan II upper rocket stage that had launched them into space. But McDivitt kind of rejected that. He was an expert pilot, and knew exactly where his booster rocket was at the time. He was pretty adamant that this thing was much further away, moving on a completely different path. Even all these decades later, people are still debating the photo. NASA has never given another explanation for the mysterious object McDivitt encountered. In the summer of 1977, a giant radio telescope at Ohio State University picked up this powerful burst of radio energy from deep space that left astronomers completely stunned. The signal was unusually strong, incredibly narrow, and lasted for 72 seconds before disappearing as suddenly as it had arrived. Jerry Ehman looked over the computer printout, the signal stood out so much that he circled it in red ink, and wrote a single word in the margin, "Wow." That handwritten note is what gave the mystery its famous name, [music] the Wow signal. Detected near the hydrogen line, all you really need to know about that for the purposes of this video is that it's a radio frequency many scientists have suggested would be the most logical choice for some advanced civilization trying to send a message across space. But sadly, the signal never showed up again.

[00:05:19]Astronomers have spent decades pointing telescopes back the same patch of sky hoping to catch another transmission, but have come up empty every time.

[00:05:27]Nearly 50 years later, the Wow signal is still the most famous unexplained radio signal ever detected. In 2017, astronomers spotted this dark speck traveling through our neighborhood at an absolute breakneck speed. They quickly realized this object, named 'Oumuamua, was the very first interstellar visitor ever detected, meaning it came from this completely different star system. And as NASA tracked it, they noticed weird things about it. The object was shaped like a giant cigar, so not your typical asteroid. And then the thing started to accelerate as it left the solar system.

[00:05:59]Normally, only comets speed up like that because the sun's heat boils off their ice, creating a jet of gas that acts kind of like a rocket. But here, there were absolutely no signs, dust, gas, or a comet tail around 'Oumuamua. It was speeding up completely on its own. Some Harvard scientists at the time were openly floating the idea that the object may have actually been an alien craft.

[00:06:21]But because it was moving so fast, we only got a brief look at it. And to this day, we still can't say what 'Oumuamua is for sure. For more than 50 years, NASA has been searching the skies with powerful telescopes [music] and sending robotic explorers to other planets, hoping to find signs that we're not alone. Scientists have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. And some of them have conditions similar to Earth where life could [music] theoretically exist. But after all the searching, we still haven't found anything definitive. No signs of ancient cities on other planets, not even the smallest evidence of alien life. This mystery is known as the Fermi paradox. The basic idea is that with so many stars and planets in the universe, it seems like intelligent life should have appeared somewhere else by now.

[00:07:04]Some civilizations could have had millions of years to grow beyond anything we can imagine. So, why does space seem completely silent aside from the occasional odd signal? Some people believe the answer is that governments are hiding what they know, afraid of [music] how the world would react. Of course, there's also the fact that the universe is just enormous. We've barely scratched the surface. But a lot of scientists have also considered a much darker possibility, known as the Great Filter. This is the idea that there's a point where civilizations will collapse before they ever become capable of exploring the galaxy. Civilizations are possibly greater and more advanced [music] than ours. And that's a pretty depressing thought. If you're looking for signs of life on another planet, methane is one of the best clues you can find. On Earth, the vast majority of methane in the atmosphere is pumped out by living things like microbes and animals. That's why scientists were thrilled when NASA's Curiosity rover suddenly detected a massive spike of methane gas inside Mars's Gale crater.

[00:08:00]The strange part is that Mars shouldn't be able to hold onto methane for very long. Planet's harsh environment and radiation should break the gas down over time, meaning something would have to be creating it relatively recently.

[00:08:12]Scientists have come out with possible explanations like chemical reactions happening underground, old pockets of gas escaping from beneath the surface, but so far none of these ideas fully explain what Curiosity detected. So, the possibility that tiny forms of life could be hiding beneath the Martian soil and producing the methane well, it can't be ruled out. When NASA's Kepler space telescope was searching for new planets, it came across a star that didn't behave like anything scientists had seen before. The star, known as KIC 8462852 or Tabby's Star if you want to get all technical, would suddenly lose a huge amount of brightness and then return to normal. Usually when a planet passes in front of a star, the star's light dips slightly and follows a predictable pattern, but Tabby's Star was different.

[00:08:57]Its brightness dropped by as much as 22% and the changes happened at random times. Something massive seemed to be blocking the star. There was no obvious explanation for what it could be. The strange behavior caught the attention of astronomers around the world. One possibility that was seriously discussed was an enormous alien structure built around the star to collect its energy, sometimes described as a Dyson sphere.

[00:09:20]Most scientists consider this extremely unlikely, but it was and still is seen as a very real possibility. More grounded explanations though involve things like clouds of dust or swarms of comets passing in front of the star, but even those ideas still don't explain [music] every strange pattern scientists have seen over the years. Tabby's star is still one of the weirdest objects ever discovered in space. In September of 1991, the space shuttle Discovery was flying the STS-48 mission. Its cargo bay camera captured something. The live feed showed several of these glowing white objects slowly drifting just above Earth's horizon. Suddenly, a bright flash of light illuminated the screen.

[00:10:00]The moment the flash hit, one of the strange objects stopped and switched directions zipping back it came before shooting off. The video caused such a massive public uproar that NASA had to issue a formal response, explaining that the objects were just tiny flakes of ice drifting near the shuttle and that the sudden flash was caused by a thruster firing. But, a lot of people disagree, arguing that the thruster wouldn't explain how one object seemed to suddenly move and change direction without affecting everything else around it. It's still often seen as one of the strangest pieces of NASA footage ever recorded. And that's been the video.

[00:10:34]Catch you, yes, you specifically, next time.

[00:10:36]>> Space anomaly.

[00:10:43]>> [music] [music] >> Space anomaly.

[00:10:58]Space anomaly.