Mysterious Flashes Coming From Earth That Puzzled Carl Sagan Finally Have An Explanat

[Binary_Bark]

Back in 1993, Carl Sagan encountered a puzzle. The Galileo spacecraft spotted flashes coming from Earth, and nobody could figure out what they were. They called them ‘specular reflections’ and they appeared over ocean areas but not over land.

The images were taken by the Galileo space probe during one of its gravitational-assist flybys of Earth. Galileo was on its way to Jupiter, and its cameras were turned back to look at Earth from a distance of about 2 million km. This was all part of an experiment aimed at finding life on other worlds. What would a living world look like from a distance? Why not use Earth as an example?
[video=youtube;ceJOBFj3hKs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceJOBFj3hKs[/video]

Read More At: https://www.universetoday.com/13557...earth-puzzled-carl-sagan-finally-explanation/

 

[Cius]

This could greatly assist in finding worlds with water in the atmosphere.

 

[c3n0byt3]

fyi here's the abstract from Sagan's paper in Nature.

In its December 1990 fly-by of Earth, the Galileo spacecraft found evidence of abundant gaseous oxygen, a widely distributed surface pigment with a sharp absorption edge in the red part of the visible spectrum, and atmospheric methane in extreme thermodynamic disequilibrium; together, these are strongly suggestive of life on Earth. Moreover, the presence of narrow-band, pulsed, amplitude-modulated radio transmission seems uniquely attributable to intelligence. These observations constitute a control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial life by modern interplanetary spacecraft.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v365/n6448/abs/365715a0.html

He had a skill for entertaining even in his academic papers.