Pentagon announces new will investigate UFOs as possible threats to military zones.

ABC NEWS: In the wake of a UFO report last summer, the Pentagon has announced the formation of a new group that will investigate reports of UFOs close to sensitive military areas. The new Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group will specifically look at reports of Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP) near U.S. military facilities. UAP is the military term to describe what is known as UFOs or Unexplained Flying Objects.


"Incursions by any airborne object into our SUA (Special Use Airspace) pose safety of flight and operations security concerns, and may pose national security challenges," said a Pentagon press release using the term that includes restricted military airspace, military operations areas, firing ranges and places restricted for national security and other uses.


In a memo outlining the group's formation, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks wrote that unidentified aerial phenomena in special-use areas "represents a safety of flight risk to aircrews and raises potential national security concerns."


The new group will synchronize the Pentagon's efforts with other federal agencies "to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in Special Use Airspace (SUA), and to assess and mitigate any associated threats to safety of flight and national security."
It will be overseen by the under secretary of defense for intelligence, who will head an executive council including the director of the Joint Staff and senior officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.


Last June, the U.S. intelligence community released a report requested by Congress that provided the first unclassified assessment of Unexplained Aerial Phenomena.

Compiled by the Navy's Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, that report could not explain 143 incidents and said 18 of them appeared "to demonstrate advanced technology." The UAP Task Force will now be absorbed into the newly formed group announced by the Pentagon.

The UAP report also identified the need to make improvements in the Pentagon's processes, policies, technologies and training to improve its ability to understand UAP.

Video shows Cosmos 1408 debris field

 

Russia's A-SAT test causes international outrage and risks to satellites and manned orbital platforms

BBC: Russia has carried out a missile test, destroying one of its own satellites. The action has caused international outrage because the debris could threaten the International Space Station (ISS) and satellites in low-Earth orbit.


Russia's test of an anti-satellite (A-Sat) missile system is not the first of its kind.

Back in 2007, China tested its own missile system against one of its own weather satellites in orbit. The explosion created more than 3,000 pieces of debris the size of a golf ball or larger - and more than 100,000 much smaller pieces.

Of the orbiting fragments considered a threat to the ISS, about a third are from this Chinese test. And at the speeds these objects travel in orbit, even small pieces can threaten spacecraft with destruction.

The A-Sat tests fit into the wider issue of space debris, which is being made worse by our continued activities in space.

There is now a wild jungle of debris overhead - everything from old rocket stages that continue to loop around the Earth decades after they were launched, to the flecks of paint that have lifted off once shiny space vehicles and floated off into the distance.

It is the legacy of 64 years of space activity.


It's estimated there is close to 10,000 tons of hardware in orbit - much of it still active and useful, but far too much of it defunct and aimless.Almost 30,000 pieces of debris are being tracked on a daily basis. These are just the big, easy-to-see items, however. Go below the scale of 1cm (0.39in), and objects move around more or less untracked. There may be 300 million of these. All of this stuff is travelling at several kilometres per second - sufficient velocity for them to become damaging projectiles if any were to strike an operational space mission.


The threat was starkly demonstrated in 2009 when an active communications satellite operated by the US company Iridium and a defunct Soviet-era military communications satellite were obliterated when they collided in orbit.

Now consider the threat to a space vehicle with humans aboard.


On Monday, Russia carried out the A-Sat test from Plesetsk Cosmodrome, about 800km (500 miles) north of Moscow. The missile destroyed an old Soviet spy satellite, called Kosmos 1408, that was once part of Russia's Tselina radio signal surveillance programme.


US state department spokesman Ned Price said the destruction of Kosmos 1408 had generated about 1,500 pieces of larger orbiting objects, for which tracking information is available to civilian sources. But it also created hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments.


Some of these tinier objects likely can be tracked, because the US military doesn't want to give away information about the sensitivities of its hardware. But others are probably too small to detect from the ground.


The debris field from the A-Sat test is found at an altitude of between 440km and 520km above Earth, threatening the ISS, China's Tiangong space station and other spacecraft.


When the ISS passed close to the debris cloud on Monday, crew members were told to shelter in the Soyuz and Crew Dragon spacecraft attached to the orbiting outpost. This is so that the crew could detach and come back to Earth if the space station was damaged by fragments of the satellite.



While vehicles such as the space shuttle were hit by smaller pieces of debris, it's likely that a collision with any large objects at orbital speeds would be catastrophic to the ISS.


The action by Russia has been condemned by other countries, including the US and the UK.

Russian anti-satellite missile test sparks outrage


The Russian military said it was carrying out planned activities to strengthen its defence capabilities, but denied the test was dangerous.


"The United States knows for certain that the resulting fragments, in terms of test time and orbital parameters, did not and will not pose a threat to orbital stations, spacecraft and space activities," it said.


Many countries now have their own A-Sat systems; the US and Russia (and previously the USSR) have been developing weapons of this kind since the 1950s. In 1985, the US used a missile launched from an F-15 fighter jet to destroy the Solwind scientific satellite.


After the Chinese A-Sat incident in 2007, the US military again shot down one of its own satellites - at a lower altitude than the Chinese or Russian operations - using a ship-launched missile. The lower height above the Earth was intended to ensure that any debris would quickly burn up in the atmosphere rather than staying aloft to threaten space-based assets.


Then in 2019, India tested its own weapon, during an operation codenamed Mission Shakti. The missile struck a test satellite in a lower orbit than those targeted by Moscow or Beijing, generating more than 200 pieces of trackable debris.


Since modern militaries rely on satellites for intelligence gathering, navigation and communications, A-Sat systems could be used to undermine an adversary's command and control system during conflict.

Northrop Grumman promo video offers hints of the shape of future aircraft.

 

High resolution frame grab: 

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Iran's gas shortage blamed on hackers

The Jerusalem  Post:

Gas stations across Iran malfunctioned on Tuesday, reportedly due to a massive cyberattack, according to Iranian state media.

With the details still hazy, speculation is rife about whether the purported attack came from the US, Israel or from local Iranian anti-regime groups.

According to reports, messages were posted in some systems that were hacked, addressing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei directly and demanding to know, “Where is the gas?” The attack comes some two years after nationwide protests over gas shortages in fall 2019.

“The disruption at the refueling system of gas stations... in the past few hours, was caused by a cyberattack,” state broadcaster IRIB said. “Technical experts are fixing the problem and soon the refueling process... will return to normal.”

The Oil Ministry said only sales with smart cards used for cheaper, rationed gasoline were disrupted and that clients could still buy fuel at higher rates, the ministry’s news agency, SHANA, reported.
Last week, Iran carried out a complex and coordinated strike on US forces in Syria using up to five armed drones to attack the Tanf garrison at a key strategic point near the Jordan-Iraq border.

The attack was the latest in a series of drone strikes on US forces.

In a press briefing on Monday, US Envoy on Iran, Rob Malley, mentioned possible upcoming US action to deter Iranian aggression in the region although he declined to elaborate what those actions might be.

The US is considered to be the world’s most potent cyber power by far but it has often been hesitant to use its offensive cyber capabilities against groups other than ISIS, for fear of cyber retaliation.

Under the Trump administration, the US did hack certain major Iranian intelligence sea-based operations to get the Islamic Republic to back away from attacking American allies at sea.

But the Biden administration has not done so to date, as it has focused on building goodwill for a mutual return to the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA.

Israel reportedly hacked Iran’s Shahid Rajaee Port on May 9, 2020, as a counter strike for an attempted Iranian cyber strike on Israel’s water supply system the previous month.

Iran has also accused the Mossad, the US and European intelligence agencies of using the STUXNET virus to hack its Natanz nuclear facility in 2009-2010.

Former Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) cyber official Harel Menashri told KAN radio that there was a good chance that to accomplish such a broad and successful attack on Tuesday, the hacker would have to be a nation-state actor.

However, recent months have also shown that amateur hackers can cause major disruption to the US and European powers with sophisticated ransomware and other means, and the Khamenei regime has many local enemies among Iran’s many minorities.

In August, Check Point Software Technologies issued a report stating that an Iranian dissident group called Indra, not Israel, executed the mega-hack on the Islamic Republic’s train system on July 9.

Check Point said Indra’s hack was “an example for governments around the world of how a single group can create disruption on critical infrastructure.”

If non-state groups are traditionally thought of as lacking the capability to do more than hack websites and data, this was an example of such a non-state group causing profound real-world damage.

Indra’s tools destroyed data without direct means to recover it by using a “wiper,” or malware designed to wipe the entire data system of critical infrastructure, making the recovery process complicated, locking users out of machines, changing passwords, and replacing wallpapers to custom messages crafted by the attackers.

The hack included the posting of fake messages about train delays and cancellations on display boards across Iran.

Reuters contributed to this report.