Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
02-11-2016
Guy Asks UFOs To Come Closer...And They Did, Nov 1, 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Guy Asks UFOs To Come Closer...And They Did, Nov 1, 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: November 1, 2016 Location of sighting: Unknown ( I asked and location will be updated soon). Here is an interesting video of a man using meditation and focus to call the orbs over to his area. It works...watch them come when he asks them too. Its really rare to see this many UFOs come when a person summons them. Usually just one will appear. This person...DWC Coffman of Youtube, must be a very focused and pure hearted person at this moment in time. Does summoning work, yes, I have done it myself, but only a single UFO came. This is spectacular. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Forgive my speaking I talked to them while I meditate and they always show up, I have many photos.
Mysterious Star Pulses May Be Alien Signals, Study Claims
Mysterious Star Pulses May Be Alien Signals, Study Claims
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
A study published in October 2016 reported the detection of odd light pulses coming from 234 of 2.5 million stars observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's 2.5-meter telescope in New Mexico (pictured here). These pulses are consistent with signals that intelligent aliens might produce, the study authors claimed.
Credit: SDSS/Fermilab Visual Media Services/NASA
Strange pulses of cosmic light might be signals from hundreds of different alien civilizations — or just the latest false alarm in the tortuous search for ET.
This month, astrophysicists Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier, both from Laval University in Quebec, announced that they had spotted mysterious light signals coming from 234 different stars in our Milky Way galaxy. These pulses match the profile of signals that Borra, in a 2012 paper, predicted intelligent aliens might use to get our attention, the authors wrote.
"We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis," the duo wrote in the paper, which was published online Oct. 14 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]
"The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis," the researchers added in the study. (Borra and Trottier looked at the spectra of 2.5 million stars studied by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which uses a telescope in New Mexico.)
But don't get too excited: Borra and Trottier said that additional observations are needed to confirm this hypothesis, and outside astronomers are even more emphatic on this point. Indeed, a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted, said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California.
For example, it seems unlikely that 234 separate alien societies would be sending out such similar signals more or less simultaneously, Shostak said.
"It would be like expecting us to send the same signals as the Abyssinians — it doesn't make a whole lot of sense," he told Space.com. "If I were a betting guy, I'd bet this is an artifact of the way they processed their data."
Shostak also said that he knew of six different reviewers who had recommended against publishing the paper, at least without significant revision. However, he did stress that Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific is a reputable journal.
The astronomers behind Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million project that's scanning the heavens for SETI signals over the next 10 years, also urged skepticism.
"The international SETI community has established a 0-to-10 scale for quantifying detections of phenomena that may indicate the existence of advanced life beyond the Earth called the 'Rio Scale,'" team members of Breakthrough Listen, whose science program is headquartered at the Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC) at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. "The BSRC team assesses the Borra-Trottier result to currently be a 0 or 1 (None/Insignificant) on this scale."
But skepticism is not the same thing as dismissal. Shostak thinks the stars singled out by Borra and Trottier are worthy of follow-up investigation, as does Breakthrough Listen. Indeed, the latter organization plans to study several of these stars using the 7.9-foot (2.4 meters) Automated Planet Finder optical telescope at Lick Observatory in California, team members said in the same statement.
The long history of SETI false alarms — including a detection that generated buzz this past August, but was soon traced to a Russian satellite — shouldn't deter scientists from checking out intriguing candidates, Shostak stressed.
"You can't get too cynical," he said. "You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater."
Our Galactic Arm May Have a Longer Reach Than We Thought
Our Galactic Arm May Have a Longer Reach Than We Thought
By Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor
An artist's impression of the Milky Way as seen from the outside. New research suggests that the Orion Spur, or Arm, is almost twice as long as scientists had previously thought.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESO/R. Hurt
The sun's galactic neighborhood just became a bit more significant. New research reveals that the sun's branch of the Milky Way may be several times longer than previously measured, which would make it a significant contender in the structure of the galaxy.
Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way contain several massive structures known as arms, which unwind from the galaxy's center. The sun's neighborhood is called the Orion Arm, though scientists often refer to it as the Local Arm. Despite its name, it is classified as a spur — a collection of dust and gas that lies between the more massive arms.
"Our study reveals that the Local Arm is not only a tiny spur of the Milky Way. In includes a prominent major arm nearly extending to the Perseus Arm and a long spur branching between the Local and Sagittarius Arms," astronomer Ye Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told Space.com by email. Xu led a team that identified eight new features in the Orion Arm and determined that it is much longer than scientists have previously estimated, Xu said. [Our Milky Way Galaxy: A Traveler's Guide (Infographic)]
Mapping from within
With their gently unfurling arms and ongoing star formation, spiral galaxies are some of the most beautiful star collections in the universe. But it is far easier to calculate the characteristics of distant galaxies than it is to understand the features of our own Milky Way.
"Determining the structure of the Milky Way has been a long-standing problem for astronomers because we are inside of it," Xu said. "While astronomers agree that our galaxy has a spiral structure, there are disagreements on how many arms it has and on their specific location."
Mark Reid, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts who was not involved in the study, compares the Milky Way to a dinner plate with an interesting design on its face. While the pattern is easy to spot from above, it can be difficult to interpret when the plate is edge-on.
"All of the structures are projected on top of each other, and without accurate distances to these structures, it is impossible to infer the design," Reid told Space.com by email.
To measure how far parts of the arm sit from the sun, scientists search for telltale signals in star-forming regions. As gas enters galactic arms, gravitational forces squeeze the gas to produce newborn stars. In other galaxies, blobs of bluish light that are produced by the birth of stars trace out spiral arms.
In the Milky Way, star-forming regions are more challenging to map. As part of the new research, the scientists identified bright spots of radio emission known as masers, whose shift in light researchers can measure to identify their movement and distance from Earth. Masers can be made up of clouds of gas that contain trace amounts of molecules such as water and methyl alcohol.
Reid compared the microwave emissions produced by masers to the spots of red light streaming from a hand-held laser.
"All they need is a source of energy — analogous to the battery in a laser pointer — and long path-lengths to amplify the emission," Reid said. "In star-forming regions, the more massive and very young stars provide the energy."
Using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a suite of 10 telescopes operating in Socorro, New Mexico, the scientists identified and measured eight new masers in the Orion Arm, setting its new length at about 25,000 light-years long. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year.) Although measurements of the arm vary, Xu’s team set the distance as being just over 16,000 light-years in 2013.
"This characterization of the Local Arm will change the image of the Milky Way," Xu said.
The new research, which was published in the journal Science Advances in September, reveals the Milky Way as more complex than scientists have previously estimated. The galaxy is typically classified as a grand-design spiral, which Reid said is often very symmetrical, often boasting only two arms.
"The Milky Way, while probably a 'pretty galaxy,' has significant irregularities," Reid said. "Based on our observations, it is clear that there are four major spiral arms and some non-symmetric structures like the Local Arm."
Further studies are needed to determine how irregular the Milky Way might be: "Without a complete map of the Milky Way, however, it is not clear how symmetric the four arms are," Reid said.
Instruments like the VLBA, located in the northern hemisphere, are limited in their ability to study the Milky Way. According to Reid, they can only map a bit more than half of the galaxy.
"We need more observations, particularly from the Southern Hemisphere, so that we can map the entire Milky Way," Reid said.
Amajor lunar mystery may have just been solved. Orientale basin — a 580-mile-wide crater — is one of the moon’s most striking features and resembles a large bull’s-eye. After pondering its origins for decades, scientists now think they’ve discovered how the crater’s concentric rings formed, and it’s more complicated than just a giant meteor pummeling into the surface.
A pair of articles published in the new issue of Science, explains how researchers used data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft to examine the lunar subsurface in order to piece together the giant crater’s history.
“Big impacts like the one that formed Orientale were the most important drivers of change on planetary crusts in the early solar system,” says Brandon Johnson, lead author of one of the papers and a co-author of the other. “Thanks to the tremendous data supplied by GRAIL, we have a much better idea of how these basins form, and we can apply that knowledge to big basins on other planets and moons.”
Maria Zuber, a a geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead on the gravity field study, explained that they used GRAIL much like an X-ray machine. The spacecraft mapped the interior of the planet by using its own gravity. The lunar interior is made up of a myriad of materials, each with their own temperature, density, and composition. The surface also has a variety of features, and GRAIL measures the gravitational differences around all of these objects to map out what’s underneath.
“In the past, our view of Orientale basin was largely related to its surface features, but we didn’t know what the subsurface structure looked like in detail,” Jim Head, a geologist at Brown University in Rhode Island, a GRAIL scientist and a co-author of the new research, said in a statement. “The beauty of the GRAIL data is that it is like putting Orientale in an X-ray machine, and learning in great detail what the surface features correspond to in the subsurface.”
A color-coded map that shows the strength of surface gravity around the Orientale basin.
By analyzing the GRAIL data, the researchers concluded that an object about 40 miles (64 km) across, struck the Moon while traveling at roughly 9 miles per second. The data also indicated that the three concentric rings surrounding the crater were not caused by the initial impact. Instead, they were formed by processes happening below the surface in response to the impact.
As the crust rebounded following the impact, molten rocks below the surface flowed toward the point of impact, causing the crust above to rise up, forming the jagged cliffs that make up the outer two rings.
The innermost ring, however, was formed by a different process. When the crust rebounds, it can form a central peak. But in Orientale’s case, that central peak was so massive that it was unstable, eventually collapsing into a ring-like structure.
Multi-ring craters exist all over the solar system, and future missions modeled after GRAIL could be sent to other planetary bodies to better understand their inner-workings. When similar craters formed on the Earth, the first single-celled organisms were emerging. By studying craters similar to Orientale, on places like Mars, it could give us a better understanding of whether or not life existed.
Paleontologists at Cambridge University have announced the discovery of the first known fossilized dinosaur brain tissue — ever. It’s a small fossil, and a huge deal.
The rock, just a few inches long, was picked up in 2004 by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks on a beach in the south of England after a storm. Since then, paleontologists have been working on making a solid case that it is what they think it is: exquisitely preserved tissue from the outer layer of the brain of an iguanodon, or similar dinosaur that lived 133 million years ago.
Fossils that wash up on shore have already lost a lot of important information about their origin, often changing shape, and making it difficult to figure out what it originally was. But the evidence — at least for this piece of detritus — is all pointing in one direction.
The rock fits neatly into the brain cavity of an iguanodon, based on known fossils, and it likely came from the Tunbridge Wells Sand Formation, which is 133- million-years-old, and coincides with when iguanodons would have been hanging out in the area.
The brain might have belonged to an animal that looked something like this.
The soft tissues on the outer layer of the fossil are exquisitely preserved — you can even see the blood vessels running through it. The patterns match what we see today in the closest living relatives of the dinosaurs: crocodiles and birds.
Soft tissue fossils from the dinosaur era are rare finds and require very special circumstances for preservation. Although fossilized stomachs, skin, feathers, and even blood vessels have been found, many scientists would have said we’d never find a brain — until we did.
Cambridge paleontologist David Norman, who announced the discovery at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Utah this week, theorizes that the animal died and sank to the bottom of a shallow, stagnant pond. It flipped over on its head, which became buried in the muck. The conditions in the pond would have had to be inhospitable to bacteria in order for the tissue to stay intact long enough to become mineralized.
Scanning electron microscopy images show what appear to be meningeal blood vessels on the surface of the fossilized brain.
In Norman’s telling, the main mass of the brain ultimately eroded, and was replaced with sediment. The fossil, as it exists today, is mostly made up of debris, preserved in the shape of the brain casing, and enveloped by a very thin layer of fossilized brain material.
This last point was one Norman debated for years with Oxford paleobiologist Martin Brasier, who was involved with the find at an earlier point, and theorized that perhaps the brain had been fossilized in its entirety. Brasier died suddenly in a car crash in 2014, although he left behind notes later found by a former student that indicated he had come around entirely to Norman’s point of view.
The discovery of the fossil will be published in a special edition of Earth System Evolution and Early Life, honoring Brasier’s life and contributions to science.
This brain will certainly be the focus of intense research and debate among paleontologists for years, and decades, to come. Assuming the findings hold up to the scrutiny, this fossil will open up new possibilities into the study of the physical structure of dinosaur brains, and what they might have been thinking.
These Scary Things in Space Will Haunt Your Dreams
These Scary Things in Space Will Haunt Your Dreams
By Hanneke Weitering, Staff Writer-Producer
1. Ghost Hand of God
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/McGill
Witches, ghosts and ghouls don't just haunt the Earth on Halloween night — such spooky figures exist throughout the universe, too. Here are some of the most spine-chilling space photos to scare your pants off this Halloween. HERE: This glowing, green zombie-like hand reaches through the depths of space to grab a bright-red cloud of light. Is this a giant space zombie grabbing some dinner? Not quite — NASA calls this nebula the "Hand of God." It is actually a pulsar wind nebula, produced by the dense remnant of a star that exploded in a supernova.
2. Screaming Skull
Credit: A. Fabian (IoA Cambridge) et al., NASA
Yikes! This ghastly face in space appears to be screaming while suffering through a miserable, fiery death. But no real skulls were harmed in the making of this photo. It's actually an X-ray image of cluster of galaxies known as the Perseus Cluster
3. Space Ghosts
Credit: Adam Block, NOAO, AURA, NSF
Ghastly figures appear to be fighting to escape from this cloud of interstellar gas and dust called SH2-136. The illuminated dark nebula is about 1,200 light-years away, towards the constellation Cepheus.
4. Halloween Skull in Space
Credit: NAIC-Arecibo/NSF
How did this skull wind up in space? A radar image of asteroid 2015 TB145, which NASA says is likely a dead comet, was captured using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on Oct. 30, 2015. The skull-shaped asteroid flew by Earth last Halloween (Oct. 31).
5. Zombie Pac-Man Nebula
Credit: Gemini South GMOS/Travis Rector/U. of Alaska Anchorage
An ominous-looking nebula named NGC 246 lurks in the constellation Cetus about 1,600 light-years away from Earth. It is nicknamed the "Skull Nebula," but some astronomers call it the "Pac-Man Nebula." It appears to be taking a bite out of space.
6. Witch Head Nebula
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A witch appears to be cackling out into space in this eerie image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The infrared portrait shows the Witch Head nebula, named after its resemblance to the profile of a wicked witch.
7. Eye of Sauron is Watching You
Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
This evil eye-shaped nebula, formally named Fomalhaut, strikes an eerie resemblance to the fearful Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings series. In the books, Tolkien described the eye as being "rimmed with fire... watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened up on a pit, a window into nothing."
8. The Face on Mars
Credit: NASA
Though we have yet to find any aliens on Mars, NASA did discover this creepy human face on the Red Planet. The original "Face on Mars" image was taken by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter, in grey scale, on July, 25 1976. NASA assures that the face is simply a peculiar pile of rocks — but that doesn't make it any less spooky!
9. Ghost Head Nebula
Credit: Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri (Observatoire de Paris) et al., ESA, NASA
The Ghost Head Nebula's two flaming-hot eyes peer at us all the way from the Magellanic cloud, located about 170,000 light-years away from Earth. Its glowing eyes are star-forming regions with hot blobs of hydrogen and oxygen
10. Black Widow Nebula
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Wisc.
This giant, red space spider is the biggest black widow we've ever seen! But don't worry — it won't bite. It's actually just a nebula, or a cloud of interstellar gas and dust.
11. Zombie Star Explodes Back to Life
Credit: NASA/CXC/Chinese Academy of Sciences/F. Lu et al
This zombie star named Tycho was once a white dwarf, or the remnants of an exploding supernova. The dead star gobbled up too much mass from another nearby star and exploded again in what's called a Type Ia supernova.
12. Extreme Pumpkin Stars
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA has discovered 18 strange stars that spin so fast that their spherical shape is squashed into the shape of a pumpkin. These rapidly-spinning stars blast X-rays into space at rates of up to thousands of times as much as our sun.
This Is the Best View Yet of Europe's Mars Lander Crash Site
This Is the Best View Yet of Europe's Mars Lander Crash Site
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Europe's ExoMars lander gauged out a crater 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) deep and nearly 8 feet (2.4 m) wide when it crashed into the Red Planet's surface last week, a new photo by a NASA Mars orbiter reveals.
The lander, known as Schiaparelli, apparently deployed its parachute prematurely and didn't fire its thrusters nearly long enough to pull off a soft landing as planned on Oct. 19, European Space Agency (ESA) officials have said.
The new image, which was captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on Tuesday (Oct. 25), shows the aftermath of Schiaparelli's violent impact. [In Photos: Europe's Schiaparelli Mars Landing Day]
This Oct. 25, 2016, image from the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the area where Europe's Schiaparelli lander struck Mars. The inset at center shows where the main lander hit; at bottom is Schiaparelli’s parachute and back heat shield, while the inset at upper right shows the front heat shield.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
First of all, there's the main crater, which the lander blasted out when it hit the surface at a speed of about 180 mph (300 km/h). The fuzzy dark smudges around the central crater are difficult to interpret at the moment, ESA officials said: These markings are asymmetrical, which suggests that the impactor was traveling at a low angle to the ground, but Schiaparelli should have been descending pretty much perpendicular to the surface when it hit.
"It is possible the hydrazine propellant tanks in the module exploded preferentially in one direction upon impact, throwing debris from the planet’s surface in the direction of the blast, but more analysis is needed to explore this idea further," ESA officials wrote in an update today (Oct. 27).
"An additional long, dark arc is seen to the upper right of the dark patch but is currently unexplained," they added. "It may also be linked to the impact and possible explosion."
About 0.9 miles (1.4 kilometers) south of this crater is a bright feature above a smaller gray disk, which are almost certainly Schiaparelli's 39-foot-wide (12 m) parachute and its attached rear heat shield, respectively, ESA officials said.
Another bright feature 0.9 miles (1.4 km) east of the Schiaparelli crater is probably the lander's front heat shield, they added.
"The mottled bright and dark appearance of this feature is interpreted as reflections from the multilayered thermal insulation that covers the inside of the front heatshield. Further imaging from different angles should be able to confirm this interpretation," ESA officials wrote in the update. "The dark features around the front heatshield are likely from surface dust disturbed during impact."
Schiaparelli launched in March 2016 along with the Trace Gas Orbiter. Together, the two spacecraft make up the ExoMars 2016 mission — the first part of the two-phase ExoMars program, which ESA leads with assistance from its chief partner, the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos.
The second phase of ExoMars aims to land a life-hunting rover on the Red Planet's surface in 2021. Schiaparelli's main goal was to test out the technologies needed to get this rover down safely, and the data gathered during the lander's Oct. 19 descent should be helpful in this regard, ESA officials have said.
The ExoMars team expects to wrap up its investigation into what exactly happened during Schiaparelli's descent by mid-November, ESA officials added.
The landing site of ExoMars’ Schiaparelli lander within the predicted landing ellipse (top), along with zoomed-in, before-and-after views (bottom left and bottom right, respectively) showing evidence of the lander’s crash on Oct. 19, 2016.
Credit: Main image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS, Arizona State University; inserts: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
TGO, for its part, aced a crucial orbit-insertion burn on Oct. 19 and is in good shape as it loops around Mars on a highly elliptical, four-day-long orbit, mission team members said. Early next year, the spacecraft will begin moving into its final science orbit, a circular path with an altitude of 250 miles (400 km).
TGO should reach that orbit by March 2018, at which point the spacecraft will begin hunting for buried water ice and sniffing the Martian atmosphere for methane and other gases that could be signs of life. This science mission will last for about two years. TGO will also serve as a communications relay for the ExoMars rover and other surface craft before ending operations in 2022.
MRO took the new photo with its supersharp High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The Schiaparelli crash site was first identified last week in images captured by MRO's lower-resolution CTX camera.
Outer space is terrifying — not just on the body, but also on the mind. Extreme environments and situations can stretch people’s minds to the brink of sanity, and outer space is no exception. Sure, astronauts are protected inside their multimillion-dollar spacecraft, but those confined little metallic boxes can make one feel isolated and trapped. And we’re also making strides to put humans on other planets.
All that time in the deep dark void — probably not good for the noggin, right?
Thankfully, NASA’s on it. Welcome to the world alternately called aerospace psychiatry and psychology — a field of medicine where one provides mental health support to aviation professionals.
Astronauts, in particular, have been the focus group for decades now. They’re people who we typically think of as the best of the best, “who are otherwise quite healthy, but operate in an abnormal environment,” says Gary Beven, NASA Flight Surgeon and Chief of Aerospace Psychiatry at NASA Johnson Space Center.
Although the U.S. beat Russia to the moon, it was the Russians who started aerospace psychology. Beven explains that during missions onboard the Salyut 6 (1977 - 1982) and Salyut 7 (1982 - 1991) space stations, Soviet cosmonauts began to experience noticeable signs of psychological distress (or physical problems with an underlying psychological cause) while in space.
Taylor Swift would do poorly in space.
This most likely had to do with the longer durations of these missions. Salyut 6 had the first six-month space mission, while Salyut 7 upped the ante with the first-ever eight-month mission. Each mission put two or three cosmonauts in a fairly tight quarters with one another. Several crew stints had to be terminated before completion.
The Russians were spurred into establishing their own space psychology program. “They brought in experts within the field of psychology to work full-time with the Russian space program,” says Beven. “They were involved not only with cosmonaut selection, but also providing support and monitoring the psychological well-being of astronauts while they were in space.”
Until fairly recently, NASA wasn’t interested in long duration missions, so they had no need for psychologists or psychiatrists beyond the initial medical and mental health evaluation during the candidate selection process.
That changed in the mid 1990s, when the U.S. and Russia established the Shuttle-Mir Program to allow NASA to learn about Russia’s experiences with long-duration space habitation. At that point, NASA brought in a group of psychologists and psychiatrists to develop a behavioral health and support group for the NASA astronauts that were staying aboard Russia’s Mir space station.
Space Shuttle Atlantis docking to Mir.
“Life aboard Mir was very arduous and very difficult,” says Beven. “Some of the (U.S.) astronauts even admitted they felt they had not been psychologically prepared for that type of a mission.” Some did exceptionally well, like Shannon Lucid (who stayed on Mir for seven months in 1996), but others publicly acknowledged the difficulty of living in an orbital spacecraft for months at a time. Part of the feelings of psychological anxiety and depression that crept up were simply the result of isolation, difficulty communicating with Russian counterparts on the station, the lack of leisure activities on Mir.
With all that qualitative data and feedback, NASA refined the aerospace psychiatry system as it and the rest of the world began moving forward with the International Space Station. Today’s aerospace psychiatry group supports astronauts from the time of training all the way through the end of the mission — and even beyond to assist with post-mission acclimation to life on the ground. “In some ways, we may be involved with astronauts all the way to the end of their career,” says Beven. “We get to know them very well, and we also get to know their families very well.”
Beven says the candidate selection process is probably the most important way to prepare astronauts for the mental rigors of space travel and life. The goal is to pick candidates who possess sound, sturdy minds. Beven and his team grade candidates on nine different “suitability proficiencies”:
ability to perform under stressful conditions
group living skills
teamwork skills
self-regulation of one’s emotions and mood
motivation
judgement and decision making
conscientiousness
communication skills
leadership skills
They also screen for any history of major mental disorders or disqualifying problems. For the most part, candidates come from occupations where good mental health and the aforementioned traits are already a necessity, sometimes in already extreme or stressful environments — such as fighter pilot living aboard an aircraft carrier, or a scientist who has done stints at research stations in Antarctica. When you’re talking about picking 10 astronauts to train out of a final list of 60 people, you’re really getting the most mentally and behaviorally qualified group, says Beven.
The vast majority of the aerospace psychiatry group’s work, however, revolves around proactively working with active astronauts. Beven says there are a little over 40 active astronauts currently working at NASA, and each one is notified they’ll be going up into space about two years prior to the mission launch.
Beven and his team start to work directly with the astronaut (and their spouse), and their work can be categorized into two parts. The first is behavioral medicine: evaluating astronauts’ mental health at regular intervals before launch (the last meeting happening 60 days before launch) and training them to identify and deal with instances of psychological detriment in other crew members.
Up in space, Beven or his colleagues will do a private video conference with each astronaut about every two weeks to go over everything pertaining to sleep, crew morale, if that astronaut is dealing well with the workload or experiencing fatigue (or even feeling underworked), their relationship with the ground team, concerns with family, and anything else. If they need immediate help, they can call Beven’s cell phone or send him an email in an instant, at any given moment. If any major concerns arise out of these avenues of communication, Beven and his team will confer with the flight surgeon to decide on a course of action.
What kinds of problems are we talking about? For the most part, the typical psychological problems you’d find in space are no different from what you’d find in a high-stress environment here on the surface. They include:
difficulty sleeping
irritability
mood lability
feelings of discouragement
heightened nervousness or anxiety
A nurse working in the E.R. or a long distance runner training for a marathon might experience these kinds of symptoms pretty regularly. But when an astronaut — who is trained more rigorously to withstand stressors — starts to experience these kinds of symptoms, there’s a much larger cause for concern, since they’re essentially trapped up there in space.
Beven says these problems are not unlike what you might find for someone who is unfamiliar to a long winter in a northern country, or a prisoner who is placed in solitary confinement. “There’s nothing unique about the symptoms themselves. What’s unique is that, given the spaceflight environment, there’s no analogue for them here on Earth, because of the microgravity.”
After getting back to Earth, the astronaut undergoes three more psychological assessments — at 3 days, 14 days, and 30 to 45 days after getting back — to go over lessons learned in hindsight and help the astronaut adjust to their new role on the ground.
“Many astronauts, when they land, might not fly again for several years, so they need to determine if they will stay with NASA, or do something else,” Beven says — which can be a very difficult, debilitating decision, even among the least neurotic among humans.
The other facet is what Beven calls behavioral support: it’s essentially the way he and his team make sure an astronaut has access to hobbies or forms of entertainment that they can indulge in in their leisure time to unwind and de-stress. It could range from music, to watching sporting events or television, having access to games — whatever. Even astronauts love to watch Game of Thrones, and it’s critical to keeping their sanity.
“Our belief is that if you’re forced for six months or more to live and work in your office, the downtime really needs to be rejuvenating,” says Beven.
So far NASA’s aerospace psychiatry program has been very successful. Beven says that every astronaut performs “exceptionally well,” for 95 percent or more of their mission duration. “Occasionally, they dip down to more mundane frustrations or frictions,” he concedes. Yet, for the entire time he and his team have been working with the ISS, “we’ve not noticed anything that would be of clinical significance,” nor anything that would terminate any mission or procedural activity due to psychological detriment.
Artist's rendering of Mars Semi-Direct/DRA 1.0: The Manned Habitat Unit is "docked" alongside a pre placed habitat that was sent ahead of the Earth Return Vehicle.
This is all thanks to the constant communication and support the team can provide astronauts while they’re up there in space. But as space travel begins to expand — both in allowing more people access to space travel, and in sending more people out to greater distances beyond Earth’s orbit — aerospace psychology will need to change. “In the next 10, 20, or even 50 years, how are we going to provide the system to allow the first Mars crew the same opportunities for psychological support that the ISS crew has — even if there is a 45-minute delay in communications?” asks Beven.
One idea: using A.I. programs to that can provide instant cognitive behavioral therapy to astronauts onboard a spacecraft or working on a Martian or lunar colony. A future astronaut may be having bi-weekly meetings with an artificial robot on their iPad, instead of chatting so frequently with a human being here on Earth. “I don’t think anything on Earth right now has been proven to work in that realm, but that’s something we need to make certain is working,” says Beven.
And as spaceflight becomes commercialized and low-Earth orbit operations are turned over to private companies, it’s unlikely commercial astronauts will be as rigorously screened as NASA’s astronauts are right now. Beven predicts “there will be someone who does have the first psychotic episode in space,” or the first manic episode, or someone who develops a drug or alcohol problem in space.
But he’s optimistic: “The way in which those things are dealt with will spread into the psychiatric and psychological community.” He thinks, for example, an asteroid mining community will likely contract with a healthcare provider or institution, and work with them to provide on-call psychiatrist and psychologists who are available 24/7. Or, making sure a general physician who is there can detect signs of psychological problems and provide some sort of solution.
At some point, we’ll see the first marriage in space, the first child born in space, and more — especially once we see a colony in space or somewhere on another world. “Space travel is becoming normal,” says Beven. It’s only natural that mental health services acclimate to those changes as well.
The fact that science fiction is becoming real excites many, annoys some, and absolutely terrifies an unfortunate few suffering from spacephobia or astrophobia, which is characterized by a fear of outer space or celestial objects. For those people, the idea of colonizing Mars is pants-wettingly horrifying. That’s fine, they don’t have to go. But psychologically similar spacephobes may truly suffer several generations down the line if humanity does become a multiplanetary species.
For people with spacephobia, the very concept of space creates feelings of anxiety and distress. As with other phobias, this fear is irrational. Humans can only survive for 15 seconds exposed in space, but no one has — contrary to Gravity — floated off into orbit. The perils of both cis-lunar and extra-lunar space are also eminently avoidable for people who don’t work as professional astronauts.
Phobias usually manifest themselves when you’re a child or a teenager — sometimes because of a specific event or experience, or sometimes because of an acute anxiety that may slowly progress into a full-blown fear. Genetic factors and brain chemistry may also play a role. Exposure to specific media could as well. It’s the golden age of science fiction right now and, yes, that could lead to the proliferation of fear.
In a sense, spacephobia is an amped up version of agoraphobia, the unfortunately common fear of going outside. Agoraphobes suffer privately or overcome their terror to lead normal lives; regardless, it’s a rough time. And it could — at some point in the distant future — be a similarly hard go for spacephobics born to asteroid miners or deep space explorers. Eventually, spacephobia could become to natural-born Martians what aquaphobia currently is to those born on islands.
For now, spacephobia is not debilitating, but like other phobias — which are treated variously with medications like beta blockers and antidepressants or exposure therapy, relying on acclimation to a phobia — it’s also nearly impossible to treat. If someone has ophidiophobia (fear of snakes), exposure therapy would probably first involve getting someone comfortable with first talking about snakes, then looking at pictures of snakes, then watching videos, and at last being comfortable with seeing snakes in real life and perhaps even holding one and interacting with it. Spacephobia is trickier because you can show pictures and video, but you can’t just send people into orbit (though virtual reality might help psychologists get around this limitation until rocket scientists eliminate it).
For now, spacephobia and astrophobia are minor conditions. They do, however, permanently ground some peoples’ imaginations. And there is harm in that even if we’re all not headed to Mars tomorrow.
The sun will blow up one day. And when that happens, the warm yellow orb at the center of our solar system will transform into a cooler — but still broiling — red giant. It will consume Mercury, Venus, and Earth. It’ll probably make Mars into a dessert. And yes, this will happen quickly. One day Earth will be there, and the next it will be gone. But don’t worry, there will be enough time for some suffering.
There’s a few things you ought to remember about the sun. Light that’s emitted from our host star takes eight minutes and 20 seconds to hit our planet. If the sun suddenly blew up, we actually wouldn’t know it happened for — you guessed it — eight minutes, 20 seconds — since even that explosive light show would only be traveling, at maximum, the speed of light. The death and destruction would follow very, very shortly after that.
But when the sun does blow up, it’s not simply going to extinguish like a small flame in a candle. It’s going to shoot out some really gnarly, very powerful stuff. All that energy — about as much as you would observe if you blew up a few octillion nuclear warheads — will almost instantly kill all life on Earth. Chances of survival will near zero.
Even if the Earth miraculously survived, and life found a way to go on without the energy from the sun, the resulting radiation would decimate the planet. A supernova 30 light years away would probably result in a destruction of the ozone layer and mass extinctions. A supernova 8.3 light-minutes away? Annihilation. Explosions would vaporize the surface of the planet facing the sun. The other side would hit temperatures 15 times hotter than the surface of the sun right now. The entire planet would probably disintegrate in a few days.
So, yeah, we’re not going to be able to walk it off.
Now, it’s also important to remember that perhaps we might actually feel the effects of the sun’s departure, even during those eight minutes of impending doom. If the sun exploded, Earth would no longer have a celestial body to rotate around. And when the center ceased to hold, the gyre would widen. There are more nuanced ways of considering how this would actually work from a math and physics perspective, but the general notion is that Earth would go from planet to spaceship to nothingness over the course of relatively little time.
Of course, you’re not supposed to worry about any of this. Our sun has only made it about halfway through its expected 10 billion-year lifespan. The sun is not going supernova tomorrow.
The notion that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate is taken as fact by the physics community. The three scientists who made that discovery won the Nobel Prize five years ago. And yet, new research by Oxford University physicists suggests that it may not be that simple. There may not be any acceleration at all. If they’re right our understanding of dark energy is up for debate and so is our standard model of cosmology.
It just got more confusing to living in this particular universe.
Published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the findings incorporate an analysis of an expanded data set and instead suggests the supporting evidence for accelerated expansion is not as airtight as previously suggested. The new data set, which the researchers say is 10 times bigger than than the Nobel-winning data set was, includes a catalogue of 740 Type Ia supernovae, which occur in binary star systems. Type Ia supernovae are important to research into dark energy — which is hypothesized to make up 68.3 percent of all energy in the universe and essentially drive forward the acceleration of universal expansion. Type la supernovae flare up with the same brightness as the stars they burst out from, and therefore glow for large distances across space. Measuring the distance of this brightness is key to researching the changing dynamics of the expansion of the universe.
According to Subir Sarkar, lead author of the Oxford team who wrote the new paper, the new data is more consistent with a constant rate of expansion for the universe. He and his team found that the evidence for accelerated expansion is, “at most, what physicists call ‘3 sigma’,” he said in a news release. “This is far short of the ‘5 sigma’ standard required to claim a discovery of fundamental significance.”
For context, Sarkar recalled the example of the new particle the Large Hardon Collider at CERN found last December, which had a significance between 3.9 and 3.4 sigma. An analogous example in this context would be the recent suggestion for a new particle weighing 750 GeV based on data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In August, however, that confidence dropped after new data showed the significance plummet to less than 1 sigma — indicating the initial data was almost certainly a statistical fluctuation.
The new findings, if true, would also put doubts behind current estimates of how much of our universe is made of “dark energy.” If it turns out the universe is not expanding at an accelerated rate, it upends the entire standard model of cosmology and raises big questions about whether dark energy is real, whether it plays a role in universal expansion, or whether it does something else entirely.
Sarkar and his team, however, are only poking holes in one of the many pieces of supporting evidence the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, and not a constant one — such as the cosmic microwave background of the universe. But Sarkar thinks those tests were conducted on an assumption of an assumed model of accelerated expansion — and he also says “cosmic microwave background is not directly affected by dark energy.”
Sarkar may be onto something, but he’s going to need a lot more evidence to bolster this hypothesis, and a lot more time to persuade his fellow scientists to take this seriously.
“Naturally, a lot of work will be necessary to convince the physics community of this, but our work serves to demonstrate that a key pillar of the standard cosmological model is rather shaky,” he said. “Hopefully this will motivate better analyses of cosmological data, as well as inspiring theorists to investigate more nuanced cosmological models.”
NASA’s Scout Space Monitoring System Gave 5 Days Warning of Passing Asteroid
NASA’s Scout Space Monitoring System Gave 5 Days Warning of Passing Asteroid
P.Carril/ESA
IN BRIEF
Thanks to NASA's Scout, we received warning of an incoming asteroid five days ahead of it (completely missing the planet).
With the ever-lengthening list of near-Earth objects, it is a comfort to know that there are currently systems in place to monitor threats, and they are only getting better.
FIVE DAYS NOTICE
Did you notice anything strange Sunday night? Perhaps a giant asteroid passing by the Earth?
Scout did. Five days early.
NASA JPL’s new space-monitoring system, Scout, detected an asteroid making its way toward our planet last week. In just ten minutes, the software displayed all potential routes the asteroid might take. Some of these paths did intersect our planet, but luckily, we had ample time to assess the possibility.
Scout alerted three other telescopes that would help to narrow down the asteroid’s path. “When a telescope first finds a moving object, all you know is it’s just a dot, moving on the sky,” astronomer Paul Chodas from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told NPR.
“You have no information about how far away it is. The more telescopes you get pointed at an object, the more data you get, and the more you’re sure you are how big it is and which way it’s headed. But sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to make those observations.”
The asteroid, 2016 UR36, passed by us at a distance of 498,000 km (310,000 miles). Sound close? It was 1.3 times further away than the Moon.
A telescope in Hawaii first spotted the asteroid. Rob Ratkowski/Courtesy of Pan-STARRS
BETTER PROTECTION
Five days might not seem like much, but it’s better than what we used to get. The first time researchers detected an asteroid hurdling toward Earth, they had just 19 hours to formulate a plan. Remember the dash cam footage of the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russiaback in 2013? NASA didn’t have any notice at all for that encounter. Thanks to Scout, the confirmation process for asteroids can be expedited.
Currently, NASA has more than 15,000 near-Earth objects on file that could potentially be heading toward Earth. “The NASA surveys are finding something like at least five asteroids every night,” says Chodas.
Don’t start digging your underground bunker just yet, though. Scout’s job is to narrow down that list and assess which of those are a real threat. Scout is still relatively new – this was actually its first case study – but it is expected to be fully operational by the end of this year.
It Took 15 Months, But All of New Horizons’ Data Has Finally Been Downloaded
It Took 15 Months, But All of New Horizons’ Data Has Finally Been Downloaded
NASA/New Horizons
IN BRIEF
Over a year after its closest approach to Pluto, all of the data from New Horizon has finally been safely transmitted to Earth.
The spacecraft made 400-plus scientific observations, which will give astronomers research opportunities for years to come.
Finally, the New Horizons team has their entire “pot of gold.” 15 months after the mission’s flyby of the Pluto system, the final bits of science data from the historic July 2015 event has been safely transmitted to Earth.
“The New Horizons mission has required patience for many years, but we knew the results would be well worth the wait,” New Horizons project scientists Hal Weaver told me earlier this year.
Because of New Horizons’ great distance from Earth and the spacecraft’s low power output (the spacecraft runs on just 2-10 watts of electricity), it has a relatively low ‘downlink’ rate at which data can be transmitted to Earth, just 1-4 kilobits per second. That’s why it has taken so long to get all the science data back to Earth.
“This is what we came for – these images, spectra and other data types that are going to help us understand the origin and the evolution of the Pluto system for the first time,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said a few months ago during an interview. “We’re seeing that Pluto is a scientific wonderland. The images have been just magical. It’s breathtaking.”
Because it was a flyby, and the spacecraft had just one chance at gathering data from Pluto, New Horizons was designed to gather as much data as it could, as quickly as it could – taking about 100 times more data on close approach to Pluto and its moons than it could have sent home before flying onward. The spacecraft was programmed to send select, high-priority datasets home in the days just before and after close approach, and began returning the vast amount of remaining stored data in September 2015.
New Horizons is now over 3.1 billion miles (5 billion km) away from Earth as it continues its journey through the Kuiper Belt. That translates to a current radio signal delay time of five hours, eight minutes at light speed.
The science team created special software to keep track of all the data sets and schedule when they would be returned to Earth.
New Horizons was about 3.7 million mi (6 million km) from Pluto and Charon when it snapped this portrait on July 8, 2015. Credits: NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI
The final item that was received was a portion of a Pluto-Charon observation sequence taken by the Ralph/LEISA imager. It arrived at New Horizons’ mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, at 5:48 a.m. EDT on Oct. 25. The downlink came via NASA’s Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. It was the last of the 50-plus total gigabits of Pluto system data transmitted to Earth by New Horizons over the past 15 months.
“We have our pot of gold,” said Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, of APL.
Bowman also said the team will conduct a final data-verification review of New Horizons two onboard recorders before sending commands to erase all the data on the spacecraft. New Horizons has more work to do, so erasing the “old” data will clear space for new data to be taken during its Kuiper Belt Extended Mission (KEM). The spacecraft will do a series of distant Kuiper Belt object observations as well as perform a close encounter flyby with with a small Kuiper Belt object, 2014 MU69, on Jan. 1, 2019.
“There’s a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth,” said Stern. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do—after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?”
RECONSTRUCTED 2000 YEAR OLD MANUSCRIPT PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF THE NEPHILIM RACE!
RECONSTRUCTED 2000 YEAR OLD MANUSCRIPT PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF THE NEPHILIM RACE!
History is surrounded with mysteries and we add new information every now and then, some of this new information can even rewrite history as we know it.
But the biggest mystery comes from ante deluvian times, when humans and other races roamed the Earth. Several ancient texts speak of a race of supernatural giants called "The Nephilim", which are the offspring of female humans and fallen angels.
There's an ancient 2000 year old manuscript, with little to no information about it's author, that speaks of the Nephilim race and their role in the world. The book in question is called "The Book of Giants". The manuscript can be put in parallel with another ancient christian book called "The Book of Enoch". Enoch was a prophet that was granted a vision of heaven and spoke to many deities.
Could these be proof of the existence of super human giants?
UFOs over Melbourne ECETI Aus Sky Watch October 29th 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFOs over Melbourne ECETI Aus Sky Watch October 29th 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 29, 2016 Location of sighting: Melbourne, Australia This is a really amazing video of a powerful glowing orb summoned that hovers over some people in Melbourne this week. They are part of the US ECETI ranch group, but stationed in Australia. The UFO comes over them on an overcast night, hovers, and then moves about in the sky some before it leaves. They mentioned a Star Language, which is some sort of positive thinking and feelings of love so the UFO will come. As I have said before, UFOs often are equipped with emotional sensors, which are also useful to protect it as well as find those who are receptive to their appearance. Scott C. Waring
This UFO tried hard to disguise itself as a green glowing meteor over Japan yesterday, however it made some amateurish mistakes. First, its glowing a color most meteors don't glow...green. Its rare. Second, its performing the horizontal mambo, and meteorites do not fly horizontal while that low to the planet. Gravity would have pulled it down and it would have a curve. Third and this was the stupidest mistake the aliens made. The main ship turned off its glow for only 1/10th a second, (watch in slow motion) and at that moment a silver disk came out and moved back slowly away from the main ship. This is a disk, with a domed upper portion and grey metallic hull. See, even aliens make mistakes, this pilot, he made a lot. Scott C. Waring
Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Projects
Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Projects
By Denise Chow, Staff Writer
Credit: DARPA
INTRO:The way of the future
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has a reputation for working on some of the most cutting-edge, futuristic projects — many that could easily be mistaken for science fiction. The agency, which falls under the watch of the U.S. Department of Defense, is responsible for developing new technologies for the military.
From humanoid robots to flying armored cars, here are 10 of the coolest DARPA projects.
1. WildCat and BigDog
As their names suggest, WildCat and BigDog are four-legged, headless robots designed to walk, run and carry heavy loads through potentially dangerous terrain, much like deployed troops. DARPA awarded contracts to Boston Dynamics to develop WildCat and BigDog for use by the military.
BigDog, created in 2005, is 3 feet (0.91 meters) long, and stands 2.5 feet (0.76 m) tall. The robot, which is roughly the size of a small mule, is capable of hauling 400 pounds (181 kg) of cargo, and can navigate difficult terrain and inclines up to 35 degrees.
WildCat, however, is quicker and more agile. The robot can gallop up to 16 mph (25 km/h) on flat surfaces, and is part of a DARPA mission to develop robots that can assist human soldiers on a variety of ground missions.
Sometimes life imitates art, as is the case with DARPA's project to develop interfaces that enable soldiers to control and partner with semi-autonomous bipedal machines that, "act as the soldier's surrogate." Sound familiar? Hollywood director James Cameron explored the idea in his 2009 blockbuster hit "Avatar."
In its 2013 budget, DARPA allocated $7 million to its "Avatar Project," which could enable soldiers to control surrogate robots in dangerous combat situations.
Credit: DARPA
3. Excalibur
To reduce the amount of "collateral damage" in war, particularly during battles fought in urban settings, DARPA is developing laser weapons that are small and efficient enough to be used in combat. These experimental laser weapons will be 10 times lighter than existing high-power laser systems currently in use, DARPA officials have said.
The lasers, developed for airplanes, may also be used for laser communications, target designation and airborne self-protection, agency officials added.
Credit: DARPA
4. Falcon Project
DARPA's Falcon Project was announced in 2003 as a joint program with the U.S. Air Force. The project aimed to develop a reusable, unmanned, rapid-strike hypersonic vehicle.
A prototype Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) first flew in April 2010 and again in August 2011. The ultra-fast, arrow-shaped drone flew at blistering hypersonic speeds of Mach 20 (about 20 times the speed of sound), more than 22 times faster than commercial jetliners. During the flight, surface temperatures on the vehicle reached 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,930 degrees Celsius), which is hotter than a blast furnace capable of melting steel.
During both test flights, operators lost contact with the HTV-2 prototypes. In July 2013, DARPA confirmed it would not conduct a third flight of the HTV-2, but research on the project will continue until summer 2014 to gain better understanding of hypersonic flight.
Credit: DARPA
5. Transformer
Imagine a militarized version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This is the thrust of DARPA's Transformer project, which aims to develop a flying armored car. The four-person vehicle will be able to drive normally but also take to the skies to avoid road obstructions or other threats on the ground.
The vehicle is being designed to take off and land from the vertical position, and will be able to fly up to 250 nautical miles on a single tank of fuel. Eventually, these flying tanks may be used for strikes, raids, counterinsurgency operations, reconnaissance, medical evacuation and supply missions.
Credit: DARPA
6. Atlas
DARPA's Atlas project was revealed to the public on July 11, 2013. The bipedal humanoid robot stands 6-feet tall (1.8 m), and is designed to assist with a range of emergency services, including search and rescue operations. The U.S. Department of Defense is not interested in using the Atlas robot in combat situations, officials have said.
Atlas was developed by Boston Dynamics and was based on some of the company's earlier robot creations.
Credit: DARPA
7. Navigation chip
Advances in GPS technology revolutionized tracking and navigation, but what about areas where GPS is unavailable, or the signals are interrupted? To help soldiers find their way around areas of GPS blackout, DARPA researchers are developing a tiny navigation chip that is smaller than a penny.
The so-called timing & inertial measurement unit (TIMU) chip incorporates three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and a highly accurate master clock into a single miniaturized system that can provide precise information for navigation, including orientation, acceleration and time.
DARPA officials have said the navigation chips will not replace GPS, but rather are designed to work when GPS is unavailable or doesn't work.
Credit: Boeing
8. X-37
The Boeing-built X-37 reusable space plane started as a NASA project in 1999, but was eventually transferred to DARPA in 2004 before the Air Force took control of the project two years later.
The unmanned X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle, which resembles a miniaturized version of the space shuttle, rides into orbit atop a rocket and returns to Earth and lands as a space plane. The X-37 launched on its first orbital mission in April 2010.
Previously, DARPA reported it was developing the X-37 to rendezvous and refuel older satellites or perform minor repairs in space using a robotic arm. Speculation mounted, however, that the X-37 was being used by DARPA and the Air Force as a vehicle for space-based weapons. In 2010, a high-ranking Air Force official involved with the project dismissed the rumors, and stressed that the X-37's main purpose is to test space technology.
Credit: PNAS, 2013
9. Brain-Machine interfaces
Imagine if your brain could communicate with an external device, such as a thought-controlled mechanical arm or a device to restore sight. DARPA researchers are investigating potential communication pathways between the human brain and machines to build, assist, augment or repair human cognitive or sensory-motor functions.
Research on these so-called brain-machine interfaces began in the 1970s, and work by DARPA researchers is focused on neuroprosthetics that aim to restore damaged sight, hearing and movement. One of DARPA's brain-machine interface projects is Proto2, a thought-controlled prosthetic arm. Proto2 consists of a dexterous hand and fingers that can perform 25 joint motions.
Credit: DARPA
10. Microscale pumps
DARPA-funded researchers created the world's smallest vacuum pump system that can be used for any electronics or sensors that require a vacuum. In 2008, DARPA's Chip-Scale Vacuum Micro Pumps (CSVMP) program set out to develop the smallest, most power-efficient pumps ever created.
The vacuum pumps could be used to build tiny chemical sensors, such as ultra-sensitive gas analyzers to detect chemical or biological attacks, or to design new sensors or instruments for micro-drones. The penny-size vacuum pumps were created by researchers at the University of Michigan, MIT and Honeywell International.
SpaceX versus Blue Origin: de ontsluiting van de ruimte nadert
SpaceX versus Blue Origin: de ontsluiting van de ruimte nadert
Caroline Kraaijvanger
De final frontier lonkt. En ruimtebedrijven knokken om deze te mogen verleggen. Er wordt zelfs gesproken over een heuse ‘ruimtewedloop’. Voor wie juich jij?
Lang was de ruimte het domein van door overheden gesubsidieerde ruimtevaartorganisaties. Die ruimtevaartorganisaties zetten mensen op de maan, rovers op Mars en stuurden sondes naar planetoïden en kometen. In een baan rond de aarde belanden of een bezoekje brengen aan onze natuurlijke satelliet was slechts voor een handjevol mensen weggelegd en de namen van deze pioniers staan in het geheugen van de mensheid gegrift. Maar de tijden zijn aan het veranderen. De door overheden gesubsidieerde ruimtevaartorganisaties zullen de ruimte op korte termijn moeten gaan delen met private ruimtevaartbedrijven. Deze ‘NewSpace’-beweging is niet meer te stoppen en heeft een helder doel voor ogen: de ruimte ontsluiten voor iedereen.
Dragon en Falcon SpaceX is misschien wel het bekendste ruimtevaartbedrijf. En terecht. Het bedrijf – dat zich bezighoudt met de ontwikkeling, bouw en lancering van raketten en ruimtecapsules – heeft in zeer korte tijd ontzettend veel weten te bewerkstelligen. Nadat het bedrijf in 2002 door Elon Musk werd opgezet, ontwikkelde het een raket (Falcon 9) en ruimtecapsule (Dragon). In december 2010 was Dragon het eerste private ruimteschip in de geschiedenis dat vanuit een lage baan rond de aarde terugkeerde op onze planeet. Twee jaar later bracht het ruimteschip een bezoek aan het internationale ruimtestation. Opnieuw een primeur: nog niet eerder had een privaat ruimteschip het ISS bezocht. En in 2014 krijgt SpaceX van NASA het felbegeerde Commercial Crew Contract. Onder dat contract heeft SpaceX de afgelopen jaren al heel wat voorraden naar het ISS gebracht. En dat is nog maar het begin: uiteindelijk zal SpaceX ook astronauten naar het ISS gaan brengen.
Dragon bij het ISS. Wist je trouwens dat de Nederlandse astronaut André Kuipers Dragon binnenhaalde toen deze voor het eerst een bezoek bracht aan het ISS? Afbeelding: NASA.
Terwijl Dragon zo geschiedenis schrijft, blijft SpaceX sleutelen aan Falcon 9. Want het bedrijf wil de ruimte voor zoveel mogelijk mensen ontsluiten. Maar dat betekent dat de kosten van de ruimtevaart omlaag moeten. Hoe doe je dat? Door onderdelen van de raket opnieuw te gebruiken. Maar dan moet je die raket na lancering wel weer heelhuids op aarde laten landen. En daar heeft SpaceX de afgelopen jaren hard aan gewerkt. Na tal van mislukkingen slaagde het bedrijf er in december 2015 in om de eerste trap van de raket heelhuids op het land te laten landen. En in april van dit jaar lukte datzelfde ook op een drijvend zeeplatform. Ondertussen werkt SpaceX ook nog aan de Falcon Heavy: een zeer krachtige raket die mensen op de maan of Mars moet kunnen brengen.
De eerste trap van Falcon 9 landt heelhuids op aarde. Afbeelding: SpaceX.
Blue Origin Maar SpaceX is niet het enige ruimtebedrijf dat hard aan de weg timmert. Het eveneens bekende Blue Origin zit ook niet stil. Het bedrijf – opgericht in 2000 – richt zich eveneens op de bouw en ontwikkeling van raketten en ruimteschepen en heeft ook als doel om de ruimte voor zoveel mogelijk mensen te ontsluiten. Het bedrijf – opgericht door Jeff Bezos – ontwikkelde de New Shepard: een combinatie van een draagraket en ruimtecapsule. Ook deze draagraket is ontwikkeld met hergebruik in het achterhoofd: Blue Origins slaagde er voor SpaceX al in om de raket heelhuids op aarde te laten landen. Overigens moeten we daar wel een kanttekening bij plaatsen. De eerste rakettrap van New Shepard landde heelhuids op aarde na een suborbitale ruimtevlucht. Tijdens deze vluchten wordt de ruimte wel bereikt, maar keert een ruimtevaartuig terug naar het oppervlak van de aarde alvorens er een omloop rond de aarde is voltooid. Falcon 9 keerde – weliswaar een paar maanden later – heelhuids terug op aarde na een vlucht waarin deze daadwerkelijk een ruimtevaartuig in een baan rond de aarde had geplaatst. En dat was een veel grotere uitdaging dan een suborbitale raket na lancering weer heelhuids op aarde laten landen, zo merkte SpaceX-baas Elon Musk fijntjes op.
De raket van Blue Origin landt keurig op aarde. Afbeelding: Blue Origin.
Inmiddels heeft Blue Origin besloten ook verder te gaan kijken dan de suborbitale vlucht. Recent kondigde het bedrijf de New Glenn aan. Een gigantische raket die – in tegenstelling tot New Shepard – ruimtevaartuigen daadwerkelijk in een baan rond de aarde kan brengen. De raket – die nog ontwikkeld wordt – zal er in een twee- en drietrapsuitvoering zijn. Beide raketten zijn groter dan de Falcon 9-raket van SpaceX. New Glenn moet nog voor 2020 het luchtruim kiezen.
Het ruimteschip van Blue Origin landt aan parachutes weer op aarde. Afbeelding: Blue Origin.
Geld verdienen Zowel SpaceX als Blue Origin zijn private ruimtevaartbedrijven. En dus moet er geld worden verdiend. Maar hoe? Blue Origin zet haar geld op ruimtetoerisme en wil al in 2018 de ‘astronaut experience‘ aan gaan bieden. Toeristen zullen naar een hoogte van zo’n 100 kilometer worden gelanceerd, gewichteloosheid ervaren en natuurlijk genieten van een prachtig uitzicht alvorens ze weer naar de aarde terugkeren. Ook wil Blue Origin raketmotoren aan andere bedrijven verkopen. SpaceX verdient ondertussen natuurlijk aardig aan de Commercial Crew Contracts (die een waarde van zo’n 2,6 miljard dollar hebben).
NEWSPACE
Natuurlijk zijn SpaceX en Blue Origin niet de enige ruimtevaartbedrijven. Er zijn er nog veel meer. Denk aan Virgin Galactic of Bigelow Aerospace. En er komen regelmatig nieuwe bij. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan Moon Express of Planetary Resources.
Verschillen Natuurlijk zijn er de nodige overeenkomsten tussen SpaceX en Blue Origin. Beiden opgezet door mannen die hun vermogen online hebben vergaard. Beide bedrijven richten zich op het ontsluiten van de ruimte. En beide bedrijven zien iets in het hergebruik van raketonderdelen. Maar er zijn ook zeker grote verschillen. Zo zoekt SpaceX eigenlijk continu de aandacht: of het nu gaat om successen of mislukkingen, SpaceX deelt het allemaal. Ook is het bedrijf niet bang om haar grootse ambitie te ventileren. Zo kondigde Musk onlangs nog aan serieuze plannen te hebben voor een reis naar Mars. Sterker nog: de man achter SpaceX onthulde plannen voor een interplanetair ruimteschip en een reusachtige raket die dat ruimteschip op Mars moeten brengen en kolonisatie van de rode planeet mogelijk moeten maken. Als het aan Musk ligt, is er over vijftig tot honderd jaar een zelfvoorzienende kolonie op Mars te vinden. Blue Origin is een stuk geslotener en voorzichtiger. Overigens wil dat niet zeggen dat Mars of de maan niet lonken: Blue Origin fantaseert al over een nieuwe raket (New Armstrong) die de maan en Mars binnen handbereik moeten brengen.
Bezos en Musk lijken het dan – ondanks hun fitties op Twitter – over één ding eens te zijn: de aarde is niet ons eind-, maar ons vertrekpunt. Uiteindelijk zullen we deze planeet verlaten. Misschien omdat het klimaat uit de klauwen loopt, omdat we de aarde uitgeput hebben of louter uit nieuwsgierigheid, maar uiteindelijk zullen miljoenen hun heil elders zoeken. En zowel Bezos als Musk willen daar een bijdrage aan leveren. Dat ze in krap tien, vijftien jaar tijd al zover gekomen zijn, geeft te denken. Waartoe zijn deze bedrijven in staat als we ze nog eens vijf tot tien jaar (zonder al te grote tegenslagen) gunnen? Met een beetje geluk halen de twee kemphanen dan het beste in elkaar naar boven. En daar kan de mensheid dan mooi van profiteren.
Er zijn op dit moment meer dan 15.000 aardscheerders bekend. Dit zijn asteroïden die soms gevaarlijk dicht bij de aarde in de buurt komen.
In 2013 waren er nog maar 10.000 aardscheerders bekend. De database is in korte tijd dus exponentieel gegroeid.
Veel van deze aardscheerders (Near-Earth Objects) kunnen overigens niet inslaan op de aarde. De baan van een aardscheerder brengt een object namelijk binnen 195 miljoen kilometer van de zon. Aangezien de aarde op een afstand van 150 miljoen kilometer om deze ster draait, betekent dit dat er nog sprake is van een flinke marge. Een object dat op een afstand van 190 miljoen kilometer om de zon draait heeft het label ‘aardscheerder’, maar wanneer de afstand tussen deze aardscheerder en de aarde het kleinst is, is er nog steeds sprake van een gat van veertig miljoen kilometer.
Van 27 naar negentig procent De schatting is dat astronomen op dit moment 27 procent van alle aardscheerders groter dan 140 meter gevonden hebben. “We boeken vooruitgang, maar hebben nog een lange weg te gaan”, concludeert Kelly Fast van NASA’s NEO Observations Program. Aan het eind van het volgende decennium moet negentig procent van alle objecten gevonden zijn. Dit moet mogelijk zijn, aangezien telescopen alsmaar beter worden en meer apparaten worden ingezet om aardscheerders te vinden.
Flinke verbeteringen Op dit moment wordt negentig procent van alle nieuwe asteroïden ontdekt dankzij de Catalina Sky Survey en de Pan-STARRS. De telescopen van de Catalina Sky Survey zijn onlangs verbeterd, waardoor er maandelijks drie keer zoveel aardscheerders aan de lijst worden toegevoegd. De observatietijd van het Pan-STARRS-systeem is vergroot naar negentig procent, waardoor ook hier sprake is van een toename van ontdekkingen met een factor drie. Komende herfst wordt er een tweede telescoop ingezet om de database met potentieel gevaarlijke asteroïden uit te breiden.
Nog geen gevaar “De komende honderd jaar zullen geen bekende NEO’s een bedreiging vormen voor de aarde”, zegt Lindley Johnson van NASA. “We hebben bijna alle grote asteroïden al gevonden, maar de kleintjes nog niet.”
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
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