12-02-2017 om 22:36 geschreven door peter  

12-02-2017 om 18:58 geschreven door peter  

12-02-2017 om 18:58 geschreven door peter  

The extraordinary story of the entire class who claimed to have spotted a 40ft-long UFO in a field near their school 40 years ago… and how mystery still surrounds the sighting 

• In 1977 a class in Broad Haven said they saw a UFO near their school playground
• When asked to draw the craft the children produced near-identical pictures
• The sighting helped make the seaside town in South Wales infamous for UFOs
• Four decades later and the mystery still hasn't been completely solved

By Luke Barnes For Mailonline

For forty years it's been a mystery in the small Welsh town of Broad Haven.

In 1977 a class of pupils at the local primary school rushed in from the playground, hearts pounding with fear.

Even under exam conditions the pupils' drawings of the UFO were all remarkably similar

They claimed to have seen a strange silver object hovering just beyond the playground.  

The Headmaster, Ralph Llewellyn, thought their claims were just a practical joke.

But the pupils stuck to their story and even handed a petition in to the local police station demanding the incident be investigated.

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One of the pupils, David Davies, still clearly remembers what the craft he saw looked like.

He told the Mirror: 'It was pearlescent silver-grey, approximately 40ft-long, torpedo, cigar-shaped, with an upper domed section that covered the central third of the vehicle which was topped with red pulsating light.'

The craft was described as silver-grey, 40ft-long and topped with a 'red pulsating light' 

The spookiest part of the story came when the headmaster decided he'd try to catch the children out.   

He sat the classmates down, in exam conditions, and had them draw out the 'craft' they'd supposedly seen.

Remarkably, the drawings were near-identical. 

For the 40th anniversary of the sighting UFO enthusiasts made a pilgrimage to Broad Haven.

Author Neil Spring (far left) and this Swansea UFO group remain determined to get to the bottom of the Broad Haven mystery

But the sightings weren't just limited to the schoolchildren, and the area around Broad Haven soon became known for its UFO activity.

Many suspected that the military might have been involved, as there were a number of high-security bases nearby.  

Author Neil Spring recently attended a village meeting where they discussed new revelations that there had, in fact, been a military base nearby which could have been launching an experimental airplane.

However members of that original 1977 class still maintain they saw a UFO. 

Neil Spring is the author of The Watchers (Quercus Books).  

{http://www.dailymail.co.uk/}

12-02-2017 om 18:50 geschreven door peter  

Zimbabwe school mass UFO sighting – 62 children independently confirm saucer-shaped UFO and alien sighting

62 Zimbabwe children witness something extraordinary

In what is widely considered to be one of the best “close encounter” cases in UFO history, on September 16, 1994, sixty-two children of various races and ethnic backgrounds witnessed an extraordinary spectacle on the playground of Ariel School in the small farming community of Ruwa, Zimbabwe. Students ranging in age from 5 to 12 years old, described (and drew) the same scenario – a fleet of alien UFOs, one of which touched down near their school playground, and two “small gray men with thin necks and huge eyes” who warned the children that humanity should take better care of their planet – or else. Researchers and psychologists, including a noted Harvard University psychiatrist professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, descended on the scene of the sighting and in the end, ruled that the event “seemed to be what it is”. The children had seen something they could not explain – and it terrified them.

Prelude – September 14, 1994 “meteor”

Two days before the Ariel School mass UFO sighting, on September 14, 1994, thousands of Zimbabweans had witnessed a UFO pass across the clear evening sky. In a culture with no widespread knowledge or media coverage of UFO sightings or alien encounters, many felt the object seen in the sky was a meteor or some sort of crashing space vehicle from the United States (despite the fact that some witnesses claimed to have watched the slow-moving light for 2-3 minutes while others claimed it descended and then changed course, levelling off to “follow the tree line”). One witness noted:

“This thing, whatever it was, was beautiful. It had a circular-shaped bright light as the leader, and behind it were tails of light in beautiful colors: green, orange, and yellow. It moved slowly and looked as if it was just above the house. The amazing thing is that it moved absolutely silently.”

Settling on a scientific explanation for their experience (a meteor), two days later, they would rethink what they saw.

The Zimbabwe Ariel School mass UFO sighting

Ariel School is a private elementary school located in Ruwa, about 20 kilometers from Harare, the capitol of Zimbabwe. At approximately 10:15 AM on the Friday morning of September 16, 1994, while teachers were attending a mandatory weekly teachers’ meeting inside the school, the children of Ariel School were sent outside to play on the school playground. One adult supervised the recess that morning, a physiotherapist (Mrs. Kirkman) who operated a small snack bar for the students, selling soft drinks and candies. A wide variety of students of mixed age and ethnic heritage – over 60 black, white, and Asian students – witnessed what happened next.

As the students frolicked noisily around the playground (it was a beautiful, clear morning), several children noticed three objects in the sky (some reported five) above the school. Described as round, silver, and saucer-shaped with lit portals around the perimeter, the objects seemed to move extraordinarily fast disappearing in the blink of an eye and reappearing in another place in the sky a moment later. Eventually, one of the objects landed on the ground about 100 meters from the children.

The object settled in a brushy, wooded area that was uncleared and ruled unsafe for the children to venture into (some children reported that it “hovered” inches above the ground). One of the researchers on the scene described the geography of the  landing area.

“Beyond their playground, which was dotted with several clumps of trees, the rest being mostly cleared ground, there was a bush area. The ground there belonged to the school and although attempts had been made to clear and level it, it really was still rough land: loving grass with thorn and other indigenous bushes, trees growing in higgledy-piggledy fashion, and undergrowth thick and heavy enough to hide a child should he venture there.”

Soon, what the students described as a “small man” could be seen standing on top of the UFO. The occupant of the craft was described as being about one meter (3 ft.) tall, wearing a tight, shiny black and silver one-piece suit (“similar to a wetsuit”), with a slender neck and very large black eyes. Some described the entity as having long hair, a mane, or cape of some sort. It walked down the craft and proceeded in the direction of the children.

As the extraterrestrial entity approached the children, it paused and in an instant, disappeared. Almost at the same moment, another creature (or possibly the same) appeared behind the grounded UFO and then after a brief moment, once again disappeared. Within seconds, the craft lifted off and vanished into the sky above the school.

Many of the smaller children were terrified and began crying for help. The “little man” evoked memories of African legends they had heard about demons and ghosts who ate little children. Some of the children ran to Mrs. Kirkman, who was attending the snack bar, but she did not believe their story, and continued with her duties. A researcher documented the testimony of the first adult witness, the snack shop operator, Mrs. Kirkman.

“Mrs. Kirkman told me that when the children came running into the Tuckshop, talking excitedly about ‘a small man running around with a band around his head and a one-piece suit’, she was totally skeptical. [She later said that she thought the children were playing]”

Upon hearing the children’s story, Colin Mackie, the Headmaster, had the children return to the classroom and sketch what they had seen. By the time researchers arrived on the scene the following day, they had 35 various drawings waiting for them. All of the drawings were similar in their depiction of the UFO and its occupants, illustrating the same disc-shaped craft and small, bug-eyed alien entity.

One of the older girls described the entity she had seen as a creature with a “small nose and a mouth that was a small, straight line” adding that “the eyes were very big and slanting”. Another described the ET as “thin and skinny with a scrawny neck and eyes that were large and oval-shaped”.

Pointing out that the alien entity never spoke to them directly, a few of the older students noted that they had communicated with the craft’s occupants and were informed by the ET that we were destroying Earth by polluting it, and unless we changed our ways, there would be dire consequences.

“Those thoughts came from the man – the man’s eyes.”

Preconceived notions of aliens and UFOs were quickly ruled out – many of the children admitted to never having heard of “UFOs” before the event.

Noted UFO investigator and psychotherapist Cynthia Hind and Harvard psychiatric professor and Cambridge Hospital physician Dr. John E. Mack spent two days interviewing the parents, teachers, and children about their experience. Video of the interviews shows a group of very serious children calmly, and convincingly, explaining what they saw. One witness to the filming of the interviews noted:

“When they were interviewed by Mack, with all his professional skills, it was clear they were telling the truth — their voice, tone, their body language. They were so consistent, they told their stories with such conviction. And they spoke about it in their own language. One child recalled being told by the alien that we should not be so ‘techknowledged’ — why make up something like that?”

Dr. Mack analyzed the interviews and concluded that the children did not experience a mass delusion – what they had witnessed that day was real.

“[The children] experienced a very powerful encounter with these beings and we’re left with a rather disturbing fact that this seems to be what it is and it seems to have no other psychiatric explanation.”

Aftermath

Typically with children’s “tall tales”, experts point out that in almost all cases, the child will eventually admit to the lie. In 2010, the children, who were now adults, were again interviewed about their experience. Sixteen years after the event – not one of the 62 children recanted their story. Here are snippets of what the witnesses, who are now adults, said 16 years after the event.

“It was that face, that craft. It will never go out of my mind.”

“We [the witnesses] met up on many occasions after that and hugged and shook our heads and said ‘that was the most amazing experience of our lives’.”

“It was strange, it was exciting. You don’t see stuff like that every day. That was like a once in a lifetime experience.”

“We *know* we didn’t just make this up. Something definitely was happening. Whether it was UFOs or whether it was who know what else, we can’t say for sure one way or another but definitely there was something that happened there that day and it got the whole school riled up.”

“If there was one experience in my life that I’d like to relive, it would be that particular experience.”

One parent said of her child:

“He never stopped talking about it. He has *never* stopped talking about it. And he has believed all this time that it did happen.”

A teacher professed that she believed the childrens’ story and was convinced that they had witnessed something extraordinary.

“I don’t believe for a minute you could get that many kids to agree to do something like that. I really don’t. I know children well enough, I just don’t think that could happen, so I’m absolutely sure that something did happen there that day.”

Six years after the incident, UFO investigator Cynthia Hind died after a short battle with cancer.

Shortly after the event, Dr. Mack, a tenured professor, was censured by Harvard University. According to BBC, it was the first time in history that a tenured Harvard professor, who was not suspected of ethics violations or professional misconduct, was subjected to such an investigation. He was later cleared and given Harvard’s blessing to continue his research.  A few years later, Mack was struck by a “drunk driver” during a visit to London.  He died on the scene.

Additional information

Progress of documentary

The South African newspaper The Witness reports on the progress of the John E. Mack Institute’s documentary about the Ariel School Sighting.

April 16, 2008

American film maker Randall Nickerson is currently visiting southern Africa to make a documentary that follows up an incident that happened at the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, in 1994, when 62 children aged between eight and 12 reported seeing a UFO and “strange beings” during their morning break.

Those children are now young adults scattered around the globe. Nickerson is tracking them down and interviewing them about the experience. “Their stories have not changed at all,” he says. “Not what you would expect if they had made it all up.”

So what exactly happened on that day in 1994 at the school in Ruwa just east of Harare? “It was morning break and they were out in the school yard playing,” says Nickerson. “They saw one main silver craft that had four others around it,” says Nickerson. “It came down on a hill beyond the school yard that was out of bounds. The boundary was the edge of the school yard, then it was bush and the hill.

“They ran to the edge of the school yard to see what this thing was. They saw this small creature walk around on top of the craft while another came down to check out the children. He was all in black, with a very tight suit. The children said he had big eyes ‘like rugby balls’.

The children had direct eye contact with this creature. There seems to have been some kind of communication with the children about the state of the world — what we are doing to the planet, the destruction we are causing, although not all the children got this message. Some of the children were traumatized, others were excited. The young children were the most traumatized as they were at the front of the group.

“They all went screaming back to the teachers. The teachers didn’t believe them at first. But then they went home and told their parents who came to the school and wanted to know what had happened.”

Soon afterwards the children were asked to draw pictures of what they had seen. “They did this separately. The drawings were all the same.”

A BBC television crew were first on the scene to follow it up. In November 1994, Harvard professor of psychiatry John E. Mack visited the school and filmed interviews with the children. He was assisted by South African producer Nicky Carter who had already made a short documentary on the subject for the SABC. “I had a half-brother at the school,” she says. “He was off sick on the day it happened, but the children told him all about it and he contacted me.”

Carter has no doubt the children were telling the truth. “When they were interviewed by Mack with all his professional skills it was clear they were telling the truth — their voice tone, their body language. They were so consistent, they told their stories with such conviction. And they spoke about it in their own language. One child recalled being told by the alien that we should not be so ‘techknowledged’ — why make up something like that?”

Mack, a Pulitzer prize winner for his biography of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) titled A Prince of Our Disorder, was a highly respected psychiatrist. However, when he began researching the phenomenon of reported alien abductions, his fellow academics looked askance. In 1994, when his book Abduction appeared, a committee was appointed to review Mack’s clinical care and investigation of the people who had shared their alien encounters with him. According to the BBC, “It was the first time in Harvard’s history that a tenured professor was subjected to such an investigation.”

After 14 months of inquiry, Harvard issued a statement stating that the dean had “reaffirmed Dr. Mack’s academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment”.

In 2004, Mack was killed by a drunk driver while he was visiting London to lecture at a T. E. Lawrence conference.

Mack was guarded in his interpretation of the abduction phenomenon. To one interviewer who said that Mack seemed “inclined to take these [abduction] reports at face value”, Mack replied saying: “Face value I wouldn’t say. I take them seriously. I don’t have a way to account for them.”

In a BBC interview he said: “I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people. [But] I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here that I can’t account for in any other way. Yet I can’t know what it is but it seems to me that it invites a deeper, further inquiry.”

Nickerson sees himself as taking that inquiry further after being commissioned by the John E. Mack Institute, along with producer Dominique Callimanopulos, to make a documentary incorporating the interview footage shot in 1994 with follow-up material shot in the present.

“I want to present the story objectively,” says Nickerson. “To show the original raw material. That’s what initially interested me about this case. These children all describing seeing the same thing. You can tell they are not lying. But having seen this footage I thought: I need to go to this place, to talk to people, I need to investigate it for myself. Did this really happen?

“The subject has to be approached as scientifically as possible,” he says. “There are questions that we need to ask. It’s a case of presenting the evidence just like court.”

Despite this rigorous approach, isn’t there a danger he will simply encounter those on the “lunatic fringe”? “I have found those are the people who have all the answers, but people to whom something like this has really happened don’t. They have millions of questions. There is a humility about them, they realize it’s not about them.

At the beginning of the project Nickerson set about contacting those people who had been among the 62 children who had witnessed the sighting. They are mainly students in Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Britain.

Tracking them down hasn’t been that difficult. “They are contacting us because of what we put up on the John E. Mack Institute website. What is interesting is that their stories remain the same as in 1994.

“They were affected profoundly,” says Nickerson. “At the time one girl was told by her parents not to talk about it, that she had imagined it all. But then she found other people’s stories on the Internet. She got in touch with them and realized ‘Oh my God, that was real’.

Others I’ve met never doubted it. They say the experience opened up new horizons for them.”

Nickerson cites two students who are now studying in the U.S. “Their father said they would never have done that, but after their experience the children were totally changed, that’s what convinced him that something really happened.”

Nickerson’s first stop during his visit to southern Africa was Ariel School. “I interviewed teachers and workers who were there at the time.” He also came across people from two different schools in the area who had similar sightings on the same day.

Nickerson is now in South Africa trying to track down those living here who were witnesses on that day. He will be here until the end of April following up leads resulting from two radio interviews he has given.

Article from  The Cape Times regarding the documentary

August 26, 2008

UFO sighting in Zimbabwe

By Tom Powell

American film-maker Randall Nickerson is in Cape Town this week seeking inspiration for a documentary he is putting together about a UFO sighting in Zimbabwe in 1994.During morning break on September 14 of that year, 62 schoolchildren between the ages of eight and 12 saw a strange craft land 150 metres from the Ariel School in Ruwa, from which two small beings emerged which were described as having “big eyes like rugby balls”.The children’s individual descriptions of the phenomenon were so similar that news of the sighting spread around the globe. Nickerson was approached with footage taken by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Professor John Mack, who travelled to Zimbabwe to interview the children after the event.

Nickerson said: “This is a story the world needs to see. Personally, I think it’s moving. I’ve found hundreds, if not thousands, of people who believe it and couldn’t find anyone who didn’t. It blew my mind when I saw it.” Although Nickerson admits the footage of the event makes it difficult to disprove the phenomenon, he doesn’t want his film to be biased. “I don’t want to steer the documentary in any direction at all. I’d rather present all the evidence and let people make up their own minds.”Refusing to believe so many people can be mistaken, Nickerson is visiting southern Africa to shed light on those events.Having visited the school itself, Nickerson is now in Cape Town to track down some witnesses and investigate some “unearthly” sightings that occurred in South Africa, including two UFO sightings in Port Shepstone and Johannesburg in April. Anyone who saw the event in Zimbabwe can contact Nickerson on 082 815 4731 or by e-mail at rsnick@gmail.comtom.powell@inl.co.za. 

Original AFRINEWS report about the incident

Cynthia Hind, UFO AFRINEWS 1994

The Children of Ariel School – Case No. #96. Ruwa, Zimbabwe

UFO AFRINEWS 1994

On Friday 16th September, at approximately 10:15, 62 children from Ariel School, a private primary school in Ruwa (about 20 km from Harare) were in their playing field for the mid-morning break. Suddenly, they saw three silver balls in the sky over the school. These disappeared with a flash of light and then reappeared elsewhere. This happened three times and then they started to move down towards the school with one of them landing (or hovering) over a section of rough ground made up of trees, thorn bushes, and some brown-grey cut grass with bamboo shoots sticking up out of the ground. The children are not allowed in this area although it is adjacent to their playing field and is not fenced off, because of snakes, spiders and perhaps other harmful creatures. One can soon disappear from view while walking here, and there is only one very rough track used by tractors in an attempt to clear this area.

There is a line of electricity pylons and according to one boy, the object followed along this line prior to landing. There is also some controversy as to whether the object _landed_ on the ground or hovered above it. On Tuesday, 20th September, I went out to the school with a BBC reporter and their television equipment, as well as my son and Gunter Hofer, a young man who builds his own electrical equipment, viz, a Geiger counter, a metal detector and a magnetometer, to try and see if the object left any traces behind.

The headmaster of the school is Mr. Colin Mackie, who was most co-operative, and although he had never been involved with UFOs or a believer in them, said that he believed the children had seen what they said they saw.

I was able to interview about 10 or 12 older children and this was recorded for BBC television.

One eyewitness, Barry D., said he had seen three objects flying over, with flashing red lights. They disappeared, and reappeared almost immediately, but somewhere else. This happened about three times. Then they came and landed near some gum trees; Barry said the main one (object) was about the size of his thumb nail held at arm’s length. The reports were similar although some children were more observant than others. The consensus of opinion was that an object came down in the area where they indicated, about 100 metres from where they were at the edge of the school playing field. Then a small man (approx 1 metre in height) appeared on top of the object. He walked a little way across the rough ground, became aware of the children and disappeared. He, or someone very like him, then reappeared at the back of the object. The object took off very rapidly and disappeared. The little man was dressed in a tight-fitting black suit which was ‘shiny’ according to one observant girl (11 years of age). He had a long scrawny neck and huge eyes like rugby balls. He had a pale face with long black hair coming below his shoulders.

I had suggested to Mr. Mackie prior to visiting the school and before the children had been interviewed, that he let the children draw what they had seen and he now has about 30-40 drawings, some of which are very explicit and clear, although some are rather vague. The children’s’ ages vary from 5/6 to 12 years. I have 22 photocopies of the clearer drawings as Mr. Mackie kindly allowed me to page through the pictures and choose those I wanted. Most of the descriptions are similar but some of the craft are very obviously ‘flying saucers’, and I wonder how many of these children have had access to the media. Others are crude but more or less in this saucer shape.

The children vary in cultures: there are black, white, coloured and Asian children. One little girl said to me, ‘I swear by every hair on my head and the whole Bible that I am telling the truth.’ I could see the pleasure on her face when I told her that I believed her. The smaller children from 5-7 years were very frightened at the time and ran shouting ‘Help me, help me.’ When the older children asked why they were saying this, the reply was, ‘He is coming to eat us.’ I should think this applied more to the black African children who have legends of _tokoloshies_ eating children.

Their teachers were in a meeting and did not come out. When I queried the headmaster about this he said the children always shouted and yelled during their playtime and no-one thought there was anything unusual going on. The only other adult available at the time was one of the mothers who was running the tuckshop. When the children came to call her, she did not believe them and would not come out: she was not prepared to leave the tuckshop with all the food and money. Gunter and the men thoroughly examined the ground around where the children had seen the object, but could get no reaction on the geiger counter or any other equipment. If the object was hovering perhaps nothing would show.

I walked, on my own, along the electricity pylons for quite a away, caught up in thorn bushes, trampling blithely over snake holes and discarding all caution. I found no place where some object could have landed and pressed down the foliage. In fact, I should think the bamboo stumps would have been a deterrent. The day was hot, around 33 C (91F)…

Dr John Mack was visiting Zimbabwe at the time of the event, and he spent two days at Ariel School with the children. He also spoke to the Headmaster, Colin Mackie, the teachers and some of the parents. John and his fellow researcher, Dominique Callimanopulos, were able to get through to the parents and teachers and convince them that even if they did not believe the children, it was counter-productive to accuse them of lying. Listen and think about what they were saying, he advised. His particular interest in child psychiatry was also of great use during the questioning and many former hidden memories came to light, something John is sure to make public when he has had a chance to reassess his interviewing.(sic)

There is a lot more to this incident than has been uncovered now and we will report further in UFO AFRINEWS No. 12.

Sources: UFO AFRINEWS Nov 1994, Feb 1995, About.com, John Mack Institute, RANDI, Wikipedia, Reddit, Educating Humanity, Unexplained Mysteries, YouTube interviews of children

12-02-2017 om 18:27 geschreven door peter  

UFO Seen Landed On Side Of Road In Small Town In Kansas, Feb 2, 2017, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Feb 2, 2017
Location of sighting: Pittsburg, Kansas, USA
Source: MUFON #82017

Here is an interesting report that also seems to have something to do with the UFO on a semi trailer being transported at midnight to Area 51. This person saw a disk on the side of the road with legs on it. It may be possible that this disk was retrieved by the USAF and taken to the top secret Air Force Base. Sadly we don't have better photos of the the disk. I believe the person taking the photos was either embarrassed to be seen taking photos or was feeling frightened by it. This was along the road in Pittsburg, Kansas last week and does look the same size as the UFO disk being transported on trailer. Click here to view last weeks report videos.
Scott C. Waring

Eyewitness states:

On feb 2, 2017, i was heading east bound on highway 400 in pittsburg, ks. As i was going around the corner, i noticed on my left, parked on side road running parralel to highway 400, what appeared to be a ufo being transported on back of flatbed of semi. To the left of the parked semi, was a highway patrolman parked right next to semi facing highway 400. Around the object, on the ground were orange cones as if it was a construction site. I then turned around and headed west bound to get anotger view just to see if what i thought i seen was true. It appeared to be perfect disc shape and appeared to be so big in size that it was hanging on side of flatbed. I then turned around once again heading east bound again but this time took pictures. This was approximately at 1130 hours cst. I then went to work trying to process what i had just seen. At approximately 2200 hours, i came back the same way to see if the objectbwas still there. It was, however this time it is dark and tge semi lights were on as if they were about to leave.

Also, now there are 2 highway patrolman and there was also a bright flashing light right on side of the object. To someone who has not seen this in daytime, will not be able to see at night because the light was so bright, it made it impossible to see the object at night as if they were hiding something. I started to investigate what i seen and there has been only 2 other reports of this incident. 1 report is supposedly a video from a year ago. Since there were only one legit reporting, they are saying this could be a hoax. It is not. I seen it. Which is why i am sending this. I would like to please know more about this incident if any other reports were made. Attached photos will include 4 photos taken heading eastbound. All photos are sent as they were taken. You will need to zoom in. 

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

12-02-2017 om 17:31 geschreven door peter  

Robo-Bees Could Aid Insects with Pollination Duties

Mini drones sporting horsehair coated in a sticky gel could one day take the pressure off beleaguered bee populations by transporting pollen from plant to plant, researchers said.

Roughly three-quarters of the world’s flowering plants and about 35 percent of the world's food crops depend on animals to pollinate them, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Some of nature's most prolific pollinators are bees, but bee populations are declining around the world, and last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed a native species as endangered for the first time. [No Creepy Crawlies Here: Gallery of the Cutest Bugs]

Now, researchers from Japan said they've taken the first steps toward creating robots that could help pick up the slack from insect pollinators. The scientists created a sticky gel that lets a $100 matchbox-size drone pick up pollen from one flower and deposit it onto another to help the plants reproduce.

"This is a proof of concept — there's nothing compared to this. It's a totally first-time demonstration," said study leader Eijiro Miyako, a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science in Tsukuba, Japan. "Some robots are expected to be used for experiments in pollination, but no one has tried yet."

A happy accident

The key innovation of the new study, published today (Feb. 9) in the journal Chem, is the so-called ionic liquid gel, but according to Miyako it was more down to luck than design. The gel was actually the result of a failed attempt to create electrically conducting liquids and had sat forgotten in a desk drawer for nearly a decade.

But after eight years, it still hadn't dried out, which most other gels would have done, and was still very sticky, Miyako said. Fortunately, this discovery coincided with Miyako watching a documentary that detailed concerns about insect pollinators.

 "I actually dropped the gel on the floor and I noticed it absorbed a lot of dust, and everything linked together in my mind," he told Live Science.

The gel has just the right stickiness, meaning it can pick up pollen but is not so adhesive that it won't let the grains go.

The scientists next tested how effectively the gel could be used to transport pollen among flowers. To do so, the researchers put droplets of the material on the back of ants and left the insects overnight in a box full of tulips. The next day, the scientists found that the ants with the gel had picked up far more pollen grains than those insects that lacked the sticky substance.

In a side experiment, the researchers found that it was possible to integrate photochromic compounds, which change color when exposed to UV or white light, into the gel. Scientists stuck this material onto living flies, giving the bugs color-changing capabilities. This, Miyako said, could ultimately act as some kind of adaptive camouflage to protect pollinators from predators.

Real solutions?

But while improving the ability of other insects to pollinate flowers is a potential solution to falling bee numbers, Miyako said he was not convinced, and so began to look elsewhere. "It's very difficult using living organisms for real practical realizations, so I decided to change my approach and use robots," he said.

The hairs that make insects like bees fuzzy are important for their role as pollinators, because the hairs increase the surface area of the bees' bodies, giving pollen more material to stick to. In order to give the smooth, plastic drone similar capabilities, the scientists added a patch of horsehair to the robot's underside, which was then coated with the gel.

The researchers then flew the drones to collect pollen from the flowers of Japanese lilies and transport this pollen to other flowers. In each experiment, the researchers made 100 attempts at pollinating the flower, achieving an overall success rate of 37 percent. Drones without the patch of hair, or with uncoated hair, failed to pollinate the plants.

Miyako said there are currently limitations to the technology, because it is difficult to manually pilot the drone. However, he added that he thinks GPS and artificial intelligence could one day be used to automatically guide robotic pollinators.

Before these robo-bees become a reality, though, the cost of the drone will have to come down drastically and it's 3-minute battery life will need to improve significantly, Miyako said. But he added that he is confident this will happen eventually.

Dave Goulson, a professor at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, said he sees the intellectual interest in trying to create robot bees, but he's skeptical  about how practical they are and worries about distracting from more vital pollinator conservation work.Goulson specializes in the conservation of bumblebees but was not involved with the new research.

In a blog post, he wrote that there are roughly 3.2 trillion bees on the planet. Even if the robo-bees cost 1 cent per unit and lasted a year, which he said is a highly optimistic estimate, it would cost $32 billion a year to maintain the population and would litter the countryside with tiny robots.

"Real bees avoid all of these issues; they are self-replicating, self-powering and essentially carbon-neutral," Goulson wrote in the post. "We have wonderfully efficient pollinators already. Let's look after them, not plan for their demise."  

Original article on Live Science.

Editor's Recommendations

• The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created
• Photos: Oddball Bees Build Nests Out of Sands
• On the Hunt: Honeybee Scouts Find Food

{ http://www.livescience.com/ }

12-02-2017 om 01:18 geschreven door peter  

A mysterious object will pass near Earth in 2017.

The object has confused astronomers ever since it was first spotted, mainly because of its strange rotation and longevity in space. Some people think that this is a section of the Apollo 12 rocket, but according to Scotti it is probably something else:

An artistic depiction of what the “alien probe” may look like.
“We looked into all the possibilities for it being man-made. There were a few possible spacecraft and rocket bodies that might be 1991 VG. But, when we looked into each, we were able to eliminate each of them

According to other people, the strange object may also be a secret Soviet rocket from the Space Race era. It is a fact that the Soviets had equally powerful rockets as the American ones and it is quite possible that they launched one to get to the moon and covered it up if things went badly.

When 1991 VG was first spotted, it was around 10 metres in diameter, passing 280,000 miles from Earth – around 50,000 miles further than the Earth and the moon. The object showed a rapid rate of rotation and its brightness fluctuated. At that time, this kind of behaviour was not observed at any asteroid of similar size. The object’s orbit was also similar to Earth’s orbit.

After gathering more information about 1991 VG, Scotti realised that this object had passed Earth one more time in March 1975. Again this is something that is not characteristic for an asteroid. They don’t tend to pass twice in the same spot

Duncan Steel, an astronomer at University of Adelaide, suggested it might be an “alien probe observed in the vicinity of our planet.” He only mentioned this theory in order to disprove it. In further interviews, he has stated that he isn’t convinced that VG 1991 is of extraterrestrial origin.

This hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from continuing to spread the idea of an extraterrestrial origin of the object. They still keep citing Steele’s work as their main source.

Nostradamus is quoted as saying mankind would discover a machine in space that was sent to us by the WATCHERS! in 2017!

{ http://ufomania.cz/ }

12-02-2017 om 01:05 geschreven door peter  

UFO – corpuscular boat: Unique video filmed in Bulgaria.

Corpuscular ship is constructed in detail in accordance with the law of God in the form of light energy. Light corpuscular ship is therefore better as a spiritual power manifested corpuscular ships. The ship can move faster than light. When the object moves faster than light, disappearing from sight. Goes into another dimension.

The human eye sees everything that is inside of the light spectrum. When I mention the light spectrum and hit the light spectrum of the sun. With increased intensity of light would blind man. His senses would not notice a higher form of vibration. It can not therefore see the world resulting on a different frequency, although located around beside him. Corpuscular ship can move at high speed. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. By increasing the energy of the corpuscular vessel there is an increase of its speed. If it goes into the vessel by its frequency, it means that moves slower than the maximum speed. This makes it the human eye sees. It manifests itself in the form of light. Reducing the speed to changing light and the human eye, the ship must appear as a solid object. If the moving ship and if it stays on the molecular level, the maximum rate will remain invisible to the human eye.

That they are explained in words that corpuscular ship may be the front door of your house and you will not see it. The ship can come to a man secretly. People of it may remain hidden from man.
The people of the corpuscular vessels reduces its frequency to a protein molecule in the cell become visible to the human eye. They therefore come secretly and suddenly appear before you in the form of light and energy. At that moment comes the light source, the energy in the form of spirit. You will be influenced by your spirit will be affected the most energy, which manifested itself around you and you will be allowed contact with corpuscular ships. In contact with them you should not worry. Believe me, it’s something natural. There is nothing mysterious. Only one who manifests the spirit of mentally able to take this energy will be able to experience the transition from one age to another.

{ http://ufomania.cz/ }

12-02-2017 om 00:57 geschreven door peter  

The Search for Life

12-02-2017 om 00:47 geschreven door peter  

UFOs Seen Over USAF Missile And Nuclear Facilities

The Disclosure Project reports that several military and intelligence witnesses who were members of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and other nuclear specialists have come forward with testimony proving that UFOs are real and appear to be concerned about our nuclear weapons. The Project has obtained the firsthand testimony of several such insiders whose documents and corroborating testimony proves that UFOs have monitored sensitive nuclear facilities since at least the 1950s. While the UFOs were not hostile, it was made clear that they were very concerned about human weapons of mass destruction. On one occasion, UFOs over a SAC Nuclear launch area took more than a dozen intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) off line.

Lt. Colonel Dwynne Arneson: US Air Force,.ret. states,:

"I was the top-secret control officer at Malmstom AFB for the 20th Air Division. I happened to see a message that came through my communications center. It said...that 'A UFO was seen near missile silos'...and it was hovering. It said that the crew going on duty and the crew coming off duty all saw the UFO just hovering in midair. It was a metallic circular object and from what I understand, the missiles were all shut down. What I mean by 'missiles going down' is that they went dead. And something turned those missiles off, so they couldn't be put back in a mode for launching."

Captain Robert Salas: SAC Missile Launch Officer [1964-1971]:

"The UFO incident happened on the morning of March 16, 1967, at Oscar Flight one of five launch control facilities assigned to the 490th Strategic Missile Squadron. I received a call from my topside security guard...and he said that he and some of the guards had been observing some strange lights flying around the site and the launch control facility. I said, you mean UFO? He said, well, he didn't know what they were but they were lights and were flying around. They were not airplanes; they were not helicopters, they weren't making any noise... [A little later] our missiles started shutting down one by one. By shutting down, I mean they went into a "no-go" condition meaning they could not be launched. These weapons were Minuteman One missiles and were of course nuclear-tipped warhead missiles...this incident was of extreme concern to SAC headquarters because they couldn't explain it."

Colonel Ross Dedrickson: US Air Force/Atomic Energy Commission, ret.): "

After  retiring from the Air Force I joined the Boeing company and was responsible for accounting for all of the nuclear fleet of Minuteman missiles. In this incident they actually photographed the UFO following the missile as it climbed into space and, shining a beam on it, neutralized the missile. I also learned of a number of incidents such as a couple of nuclear weapons sent into space were destroyed by the extraterrestrials. Our government sent a nuclear weapon for explosion on the moon's surface...[And] the ETs destroyed the weapon as it went toward the moon. [Apparently] the idea of any explosion in space by any Earth government was not acceptable to the extraterrestrials, and that has been demonstrated over and over." 

Professor Robert Jacobs: Lt. USAF 1369th Photo Squadron:

"...we were testing ballistic missiles that were to deliver nuclear weapons on target...my duty [was] to supervise the instrumentation photography of every missile that went down in that western test range...and into the frame came something else. It flew into the frame and shot a beam of light at the warhead. Now, remember, all this stuff was flying at several thousand miles an hour, so this thing fires a beam of light at the warhead, hits it, The warhead tumbles out of space. The object, the points of light that we saw, the warhead and so forth, were traveling through subspace about sixty miles straight up, and they were going somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven to fourteen thousand miles an hour, when this thing caught up to them, flew in, flew around them, and flew back out."

Mr. Harland Bentley:

"I have been in a graduate program for nuclear engineeringand have been working contracts since 1963: NASA, Department of Energy, and several other electronics firms in the DC area. I was at a facility in California.doing classified workwhich I can't say too much about..Our astronauts were doing a loop around the moon in 1967 or 1968I heard them say they had a bogey [term used to denote UFOs]it was another type of ship. There were portals that they could see into. They could see beings of some sort. They did not describe these beings, they just took photographs. They just said it was a saucer shaped craft. Then they said, 'There they go,' and they [the bogey] went out of sight almost immediately."

The Disclosure Project, a nonprofit research and public interest group, has identified hundreds of military, intelligence, government and corporate witnesses. See: http://www.DisclosureProject.org.

Thanks to Bruce-Knapp ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net.

Editors Notes: I have met or talked to many of the witnesses who have impressive UFO knowledge that they obtained while working for the government. Very few UFO investigators have the first hand knowledge these witnesses possess.

{ http://www.rense.com }

12-02-2017 om 00:36 geschreven door peter  

UFO sightings in Derbyshire: do aliens exist?

12-02-2017 om 00:10 geschreven door peter  

NASA Discovers an Organism That Can Survive 16 Months in Outer Space

 

Seabamirum/Flickr

IN BRIEF

• Algae has proven to be quite the formidable organism by being able to survive 16 months in space outside of the International Space Station.
• The samples will now be sent back to Earth to test if there were any genetic changes in the specimens.

ALGAE IN SPACE

Scientists aboard the International Space Station (ISS) recently ran an experiment where they let algae loose into the vacuum of space for a full 16 months. And, surprisingly enough, the simple plants survived the harrowing journey. Despite extreme temperature variations, UV radiation, cosmic radiation, and incredible length of time, the algae were brought back aboard still alive.

The researchers aboard the ISS are currently running experiments as part of the Biology and Mars Experiment (BIOMEX) project. Within this experimental algae portion of the project, they tested the durability of algae species that are known to love freezing temperatures. Since the mixture of extreme conditions found in space is impossible to replicate in a laboratory environment exactly, the crew on the ISS used their location to put these cold-loving species to the test. However, despite knowing what these plants will endure on Earth, the scientists were astonished at how much they can really take.

COLD LOVING ALIENS

Post-experiment, the researchers aboard the ISS will send these algae samples back to Earth. There, they will be rigorously tested to see the actual extent that the temperatures and combined radiation impacted them. This information could be crucial to future human missions to Mars. It could help to ensure the safety of humans and any plant-based food to be consumed.

However, beyond the positive benefits that this research could have on future missions of humans in space, it could also potentially tell us a little bit more about alien life. According to many, including famed astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, thinking that we are somehow the only living creatures in the universe would be “inexcusably egocentric.” And, while previously, few would have thought that any plants could survive such an extended stay in space, we now know better. And so, while certain environments in space may seem inhospitable, we now know that life could exist in places we never before would have suspected.

References: 

• SlashGear, 
• Fraunhofer Institute

{ https://futurism.com/ }

12-02-2017 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

Lileks: Take his word for it – UFO over Minneapolis was real (maybe)

MARK WILSON, ROSWELL DAILY RECORD

Anyone see a UFO?

JAMES LILEKS@LILEKS

I saw a UFO on Sunday, and I wasn’t alone. Trouble is, I’m sure there’s a good explanation. Ask any expert.

“Well, what you’re seeing is actually the planet Venus.” But it landed on my lawn. “That’s called atmospheric lensing; it just looks nearer than it is. “It set down on the jungle gym and crushed it.” That’s called the overweight kid from a few houses down playing without permission.” (Indulgent chuckle.)

It made a high screaming noise and 50 geese dropped dead out of the sky with their feathers melted. “We’ve been seeing a lot of fast-acting avian parasites in migratory species lately.”

It took my wife. “Well, you know what they say, men are from Mars, women are from Venus! Call us if you have any other questions.”

Everything can be explained. A few years ago I saw an incredibly fast light streak low across the sky, east to west, parallel to the ground; if it was the International Space Station, they were picking tree leaves out of their antennas for days.

Which brings me back to the alien spacecraft we saw last Sunday. My wife and I were outside. “What’s that?” she said, pointing up. It was a spherical, silver object, like those hard things they use to decorate cakes and make you chip a tooth.

“A child’s balloon,” I said, because as we all know the streets are full of kids carrying helium balloons who are startled by a backfiring car and let go of the string. But — holy crow! — it was surrounded by a swarm of other small objects, some of which were segmented and moving around it.

Wait, no, those are floaters in my eyeball.

A drone? Too high, and we’re right in the flight path for the airport. If you’re some idiot flying a drone around an airport and you see your toy go into a passenger jet’s engine, you drive home really fast wondering if you can wipe that off your Amazon purchase history.

A few days later a story pops up in reddit.com: Anyone see that big UFO over Midway? Sunday afternoon? Cars were pulled over, people were looking up and pointing. City Pages picked up the story, and now here I am moving it up the Ladder of Credible Media Outlets.

But here’s the one nagging question: Where are the pictures?

Everyone has movie cameras in their pockets now. No video of this thing? Well, I can only speak for myself. My iPhone couldn’t zoom enough. I ran upstairs to get my good video camera, pointed it up at the sky — and I got a dead battery alert.

That’s why there’s no pictures. Scientists will tell you: Venus will drain your battery as fast as anything.

11-02-2017 om 23:58 geschreven door peter  

UFOs Over Rio de Janeiro Drops Probes To Ocean, Feb 10, 2017, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Feb 10, 2017
Location of sighting: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Watch as a glowing UFO over Rio de Janeiro begins to produce little glowing orbs dropping down to the waters surface. These probes are probably going to explore the area under the ocean trying to find an old alien base that was likely abandoned long ago, but they came back to claim it. 
Scott C. Waring

{  http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/  }

11-02-2017 om 23:44 geschreven door peter  

Red Sprite Alien Seen At Space Station On Live Cam, Feb 2017, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: February 10, 2017
Location of sighting: Space station

This UFO was caught by Streetcap1 of Youtube this week. Please click his link to give him a thumbs up for his hard work. He calls it a sprite, and I have to agree. These little buggers come in all colors and often the shapes are not round, but squares, rectangles and cigar shapes. They are small and only visible a split second as they shoot across the screen of the live cam. Often turning and doing 90 degree turns on screen, which should be impossible for non living things like micrometeorites, however, for a living organism that was born in space, this is normal life. 
Scott C. Waring

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

11-02-2017 om 23:41 geschreven door peter  

UFO Over Winter Park, Colorado Mountains Again, On Security Camera, Feb 2017, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: February 2017

Location of sighting: Winter Park, Denver, Colorado, USA

Source: 

http://www.9news.com/news/local/was-a-ufo-spotted-over-winter-park/406713355

A UFO was recorded on security cam at Winter Park, however the news seems to be trying to make a parody out of real news turning it into fake news. This seems to be a trend lately and I just don't get it. A UFO sighting in the area should be taken seriously and they should ask the residents living closest to that location about them possibly seeing the UFO, however no such questioning or research into it has taken place. 

Scott C. Waring

 

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

11-02-2017 om 23:38 geschreven door peter  

OVNIs lumineux à Nassau aux Bahamas

PAR MAXIME BOUCHER · JUILLET 10, 2014

11-02-2017 om 18:05 geschreven door peter  

NASA Maps Out Possible Lander Mission to Jupiter Moon Europa

A potential NASA life-hunting mission to the surface of Jupiter's ocean-harboring moon Europa is really starting to take shape.

The stationary Europa lander would use three different instrument suites to search for signs of alien life in samples collected from just beneath the moon's icy surface, according to a new report by the 21-member "Science Definition Team" (SDT) for the possible mission.

These primary instruments would include an "organic compositional analyzer," a microscope system and a "vibrational spectrometer," stated the report, which was submitted to NASA on Tuesday (Feb. 7). [Europa May Harbor Simple Life-Forms (Video)] 

"The science return possible from the model payload is such that, if life is present in Europa's ice at a level comparable to one of the most extreme and desolate of environments on Earth (Lake Vostok ice), then this mission could detect life in Europa's icy surface," the report's authors wrote. (Lake Vostok lies beneath the surface of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.)

Hunting for alien life would be the mission's primary goal. But it would also seek to assess the habitability of the huge ocean of liquid water that sloshes beneath Europa's icy shell, and to characterize the moon's surface and near-surface environments to help enable future robotic missions.

Astrobiologists regard the 1,900-mile-wide (3,100 kilometers) Europa as one of the solar system's best bets to host alien life. Not only does the satellite host an ocean, but that ocean is thought to be in contact with Europa's rocky mantle, making possible all sorts of interesting chemical reactions. (Saturn's moon Enceladus appears to be the only other "ocean world" beyond Earth where this is the case, astronomers have said.)

NASA is already developing a flyby mission to Europa, which is scheduled to launch in the 2020s. This solar-powered spacecraft will orbit Jupiter and assess the moon's habitability during the course of 45 close encounters with Europa.

In late 2015, Congress ordered NASA to add a surface component to the Europa mission. The agency is currently studying the best ways to make this happen; the new SDT report is part of that process.

The current vision for the lander calls for it to be launched separately from the Europa flyby probe, according to the SDT report. The lander and a "carrier relay orbiter" (CRO) would lift off atop NASA's in-development Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket as early as 2024.

The mission would reach Jupiter about five years later, then perform a series of Jovian moon flybys over the next 1.5 years to prepare for arrival at Europa, the SDT report's authors wrote.

Once the mission got there, the CRO would stay in Europa orbit. The lander would touch down on the Jovian moon using retrorockets and a "sky crane" like the one that lowered NASA's Curiosity rover onto the Martian surface in August 2012. (Parachutes are not part of the plan, since Europa has no appreciable atmosphere.)

The lander would operate for at least 20 days, until its batteries died. The craft would collect samples from at least 4 inches (10 centimeters) beneath the Europan surface, to get material that hadn't been destroyed or transformed by the harsh radiation bombarding the moon. It would then relay the data back to Earth via the CRO.

The Europan radiation environment would likely limit the CRO's lifetime to about 30 days, according to the SDT team's report, "thus making a longer-lived lander mission difficult to justify."

The lander would be quite busy during its brief operational life, as its proposed instrument payload indicates.

"Along with the analytical suite for detailed analyses of samples, the Europa Lander model payload also includes a pair of color stereo imagers for examining the landing site in 3D (including capabilities for characterizing surface composition), and a seismic package for determining Europa's ice shell and ocean thickness through acoustic monitoring of cracking events in the ice shell," the SDT report states.

The SDT report is far from the last word on the Europa lander mission, which remains just a concept at the moment. For example, NASA will host town hall meetings at two upcoming scientific conferences — one in March and one in April — to get feedback from researchers about the SDT team's findings and recommendations.

You can read the full 264-page SDT report here: 

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/docs/Europa_Lander_SDT_Report_2016.pdf

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• Photos: Europa, Mysterious Icy Moon of Jupiter
• NASA To Probe Europa For Signs Of Life | Video
• Fish Under Ice-Cap Suggest Europa Life May Be Possible | Video

{ http://www.space.com/ }

11-02-2017 om 17:54 geschreven door peter  

Mercury's Water Ice Deposits Have a Mysterious Origin

Although Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, some of its craters hide water ice in their shaded depths — but how much ice is there, and where exactly did it come from?

A new study has part of the answer, suggesting that the ice is around 50 meters thick on average, but there is considerable uncertainty with that measurement. What kind of comets deposited the water there in the first place, however, is a mystery.

The researchers based their information on the Mercury Laser Altimeter instrument on the now-complete NASA MESSENGER mission, which crashed into Mercury as planned in 2015. Previously, a combination of Earth-based radar and neutron data suggested water ice deposits that were at least one to two meters thick. The new data suggests an ice thickness of 50 meters, possibly up to 85 meters.

But what's possibly most intriguing is figuring out the source of this ice. The researchers aren't quite sure if the ice came from long-period Halley-type comets (which originate from the Oort Cloud, a collection of icy objects far out in the solar system) or short-period Jupiter-family comets (which originate from the Kuiper Belt, an icy group of objects beyond Neptune's orbit).

"If we had found a lower limit for the ice depth that was significantly greater than zero, which we didn't quite, then we would have been able to rule out the possibility of Halley-type comets or asteroids being responsible for delivering Mercury's water," said Vincent Eke, a reader in the department of physics at Durham University, U.K., in an email to Seeker. Eke is the lead author of a paper published in the journal Icarus.

RELATED: Weird Landscape Shows That Mercury's No 'Dead' Planet

"The models for the micrometeorite flux reaching Mercury are quite uncertain," Eke Some of the more modern models could manage to bring 50 meters of ice to the polar craters, as could Jupiter-family comets. Also, if the ice depth is as thick as 50 meters in all the polar craters, then it would rule out the possibility that the ice was all brought by a single recent impact. One other study did consider that the impactor that created Hokusai crater might have been responsible for the polar water ice deposits."

When asked what was the significance of the results, Eke added they were "still a little bit too tantalizing" because the ice depth was not defined as precisely as he would like. Eke said he plans to use the final MESSENGER MLA data to provide better sampling of the polar regions, allowing him to see more craters — perhaps including smaller ones — to give a tighter constraint on the ice depth.

Failing that, there's another Mercury mission called BepiColombo that is headed to Mercury in the 2020s. The European mission should be carrying a laser altimeter, and Eke said he is hopeful the methods in his team's paper could improve the constraint on the ice thickness.

"If BepiColombo flies low over the south pole, rather than the north pole like MESSENGER, then this would also be helpful to increase the number of well-measured polar craters. I'm not sure that the orbit has yet been decided," he said.

RELATED: Mercury Transit: How We Scaled the Cosmos

"The limiting factor is not how accurately an individual altitude is measured, because both the MLA and [BepiColombo laser altimeter] do this to better than 1 meter. However, craters have departures from axisymmetry of up to 100 meters due to subcratering impacts. We need to average over enough craters to ensure that the height difference we're measuring is caused by ice, rather than just being intrinsically rough craters."

Originally published on Seeker.

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• 10 Strange Facts About Mercury (A Photo Tour)
• Most Enduring Mysteries of Mercury
• Water Ice on Mercury: How It Stays Frozen (Infographic)

{ http://www.space.com/ }

11-02-2017 om 17:44 geschreven door peter