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 ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
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...
23-03-2018
This Is What the Entire Known Universe Looks Like in a Single Image
This Is What the Entire Known Universe Looks Like in a Single Image
Written byJoanie Faletto
The farthest manmade thing from Earth is Voyager 1. Though this 1970s-era spacecraft is pretty far out there by now and still sending back information, it'll never be able to take a snapshot of the Solar System. Or the Milky Way. And definitely not the entire observable universe. But with a little math and artistic prowess, we can cobble together what we may look like from way, way, way out there.
You Are Here
In 2012, musician and artist Pablo Carlos Budassi created the illustration of all illustrations: a full-scale view of the entire observable Universe. The resulting image looks like a giant eyeball, with humanity square in the middle. In the image above, you'll see our sun and Solar System in the center, as you move outward you'll see the outer ring of the Milky Way, the Perseus arm of the Milky Way, a ring of nearby galaxies like Andromeda, the rest of the cosmic web, cosmic microwave background radiation leftover from the Big Bang, and, lastly, the Big Bang's leftover ring of plasma.
Art and Science
You may notice that the Earth looks weirdly large in comparison to pretty much every other object depicted. The reason is that Budassi created this image on a logarithmic scale, not the linear scale you usually see in astronomy images. If he didn't, the image would be impractically humongous — this is the entire universe we're talking about, after all. To get a better understanding of the scale, think of this flat image as a cone pointed straight at you. The sun is at the tip. Each section of the cone further away from you represents a field of view several orders of magnitude larger than the one before it.
Budassi was able to do this by collecting maps, photographs, and data from Princeton researchers and NASA. In 2005, a team of Princeton researchers published a collection of logarithmic maps of the Universe in Astrophysical Journal (you can see them here). While they look more like charts than they do rich photographs, the researchers were able to accurately "display the entire range of astronomical scales from the Earth's neighborhood to the cosmic microwave background" to a logarithmic scale. Using this information, Budassi put together "Photoshop using images from NASA and some textures created [on] my own." The final result? Our weirdly eyeball-looking, not-exactly-to-scale-but-maybe-the-best-we-can-do-for-now Universe.
To learn more about why the universe is flat, check out the course "The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries" by our partner The Great Courses Plus. Get a sneak peek below, and watch the rest of this video when you start a free trial here.
New spy plane can travel at five times the speed of sound
New spy plane can travel at five times the speed of sound
By Sean Keach, The Sun
Boeing
Boeing has finally unveiled a successor to the legendary Blackbird SR-71 spy plane, capable of traveling at five times the speed of sound.
The new “Son of Blackbird” was revealed at an event in Orlando, Florida, but it’s only a concept design for now.
The new aircraft will be a direct competitor to Lockheed Martin’s upcoming SR-72.
These rival firms are racing to create a hypersonic aircraft that’s capable of stealthy recon assignments — and strike missions, too.
Speaking to Aviation Week Aerospace Daily, Boeing’s hypersonics chief described how Boeing was planning a two-step development process for the new warplane.
The first stage would involve flight tests of an “F16-size, single-engine” precursor vehicle that acts as a “proof of concept.”
The second stage is the creation of a “twin-engine, full-scale operational vehicle” that has roughly similar dimensions to the 107-foot-long SR-71.
Boeing’s end goal is an aircraft that can travel at speeds beyond Mach 5 — that’s five times the speed of sound.
The speed of sound — or Mach 1 — is around 767 miles per hour. So hitting Mach 5 would mean the Son of Blackbird would have to travel at an incredible 3,836 miles per hour.
For comparison, a Boeing 747 passenger jet typically reaches cruising speeds of just 549 miles per hour.
The tricky part is that the SR-71 replacement needs to be able to take off, accelerate, slow down and land all on its own — just like the original 1964 model.
Boeing is looking at using a conventional turbojet to hit Mach 3, then switching to a different configuration to boost beyond Mach 5.
Sadly, there’s no guarantee when Boeing will have a sky-ready model, so we’ll just have to drool over concept renderings for now.
Kim Wilde said an encounter with a UFO in 2009 inspired her to make a music comeback.
(YouTube)
“Kids in America” singer Kim Wilde said an encounter with a UFO in 2009 was one of the reasons she decided to return to music and make a comeback.
Wilde told the BBC after leaving the music business she got married and raised her children. However, two events pushed her to come back and give music a second chance.
Wilde claims she had an encounter with a UFO in 2009. She said she was sitting in the garden at her home with a glass of wine when she saw something.
"Then I looked up in the sky and saw this huge bright light behind a cloud. Brighter than the moon, but similar to the light from the moon,” she said.
"I said to my husband and my friend, 'that's really odd,' so we walked down the grass and looked to see if there was any source. All of a sudden it moved, very quickly, from about 11:00 to 1:00. Then it just did that, back and forth, for several minutes,” Wilde recalled.
"Whenever it moved, something shifted in the air - but it was silent. Absolutely silent."
The singer said she thinks about the moment every day and it gave her an idea for her new album, “Here Comes the Aliens.”
She sings on the album that maybe the aliens will “save us from the apocalypse.”
"Perhaps that's completely naïve," she laughs. "Why wouldn't they be angry with us and fling us off this beautiful earth that we're ruining? I can't deny we haven't been a terrible disappointment,” Wilde said.
She said her career started to flatline in the 1990s when she became older and felt she could not keep up.
"I'd been in it since I was 20, then I was 36 and everyone, I felt, was doing it a lot better than I was. They had the ambition that I didn't have any more. When Madonna came along, I didn't feel I could compete, so I said, 'You know what? You're best off being who you are, and that's going to have to be enough,’” Wilde told the BBC. "Sometimes it was, and a lot of the time it wasn't."
Wilde announced she would be starting her comeback tour on March 30.
STRAP YOURSELVES IN FOLKS, WE’VE GOT A DOOZY OF A TALE FOR YOU THIS MORNING.
STRAP YOURSELVES IN FOLKS, WE’VE GOT A DOOZY OF A TALE FOR YOU THIS MORNING.
After all, it’s Friday and what better way to end the week than with a big old spooky conspiracy story.
A video has emerged on Youtube of a UFO just casually following an aeroplane.
Yep, we’re in the deep end now, my friends.
The UFO not only follows the plane but overtakes it then disappears.
Why?
Who can tell.
Are we now totally convinced that aliens walk amongst us?
you betcha.
The sighting took place in Lincoln, New Hampshire, according to News.com, and was captured in 2016 but only surfaced on Youtube earlier this week, since racking up almost 96,000 views.
The person who captured the footage said they were home reading when they noticed the strange object close to the aircraft.
“I am told that military pilots train in the mountains around where I live and I’ve always enjoyed seeing them fly through,” they can be heard saying.
“So I naturally saw the jet and did a double take, because there was something following it.”
“I immediately thought I was witnessing some strange aircraft, possibly military but it was not a jet.”
“THE UFO WAS GAINING ON A JET. NO HELICOPTER COULD DO THAT. I WAS BLOWN AWAY AND LUCKILY GOT OUT MY PHONE IN TIME TO TAKE A VIDEO”
Lucky indeed.
One commenter on Youtube suggests what we’re seeing is two planes travelling at “different altitudes, creating vapour trail”, but the witness filming has other ideas.
“Shortly after the jet and object left my range of sight I saw three more jets and 1 helicopter going the same direction (in my opinion chasing the UFO),” the witness said.
That last part wasn’t captured on video for some reason, but we DEFINITELY believe them.
In August 1969, Alan Potter an apprentice radio technician, was servicing a radar at Adelaide Airport when he spotted something peculiar on the radar head.
Potter was tracking a Fokker Friendship flying from Adelaide to Kingscote on Kangaroo Island, but as the radar turned slowly, it pinged a large object approaching from Port Lincoln, it was like nothing he’d seen in the area before.
The Fokker flight was flying towards Kangaroo Island, when a small object, looked to leave the large object and fly in a line towards the Fokker plane.
The two signals met over Rapid Bay before the smaller signal returned to the larger one. Potter laughed at the idea the two signals could have been a UFO checking out the Fokker, but after further thought, there was nothing else it could be.
During the 1960s, Adelaide became a hotspot for “spotting” UFOs. The Bunyip Newspaper publication published several articles of unexpected and unexplained sighting and experiences. Though Potter’s sighting was logged by the Australian UFO Research Network in 2004, no passengers or pilots on the Fokker reported anything out of the order.
Lead Image: Rocks on Kangaroo Island, South Australia.
Researchers hope their new research will settle debate over the origins of Ata, a naturally mummified infant found in the Chilean desert.
By Erika Check Hayden
Ata is just six inches tall, with a conical-shaped head and unusually hard bones for her size. Some have claimed that she’s an alien. But a new study published today in the journal Genome Research not only continues to disprove the alien theory, but also reveals a scientific explanation for her allegedly extraterrestrial appearance.
The debate started in 2003 when the naturally mummified remains of Ata were discovered near a ghost town in Chile’s Atacama Desert. A Spanish businessman, Ramón Navia-Osorio, purchased her mummy and in 2012 allowed a doctor named Steven Greer to use x-ray and computed tomography (CT) imaging to analyze her skeleton.
Greer is the founder of The Disclosure Project, which is “working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems,” according to its Web site.
Ata is only as long as a human fetus. But a radiologist who analyzed the images said that Ata’s bones were about as mature as those of a human six-year-old.
At the time, Greer also provided samples of Ata’s bone marrow to immunologist Garry Nolan at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Nolan’s team sequenced Ata’s DNA and concluded that her genetic material was from a human being, not an alien. But he couldn’t explain how such a small person could exhibit her unusual physical appearance.
“Once we understood that it was human, the next step was to understand how something could come to look like this,” Nolan says.
So Nolan worked with genetic researchers at Stanford and with computational biologist Atul Butte’s team at the University of California, San Francisco to analyze Ata’s genome. According to their new study, mutations are present in seven of Ata’s genes that are all involved in human growth. Nolan now thinks that this combination of mutations caused Ata’s severe skeletal abnormalities, including her unusually rapid bone growth. He says that Ata is most likely a human fetus who was either stillborn or died soon after birth.
But those who believe that Ata is extraterrestrial aren’t changing their minds, regardless of the new scientific revelations.
“We don’t know what it is, but it most certainly is not a deformed human,” says Greer, who is aware of the new research.
Scientists, however, say that in light of the new analysis, it’s time to bury the Ata controversy.
“The alien hype was silly pseudoscience promoted for media attention,” says paleoanthropologist and anatomist William Jungers, an emeritus professor at Stony Brook University Medical Center. “This paper puts that nonsense and poor little Ata to bed.”
Doctors who treat children with rare genetic bone disorders also think the debate highlights how archaeologists and other scientists can be misled by genetic disorders that cause unusual physical features. For instance, geneticist Fowzan Alkuraya points to the controversy surrounding the “hobbits,” small creatures that were discovered 15 years ago in Indonesia. Scientists are still embroiled in debate over whether the diminutive beings are relatives of modern humans, or are simply humans with unusually small size.
“This paper serves as a reminder about the exotic nature of many genetic disorders,” says Alkuraya, who is a geneticist at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
All humans—Ata included—can have many different genetic mutations. But usually only one of these mutations actually causes a child’s disease. It’s “virtually unheard of” for seven mutations to be involved, Alkuraya says; he thinks that one or at most two of the mutations probably caused Ata’s growth problems.
Nolan disagrees: “That poor child unfortunately rolled the dice seven times snake eyes,” he says.
But it would be difficult, if not impossible, to decide which of Ata’s genetic defects caused her symptoms. That’s because scientists don’t have any information about Ata’s relatives. If they had DNA from Ata’s parents, for instance, they could check which of Ata’s mutations were also present in her mother and father. Any of Ata’s mutations that were also present in her parents’ DNA might be harmless, because unlike Ata, her parents lived long enough to conceive a baby.
Even though no one knows anything about her parents, Nolan thinks that someone cared for Ata when she died about 40 years ago. He points to the way she was carefully laid flat on the ground, wrapped in a leather pouch.
“They didn’t just throw it away; somebody thought it was important. It was their child,” Nolan says.
Like Jungers, Nolan now wants to see Ata returned to Chile and laid to rest once again.
“I don’t think that people should be trafficking in human bodies and claiming they’re aliens for the sake of monetary advantage,” Nolan says.
Third DoD UFO video is posted with Washington Post article
Third DoD UFO video is posted with Washington Post article
To the Stars Academy (TTSA) posted a third Department of Defense (DoD) UFO video in coordination with the posting of an opinion piece by TTSA member Chris Mellon in The Washington Post. Mellon is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. He served during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Mellon is a current the national security affairs advisor for TTSA.
This video is perhaps the most impressive, but very few details about the video were released, and although most of the media attention has been supportive of the DoD’s UFO program, some doubts and confusion have also arisen.
The new video is being referred to by the TTSA as the “2015 GO FAST FOOTAGE.” According to TTSA, this video, as with the others, is from the Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) system of a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet. The actual footage of the object is a little over 30 seconds long. The TTSA video presenting the footage is about two minutes long with an introduction that includes a description of the telemetry seen on the screen of the ATFLIR system.
Two Navy jet-fighter pilots are commenting on the object in the video. Both appear to be very excited about the object. When the video starts, the UFO darts across the screen as the ATFLIR operator is attempting to get a lock on it, which he finally does. The object seems to be moving very fast below the jet-fighter. The telemetry shows that the aircraft capturing the video is at 25,000 feet traveling at 259 knots (approximately 300 mph).
The object appears to be round. ATFLIR displays heat, but as demonstrated in a graphic on the TTSA website, aircraft shape is still discernible with these systems, and in this case, no wings or exhaust are apparent.
The ATFLIR display reveals significant information regarding flight conditions and characteristics of the imagery.
(Credit: To the Stars Academy)
As to when and where this video comes from, we have only a couple of pieces of information. The TTSA website states, “The date, location, and other information has been removed by the originating authority as part of the release approval process.” However, the title indicates the video is from 2015. Also, in the Washington Postarticle, Mellon describes the video as a “Navy encounter that occurred off the East Coast in 2015.”
Chris Mellon
(Credit: To the Stars Academy)
It should be noted that these videos have were all posted by TTSA. The DoD has not directly provided them to anyone else, yet. TTSA notes on the GO FAST video, “While TTSA was the first to obtain a copy, it should be available to any member of the press or public via the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA].” However, of the several researchers who have submitted FOIA request I am aware of, none have received copies of the videos. In fact, the responses the DoD have given are a bit odd.
John Greenewald of TheBlackVault.com is an experienced FOIA researcher with perhaps the most extensive online repository of documents received via FOIA requests. Greenewald has several FOIAs filed in regards to these videos and their release. One of the first he submitted was for the records of Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the agency that investigated these videos and determined them to be unknown. Greenewald also sent a FOIA to the National Security Agency (NSA) for information about AATIP. In both cases, he was told no records exist. The response may be due to the way in which the requests were submitted. For instance, when he filed the first FOIA, he was not sure of the exact name of the DoD UFO program. In the second FOIA, he was asking for NSA records in a particular database which may not have records on AATIP. Greenewald says over the phone an NSA representative did confirm to him the name of the program is Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program. AATIP has been called Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program, among other variations. Apparently, the NSA is aware of the program.
FOIA response received by Greenewald.
(Credit: John Greenewald/TheBlackVault.com)
Government UFO documents researcher Paul Dean has filed a FOIA requesting the forms regarding the declassification of the videos. The response he received says his request “has been placed in our [Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff] complex processing queue and is being worked based on the order in which the request was received. Our current administrative workload is approximately 2,246 open requests.”
It may be some time before Dean receives any further information. All of this indicates that TTSA’s suggestion that researchers use FOIA to obtain more information is going to be a lengthy and challenging process.
The documents are particularly relevant because there have been some mixed messages from government agencies. Although the DoD confirmed to the New York Times that AATIP existed, according the UK tabloid The Sun, a spokesperson for the U.S., Defense Intelligence Agency told them “There is some confusion about this program and claims about its purpose in press reporting… the Defense Intelligence Agency has not released any information, files or videos.”
More recently, an article covering skeptic perspectives on the videos in CNET claims a spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of Defense said “The Department of Defense did not release those videos. I cannot confirm their authenticity. I don’t have any additional info to provide.”
Still, despite these confusing statements, mainstream media seems to mostly be taking Elizondo’s word in regards to his conclusions regarding the mysterious nature of the videos. Senator Harry Reid and Navy pilots have backed his claims. However, even though Elizondo says AATIP still operates today, most mainstream media outlets are still reporting that the program closed in 2012. That is when the DoD says they stopped funding AATIP. Elizondo says AATIP continued after 2012, and he told me that since he left AATIP this past October, a high ranking official has replaced him as the chief of the program. In his interview for the International UFO Congress, Elizondo explained that after they lost funding, “we very quickly continued our efforts and we started to dual-use a lot of what we were doing.”
“…as an example, one may be interested in putting out a requirement looking for let’s say advanced ICBM technology,” Elizondo continued. “So you would go out, and you would ask folks, ‘I want you to be able to give me a paper that helps me understand anything coming into Earth’s orbit with these particular profiles.’ So hypersonic velocities, loads over ability et cetera, and what might be useful for let’s say identifying North Korean ICBM missiles coming into the continental United States could also be useful in identifying other objects, things that are coming in with that same flight pattern but not necessarily a ballistic missile.”
Luis Elizondo during the International UFO Congress interview filmed by To the Stars Academy.
(Credit: International UFO Congress/To the Stars Academy)
In an interview on Open Minds UFO Radio, Leslie Kean, one of the authors of the New York Times article that broke the AATIP story in December, referred to a memo regarding the release of the videos by the DoD. She was not at liberty to share the document with the public at that time. The release of this memo would help clear up some of the questions.
Despite the many loose ends and unanswered questions dangling out there, the media seems to be accepting that indeed UFOs are a real phenomenon in which the U.S. government has had an interest. The gist of Mellon’s Washington Post article, titled “The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?,” is that it is time the U.S. government take this issue more seriously.
When asked by a BBC Radio 5 host what the military should do about UFOs, Mellon responded, “The first thing we need to do for national security and scientific reasons is to increase collection, analysis and research and development.”
“We have in existence proof here that there are propulsion capabilities and aeronautical capabilities beyond what we have,” Mellon explained. “Ergo, we ought to expand research and development in promising leads that might provide us with similar capabilities. At the same time, we can easily and dramatically expand our knowledge and understanding simply by putting someone in charge and try to answer the question.”
According to Mellon, various government agencies and branches of the military do have an interest in UFO incidents, but they do not share information with each other. Nor do they apply the necessary resources to figure it out. He seems to agree that these cases Elizondo has identified as significant are worthy of a renewed effort to take a serious look, with the appropriate resources, at the UFO phenomenon.
Mellon writes, “…the national security implications of these incidents are concerning — but the scientific opportunities are thrilling. Who knows what perils we may avoid or opportunities we might identify if we follow the data?”
Note:This article was updated on March 22 as a result of a clarification by Leslie Kean. The DoD memo regarding the release of the videos was in the possession of the authors of the New York Times article posted on December 16, 2017. She is not aware of whether TTSA also has a copy of the memo. She adds, “there is absolutely no question that the videos were cleared by the DOD from their files.”
New LightSail 2 Spacecraft Will Boost Solar-Sailing Interplanetary Missions
New LightSail 2 Spacecraft Will Boost Solar-Sailing Interplanetary Missions
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
A new solar-sailing spacecraft will be a call to all (future) occupants of interplanetary craft. The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft will be a test bed for future missions wanting to use solar sails — including NASA's proposed cubesat, the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout).
LightSail 2 will launch no earlier than June 13 from the Kennedy Space Center near Orlando, Florida, using SpaceX's new and powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. The spacecraft's ultimate destination will be medium-Earth orbit of about 725 kilometers (450 miles) — roughly double the altitude of the International Space Station.
The mission's ultimate goal is to test out "flight by light," as The Planetary Society calls it — solar sailing in space. This type of propulsion uses the gentle push of photons streaming from the sun to move the spacecraft around. The greatest benefit is that the spacecraft doesn't have to carry fuel with it. On a small satellite like a cubesat, said Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, every gram of weight counts. [The Evolution of Solar Sails in Photos]
"We've been waiting for a launch where we could get to a higher altitude [above Earth], where solar pressure will dominate over the atmospheric drag," Betts told Space.com.
"We actually will be trying to do controlled solar sailing … every half an [Earth] orbit, we will be pushed by the sunlight, and for the other half of the orbit, we will be edge-on to the sunlight," added Betts, who is also The Planetary Society's director of science and technology.
Improvements from LightSail 1
LightSail 2, set to launch no earlier than June 13, 2018, will be visible to observers on the ground as it orbits Earth for a month or more.
The Planetary Society's LightSail 1 launched on May 20, 2015, along with the Air Force's supersecret X-37B space plane. It survived for just under a month in low Earth orbit. While it met its major mission objective of deploying the sail, the test flight had several issues along the way.
Just two days after launch, a software glitch delayed plans to deploy the solar sail until June 7. The spacecraft transmitted an image June 9 showing that the sail unfurled successfully, meeting its primary mission objective. But then, more problems arose.
"Before engineers could get a picture from the opposite-side cameras, LightSail's radio began transmitting a continuous, nonsensical signal, and the spacecraft stopped responding to commands," said the Planetary Society's Jason Davis in a blog post on June 15, 2015. The spacecraft also stopped transmitting on June 10, shortly before it entered the atmosphere as originally planned.
"We learned a lot from LightSail 1," Betts said. "It taught us a lot about the spacecraft, and after the various issues, we made a lot of improvements."
The Planetary Society’s LightSail cubesat captured this image of its deployed solar sails in Earth orbit on June 8, 2015.
Credit: The Planetary Society
Some of the key improvements will help LightSail 2 make more efficient use of the particles coming its way. The most dramatic hardware difference is a momentum wheel, or a rapidly spinning wheel that helps LightSail 2 maintain position in space. Its attitude determination and control software is different from LightSail 1's equipment. The cameras were also upgraded to transmit higher-quality images of the sails.
Other improvements were intended to make the spacecraft more robust. Instead of "waiting for reboots to sometime, magically happen," Betts said, there are timers on board with automatic settings to restart processes, or, at worst, to reboot the entire spacecraft in case of trouble. More information will be included in the radio signal to give controllers information about the spacecraft's health status. Engineers also added reflectors to make the position of LightSail 2 easier to track from the ground.
Interplanetary craft
This photo shows Japan's Ikaros solar sail as it sailed by the planet Venus (which appears as the crescent at upper right) on Dec. 8, 2010. The Ikaros solar sail was about 80,000 kilometers from Venus during the flyby.
Credit: JAXA
A couple of other spacecraft have successfully tested out solar sailing in space. The most notable example is the Japanese Ikaros (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun), which successfully traveled using a solar sail in 2010 during Japan's Akatsuki mission to Venus. It's the only spacecraft that uses that method to move so far in deep space — in 2012, Ikaros received the Guinness World Record as the first solar sail spacecraft between planets. [Are Solar Sails the Future of Space Travel?]
NASA also deployed a solar sail on the NanoSail-D2 in low Earth orbit in 2010 as well; that mission focused more on the sail's deployment, and how the sail behaved in low Earth orbit. (The agency planned another solar-sailing mission called Sunjammer, but it was canceled before launch.)
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Ikaros solar sail is seen in deep space after its deployment on June 14, 2010, in this view taken from a small camera ejected by the sail.
Credit: JAXA
This means LightSail 2 will add vitally needed, real-world information about how solar sails behave in space. Its team is in contact with another solar sail experimental team as well: the NEA Scout team, which will use a solar sail to fly by an asteroid. "They are planning on using a solar sail with similar type design and characteristics to LightSail 2," Betts said.
NEA Scout is scheduled to join a dozen other tiny missions aboard the Orion's Exploration Mission-1, which will also be the first test flight of NASA's Space Launch System and is currently scheduled for no earlier than 2019. NEA Scout is expected to fly past an asteroid called 1991 VG, although the decision to fly by the asteroid hasn't been finalized yet.
Solar sailing is a possible propulsion method for distant-future interstellar missions because fuel doesn't need to be carried on board. NASA has played around with various mission-concept ideas. Similarly, the privately funded Breakthrough Starshot initiative plans to use a laser in combination with a sailto send a tiny probe to Earth's nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.
Editor's Note: This article has been corrected to note that LightSail 2 is propelled using photons streaming from the sun, not charged particles in the solar wind.
For the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), killing people isn’t all that complicated. A budget of more than $600 billion per year buys a whole lot of tanks, guns, and bombs.
But not killing someone proves to be a bit more complicated. How about just stunning them a bit from far away? Or maybe setting their clothes on fire without having to look them in the face?
For that, we’ve got the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Development Program (JNLWD). The program’s purpose: to develop weapons and other devices military personnel can use to incapacitate targets without outright killing them. As explained on the program’s FAQ, the goal of the JNLWD is to fill the gap between “shout and shoot” (truly, we should all be grateful the armed forces acknowledge that such a gap exists).
The JNLWD’s latest breakthrough is the Non-Lethal Laser-Induced Plasma Effect (NL-LIPE) system. They recently gave Defense One a look at the in-development device. And it’s truly a sight to behold.
Rather, a sound to behold. Take a listen below (and maybe make sure your pets are out of the room because, we promise, they really hate this).
Here’s how this device is useful. Imagine an enemy is getting a bit too close for comfort, and you want them to back off.
You could use a stun grenade, a blinding flash of light and noise that leaves the enemy disoriented and stunned. Those only work if you’re close enough to throw them, though.
And maybe you have some good guys standing in between. How do you blast the enemy but not the good guys? That’s where the lasers come in.
First, the NL-LIPE operator shoots a burst of light at the target using a femtosecond laser. This rips electrons from the air molecules to create a ball of plasma at the targeted site. The operator then manipulates the plasma ball using a second nanolaser, directing the plasma to produce sound or light, or even burn clothing.
Right now, of course, the technology is still in development, so it only works under pretty specific conditions. Eventually, though, the military thinks it could get the device to work at distances of tens of kilometers, David Law, head of JNLWD’s technology division, told Defense One. That would give it a longer range than any other non-lethal weapon.
Law also said the researchers believe they’re very close to getting their device to outright “speak” to them, but the creepy almost-voice it already produces would likely be enough to get any enemies to turn tail.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
Graham Hancock: An Entire Episode Of The Human Story Has Been Lost
Graham Hancock: An Entire Episode Of The Human Story Has Been Lost
Hancock describes an advanced civilization very different from our own, with advanced technological skills. This should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve, but it was brought into use almost overnight.
Amazing research and presentation. still coming into grasps with this. but really angry of those mainstream academics from the Dark-ages for freezing funds towards discovery and research.
Neutral-particle beams, a concept first tried in the 1980s, may get a fresh look under Michael Griffin.
The next thing in space-based weapons could be decades old, according to Michael Griffin, the first defense undersecretary for research and engineering.
“Directed energy is more than just big lasers,” Griffin said. “That’s important. High-powered microwave approaches can effect an electronics kill. The same with the neutral particle beam systems we explored briefly in the 1990s” for use in space-based anti-missile systems. Such weapons can be “useful in a variety of environments” and have the “advantage of being non-attributable,” meaning that it can be hard to pin an attack with a particle weapon on any particular culprit since it leaves no evidence behind of who or even what did the damage.
Like lasers, neutral-particle beams focus beams of energy that travel in straight lines, unaffected by electromagnetic fields. But instead of light, neutral-particle beams use composed of accelerated subatomic particles traveling at near-light speed, making them easier to work with (though the folks that run CERN’s hadron collider may disagree). When its particles touche the surface of a target, they takes on a charge that allows them to penetrate the target’s shell or exterior more deeply.
This all makes neutral-particle beams attractive as space-based anti-missile systems. Over the years, various defense companies have released mockups of proposed designs that seem to come out of an issue of Popular Mechanics circa 1950.
The Pentagon first tested the concept in the late 1980s as part of a program called the Neutral Particle Beam, or NPB. According to a 1990 writeup that military scientists sent to lawmakers, it explored the possibility of a space-based weapon that could “kill missiles and reentry vehicles in the boost, post-boost, and mid-course portion of an ICBM trajectory as well as discriminated objects during the midcourse phase” — meaning a defensive system that could knock out missiles as they were leaving the launch pad or flying in space toward their target.
In July, 1989, the program put a neutral-particle beam into orbit as part of a project called the Beam Experiment Aboard a Rocket, which analysts described as “a major success for the NPBprogram.” The tests showed that the weapon could be ruggedized for space launch and operation and that the beam was sufficiently narrow to hit a target.
The writeup concluded that a neutral-particle beam would be “difficult, if not impossible, to countermeasure in both the kill and discrimination role since it penetrates in-depth into the target. Analysis and tests have been conducted to verify that the entry level NPB can defeat all proposed counter-measures to the beam-target interaction. It is also effective against homing direct assent [anti-satellite] which allows the NPB to defend itself and other space-based assets.”
Griffin did not say that he welcomed particle beam ideas based specifically in space. Nevertheless, because space was the environment that the U.S.“explored briefly in the 1990s” for such weapons, that is what his comments convey. He drove home this point, saying “We should not lose our way… with some of the other technologies that were pioneered in the 80s and the early 1990s and now stand available for renewed effort…I will be very welcoming of other approaches that have not had a lot of focus in recent years or recent decades.”
He refused to answer reporter requests for clarification on his comments after his presentation.
Griffin did express some caution about a different take on directed-energy anti-missile weapons: the Low Power Laser Demonstrator program, to which the military has already devoted $66 million in the most recent budget request. The LPLD seeks to put a laser aboard a drone to shoot down missile just after launch. “I think frankly I’m more concerned about exactly how high you have to be in the atmosphere to propagate a laser beam with sufficient density to score a kill at a reasonable range,” Griffin said. “I’ve found that I can get an informed opinion that says you can’t do it. And another opinion that says you can. I think that jury’s still out.”
And so, he said, when it comes to striking North Korean missiles before or soon after launch, the most practical near-term solution remains still “kinetic effects” or missiles, “especially against adversary countries where we can conduct airborne operations not too far off their shores.”
Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has written about emerging technology in Slate, ... FULL BIO
Kerry John together with his wife flew over Turkey somewhere over Izman and Khios Sea heading into Athens around 4.30 pm on March 21, 2018 when they noticed something that appears to be flying away at right angles from the commercial jet and somehow without either of them appearing to turn they end up almost following the black object.
Kerry states: In my days I was the vice president of the UFO society in Canberra Australia. We investigated sightings but I must admit this was odd even for me.
It was obviously close as the angle relative to the plane changed quite rapidly.
Up at altitude we often see in undisturbed air as this was a very calm air, white streaks like fine layers of crystalline clouds.
This was spotted by my wife a little before I filmed it. It was a thin black line. When I first saw it and to me incorrectly, it appeared to turn straight towards the plane I thought I had seconds to live and was relieved to realize it was facing away and we appeared to fly by.
Note:Black object is a UFO or a Missile? In case it is a missile better you think twice before you take a commercial plane that flies over Turkey!
A new study links oceans on ancient Mars to the rise of the planet’s Tharsis volcano system, home to the largest volcanoes in our solar system.
A Viking spacecraft image of the Tharsis region of Mars. The scene shows the Tharsis bulge, a huge ridge covered by the 3 large aligned Tharsis Montes shield volcanoes (from lower left to right): Arsia, Pavonis, and Ascraeus Mons. To the left of the Tharsis Montes lies the huge Olympus Mons shield volcano. Read more about this image here.
A new study suggests oceans on Mars were shallower and formed several hundred million years earlier than thought, and links their existence to the rise of the planet’s Tharsis volcano system.
Tharsis is a vast volcanic plateau centered near the equator in Mars’ western hemisphere. The region is home to the largest volcanoes in our solar system.
Michael Manga, a University of California, Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science, is senior author of the paper, published Monday (March 19, 2018) in the journal Nature. Manga said in a statement:
Volcanoes may be important in creating the conditions for Mars to be wet.
The early ocean known as Arabia (left, blue) would have looked like this when it formed 4 billion years ago on Mars, while the Deuteronilus ocean, about 3.6 billion years old, had a smaller shoreline. Both coexisted with the massive volcanic province Tharsis, located on the unseen side of the planet, which may have helped support the existence of liquid water. The water is now gone, perhaps frozen underground and partially lost to space, while the ancient seabed is known as the northern plains.
Those who adhere to the theory that Mars never had oceans of liquid water often point out that estimates of the size of the oceans don’t jibe with estimates of how much water could be hidden on Mars today as permafrost underground, and how much could have escaped into space. These are the main options, scientists say, given that the polar ice caps don’t contain enough water to fill an ocean.
The new study proposes that the oceans formed before or at the same time as Mars’ largest volcanic feature, Tharsis, instead of after the volcanic system formed 3.7 billion years ago.
According to the study, Tharsis was smaller at that time, so it didn’t distort the planet as much as it did later – in particular the plains that cover most of the northern hemisphere and are the presumed ancient seabed.
The researchers say that the absence of crustal deformation from Tharsis means the seas would have been shallower, holding about half the water of earlier estimates. Manga said:
The assumption was that Tharsis formed quickly and early, rather than gradually, and that the oceans came later. We’re saying that the oceans predate and accompany the lava outpourings that made Tharsis.
Tharsis, now a 3,000-mile-wide (5,000 km) eruptive complex, dominates the topography of Mars. Earth, which is twice the diameter and 10 times more massive than Mars, has no equivalent dominating feature. Tharsis’ bulk creates a bulge on the opposite side of the planet and a depression halfway between. This explains why estimates of the volume of water the northern plains could hold based on today’s topography are twice what the new study estimates based on the topography 4 billion years ago.
The scientists suggest that Tharsis spewed gases into the atmosphere that created a global warming or greenhouse effect that allowed liquid water to exist on the planet, and also that volcanic eruptions created channels that allowed underground water to reach the surface and fill the northern plains.
A map of Mars today shows where scientists have identified possible ancient shoreline that may have been etched by intermittent oceans billions of years ago. The new study counters another argument against Mars oceans: that the proposed shorelines are irregular, varying in height by as much as a kilometer, when they should be level, like shorelines on Earth. The study says the irregular elevations of these shorelines can be explained by the growth of the volcanic province called Tharsis some 3.7 billion years ago, which would have deformed the topography and misaligned the shorelines. Arabia (magenta) is more than 4 billion years old, while the Deuteronilus (white) and Isidis (cyan) shoreline are several million years younger. The solid contour lines represent the Tharsis bulge (left) and the antipodal bulge it created (right), with dashed contour lines indicating the depressions in between.
COMING INTO FOCUS Saturn shines in this Cassini image taken in October 2013. Even though the spacecraft is gone, scientists are still learning from its 13 years’ worth of data.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA, SSI, CORNELL UNIV.
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — It’s been six months since NASA’s Cassini spacecraft plunged to its doom in the atmosphere of Saturn, but scientists didn’t spend much time mourning. They got busy, analyzing the spacecraft’s final data.
The Cassini mission ended September 15, 2017, after more than 13 years orbiting Saturn (SN Online: 9/15/17). The spacecraft’s final 22 orbits, dubbed the Grand Finale, sent Cassini into the potentially dangerous region between the gas giant and its rings, and its final orbit sent it directly into Saturn’s atmosphere.
That perspective helped solve mysteries about the planet and its moons that could not be tackled any other way, scientists said March 19 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.
“In so many ways, the Grand Finale orbits provided information that was totally unexpected,” said Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “So many of our models were not correct.”
Here are five things we now know and a few outstanding mysteries.
1. Saturn’s clouds go deep
Those final daredevil orbits allowed Cassini to measure the gravity of Saturn and its rings independent of one another. Looking at the planet’s gravity field alone revealed that the swirling bands of clouds penetrate much deeper into the planet than expected.
Astronomers this month announced a similar discovery for an even larger gas giant, reporting that the Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter, had found that the planet’s rotating cloud belts reach roughly 3,000 kilometers below the top of the atmosphere.
Saturn’s clouds reach a few times deeper than that. “This was an astonishing result,” Spilker said.
“People used to think that maybe Saturn was just a slightly smaller version of Jupiter, but it’s evident that that’s not the case,” says planetary scientist Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, who was not involved in the gravity measurements. The difference speaks to how diverse planets are, he says. “Every place you look, everywhere we’ve been to, it’s just been so dramatically different and unique.”
2. Ring rain is eroding the innermost ring
Grains of ice from the rings are raining down into Saturn’s atmosphere, Cassini’s final orbits confirmed. This “ring rain” idea has been suggested since the 1980s, but only by tasting the atmosphere and directly sampling the space between Saturn and the rings could Cassini confirm the rains are real.
In its last five full orbits, Cassini found a zoo of organic molecules in and just above Saturn’s atmosphere, said planetary scientist Kelly Miller of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The spacecraft found a lot of water, which wasn’t surprising — water makes up about 90 percent of the rings. But there were also a lot of hydrocarbons similar to propane, plus some methane and sulfur-bearing molecules.
The types of molecules became less well-mixed as the spacecraft looked deeper into Saturn’s atmosphere, which is what would happen if the particles came from the rings and sank at different speeds. The researchers think this material is especially raining from Saturn’s D ring, the thin innermost ring. Other Cassini data suggest this ring is losing mass.
“The D ring is slowly being eroded away and going into the planet,” Spilker said.
3. Organics could explain mysterious ring hues
The organics in the ring rain could solve a debate about why Saturn’s rings appear reddish in some spots.
“We’ve had this debate going on for a couple of years now — are they red because of good old-fashioned rust like Mars, or because of the same kinds of organic materials … that make carrots and tomatoes and watermelon red?” said planetary scientist Jeff Cuzzi of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “To me, this answers the question of what makes the rings red: It’s organics.”
It’s still not clear where the organics come from, though. They could be created within the rings, or they could come from cosmic dust from the tails of comets. Miller and her colleagues are comparing the ring rain molecules with data on comet 67P, which the Rosetta spacecraft observed, to see how well they match up (SN: 11/11/17, p. 32).
4. Titan’s “magic islands” aren’t islands, or bubbles
Mysterious disappearing features in the lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan are caused by sunlight reflecting off giant waves, said planetary scientist Alexander Hayes of Cornell University.
SUN GLINT This infrared image taken by Cassini in 2014 shows a bright, mirrorlike reflection (yellow spot at upper left) in Kraken Mare, a northern sea on Saturn’s moon Titan. That reflection combined with radar data suggests that what were thought to be mysterious disappearing islands in the sea are actually tall waves.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA, UNIV. OF ARIZONA, UNIV. OF IDAHO
These features were named “magic islands” when they were first spotted in 2014. As recently as April 2017, planetary scientists thought they had the islands solved: They seemed to be the result of champagnelike bubbles of nitrogen burbling through the moon’s methane and ethane seas (SN Online: 4/18/17).
But Hayes presented newly analyzed data from August 2014, when Cassini looked at Kraken Mare, the moon’s largest northern sea, in radar and infrared wavelengths within two hours of each other. The radar images showed a magic island, and the infrared ones showed a peak in brightness at the same spot.
Because the observations were taken two hours apart, the island probably couldn’t have been due to bubbles, Hayes said — bubbles would pop or disperse too quickly. Instead, he thinks the brightening could be the glint of sunlight reflecting directly off of giant waves on the lake, like how the ocean ripples with gold at sunset. Simulations of Titan’s atmosphere suggest these waves could be raised by winds as slow as 0.5 meters per second, which would barely move a wind vane on Earth.
5. Enceladus’ plumes may brighten by the pull of another moon
Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus has plumes that may be driven by nudges from another moon.
The spurts of liquid water were discovered in 2006. Over the next six years, scientists noticed that the plumes varied in brightness (a proxy for how much material is gushing from the moon) on a daily cycle, probably driven by Saturn’s different positions in Enceladus’ sky.
Then, in 2015 some researchers noted that the plumes’ overall brightness had been decreasing since the beginning of the Cassini mission.
One possible explanation was that the plumes changed with Saturn’s seasons. Another was that ice built up in the vents, clogging them and decreasing the flow. But looking at the full 13-year dataset, planetary scientist Francis Nimmo found that the plumes grow brighter in a regular cycle every four and 11 years. The pattern is too coherent to be explained by clogged vents, said Nimmo, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Oddly, the plume grew brighter in 2017, so the seasonal explanation doesn’t fit either.
The variations could be explained by a neighboring moon, Dione. Every time Dione and Enceladus line up, their gravitational stress on each other could force Enceladus’ vents open a bit more, causing the plumes to grow brighter.
Unsolved enigmas
So far, analyzing data from Cassini hasn’t answered all of scientists’ questions. Is Enceladus the only moon with plumes? Dione showed signs of activity, too, but Cassini wasn’t able to confirm it. How thick is Enceladus’ ice sheet? Why are Titan’s smaller lakes full of clear, pure methane, when scientists expected the lakes to be clogged with hydrocarbon silt?
Even though the spacecraft is gone, it left decades’ worth of data to sift through in search of answers. “Cassini is going to keep on giving as long as we keep looking,” Hayes said.
Editors’ note: This story was updated on March 21, 2018, to include the affiliations of Jeff Cuzzi and Francis Nimmo.
In 2005, astronaut Leroy Chiao was commander of the International Space Station for six and a half months. During a spacewalk with cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov, the two were installing navigation antennas. They were 230 miles above Earth, traveling at over 17,000 miles per hour, when something unusual caught Chiao’s eye.
“I saw some lights that seemed to be in a line and it was almost like an upside-down check mark, and I saw them fly by and thought it was awfully strange,” Chiao told The Huffington Post.
Chiao’s fellow spacewalker, Sharipov, hadn’t seen the lights because he was facing the opposite direction.
This experience, recreated in the above video (and still image below), launches “NASA’s Unexplained Files,” one of several programs presented as part of Science Channel’s week-long “Are We Alone?“ series, beginning March 2.
A down-to-Earth explanation is offered for Chiao’s sighting: the bright lights of a fishing boat hundreds of miles below him. But is that the only possible interpretation of what the astronaut saw?
It’s easy for many to have no doubt that he witnessed an intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. But Chiao doesn’t believe there’s ever been any tangible evidence that someone else is visiting Earth or has done so in the past.
“I’m skeptical of claims that we’ve been visited by aliens from another planet or other dimension, but I don’t rule it out 100 percent. I have an open mind and I do believe there’s other life in the universe.
“If there is life out there that’s so much more advanced than we are and they know either how to travel great distances in short amounts of time, or they’re able to come from a parallel universe into ours, why don’t they just come and show themselves?”
“NASA’s Unexplained Files” episodes highlight possible out-of-this world UFOs either seen or photographed by astronauts over many years.
An alleged photographic piece of UFO evidence occurred on the 1972 Apollo 16 moon mission when astronauts returned to Earth with several film cannisters, one of which showed something intriguing above the lunar surface — something that looks very much like a “classic” flying saucer.
Watch this clip about the Apollo 16 object from ‘NASA’s Unexplained Files’:
Throughout the week, “Are We Alone?” targets both believers and skeptics with tantalizing presentations of:
“NASA’s Unexplained Files“ — exploring unusual discoveries and possible UFO sightings.
“Close Encounters“ — focusing on unsolved UFO stories and reports from around the world.
“Alien Planet Earths“ — zeroing in on the ongoing, exciting search for Earth’s twin planets that may harbor life.
“Through The Wormhole With Morgan Freeman“ — seeking answers to the question “Is God An Alien Concept?”
ANNOTATION: Astronaut Leroy Chiao contacted this writer to clarify the fishing boat theory about what he saw in 2005: “One minor point is that it wasn’t just one fishing boat, but a line of them strung out along the South American coast. That’s why it looked like five lights from the ISS.”
“Are We Alone?” week premieres on the Science Channel, Sunday, March 2 at 10:00 p.m. Check your local listings.
Airbus is testing a big harpoon to snare rogue or redundant satellites and pull them out of the sky.
The 1m-long projectile would be attached, through a strong tether, to a chase spacecraft.
Once the target was captured and under control, the chase vehicle would then drag its prey down into the atmosphere to burn to destruction.
Airbus has been working on the concept for a number of years now, developing ever bigger systems.
It is a response to the growing problem of orbital junk - old pieces of hardware that continue to circle the globe and which now pose a collision threat to operational satellites.
Image copyrightESImage captionEnvisat artwork: Care would be needed to avoid hitting any pressurised tanks onboard
Something in the region of 20,000 items of 10cm or larger are currently being tracked.
The latest Airbus harpoon is being designed with the capability to capture one of the biggest rogue items of the lot - Europe's defunct Envisat Earth observation platform.
This 8-tonne behemoth died suddenly in orbit in 2012. "Envisat is the outlier," explained advanced project engineer Alastair Wayman.
"If we can design a harpoon that can cope with Envisat, then it should be able to cope with all other types of spacecraft including the many rocket upper-stages that remain in orbit."
Media captionAlastair Wayman: "We would tow the target satellite out of orbit"
The testing at the aerospace company’s facility in Stevenage, UK, involves firing the harpoon, using compressed air, into a panel that is representative of the kinds of material used to build satellite structures.
Typically, this takes the form of 3cm-thick, composite honeycomb panels that incorporate a lot of aluminium.
"The harpoon goes through these panels like a hot knife through butter," said Mr Wayman.
"Once the tip is inside, it has a set of barbs that open up and stop the harpoon from coming back out. We'd then de-tumble the satellite with a tether on the other end."
This is where harpoons should come into their own, over other methods of capture such as nets and robotic arms. A harpoon is relatively simple. You line up the target and shoot.
"Many of these targets will be tumbling and if you were to use a robotic arm, say, that involves a lot of quite complex motions to follow your target," Mr Wayman explained.
"Whereas, with the harpoon, all you have to do is sit a distance away, wait for the target to rotate underneath you, and at the right moment fire your harpoon. And because it's a really quick event, it takes out a lot of the complexity."
Image captionThe miniature harpoon to be tested on the upcoming RemoveDebris mission
You still have to bring the tumbling satellite under control using thrusters on the chase vehicle - but computer simulations show this should be possible.
The European Space Agency, which is responsible for Envisat, is considering all options at the moment, and the demonstration missions that fly in the next few years will almost certainly go for easier, more cooperative targets first. Indeed, a miniature version of the Airbus harpoon is set to launch next month on a mission called RemoveDebris.
This demonstrator satellite, developed at the Surrey Space Centre, will carry its own piece of junk which it will release and then attempt to retrieve. It will trial a net, but will perform a harpoon test as well to further knowledge about how such systems will behave in the weightless environment of space.
For the big harpoon back in Stevenage, it is now ready to move to its next development stage. This will involve firing the projectile over a distance of 25m, the sort of separation over which the real flight model would have to work.
2 Weeks Before His Death, Stephen Hawking Predicted ‘The End Of The Universe’
2 Weeks Before His Death, Stephen Hawking Predicted ‘The End Of The Universe’
According to a report by the Sunday Times, the world-renowned astrophysicists’ co-authored a mathematical study in which he and his colleagues sought to prove the multiverse theory, and how different universes exist out there.
In addition, he also predicted how the universe we currently live in would eventually fade to darkness as stars throughout the cosmos run out of energy.
His last scientific paper—titled ‘A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation’—is currently being reviewed by a leading scientific journal and is expected to be accepted for publication shortly.
A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation collects concepts from his theory of the lack of limits, which states that the universe expanded from a small point after the Big Bang.
As explained by the Sunday Times, this new proposal suggests that this great explosion was only one of an infinite number of explosions that occurred, each of which created its own universe.
In this context, Thomas Hertog, who collaborated with Hawking, explained that the work makes the multiverse easier to understand, by making it “a verifiable scientific framework.”
However, upon closer inspection, and as explained by follow-up articles published by Gizmodoand the Register, the study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed actually leans away from the multiverse theory, as the two scientists concluded; “we conjecture that the exit from eternal inflation does not produce an infinite fractal-like multiverse, but is finite and reasonably smooth”.
However, in the study, research shows that, if the correct mathematical tools are used, a space probe capable of discovering its existence could be sent. These mathematical tools are explored in the new study waiting to be peer-reviewed.
If this proposal of the British astrophysicist had succeeded while Hawking was still alive, Hertog assured that it would have allowed him to obtain the Nobel prize that “he had wanted for so long.”
“He has often been nominated for the Nobel and should have won it. Now he never can.”
However, this will not happen since the recognition is not delivered posthumously.
Meanwhile, the latest theory developed by the scientist is still being analyzed by specialists of the US scientific journal Physical Review Letters, who must give their approval before it is published.
A number of scientists around the world have said how Professor Hawking’s work may represent the breakthrough that cosmology needs, as it’s the first theory that may be verifiable through experiments.
If you happened to be alive 70,000 years ago, you might have witnessed an extremely rare event: a duo of rogue stars passing relatively close to the Sun — close enough to gravitationally disrupt the comets and asteroids in the outskirts of the solar system.
Artistic depiction of a brown dwarf.
Image credits: NASA / JPL.
In a time when humans were just leaving Africa and Neanderthals were still around, two small reddish stars were approaching our solar system. We now call them Scholz’s star, after the astronomer who discovered them (Ralf-Dieter Scholz). The system is currently some 20 light-years away from Earth, but 70,000 years ago, it was much closer. A team of astronomers now analyzed the orbit of nearly 340 objects in the solar system with hyperbolic orbits (very open, not quite typical elliptical), finding that the trajectory of some of them was influenced by Scholtz’s star. They report that some comets and asteroids in the Oort Cloud — the outer limit of our solar system — were disrupted by the passing of the star.
“Using numerical simulations we have calculated the radiants or positions in the sky from which all these hyperbolic objects seem to come,” explains Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, who together with the other coauthors publishes the results in the MNRAS Letters journal.
“In principle,” he adds, “one would expect those positions to be evenly distributed in the sky, particularly if these objects come from the Oort cloud; however, what we find is very different: a statistically significant accumulation of radiants. The pronounced over-density appears projected in the direction of the constellation of Gemini, which fits the close encounter with Scholz´s star.”
Despite the name, Scholz’s star is actually a binary system consisting of a red dwarf and brown dwarf, with the entire system having just 0.15 solar masses. Because it was so small, it didn’t disturb all the hyperbolic objects in the solar system. Authors explain that the disturbance might also just be a coincidence, completely unrelated to Schultz’s star — but since both the timing and the location of the disturbance fit so well, it’s highly unlikely.
Scholtz’s star passed approximately 52,000 astronomical units away from the Sun (1 astronomical unit is equivalent to the distance between the Earth and the Sun) — the equivalent of 0.82 lightyears. It’s estimated that a star passes through the Oort Cloud every 100,000 years. However, an approach closer than 50,000 astronomical units only happens every 9 million years, according to current models.
The results have been published in two papers:
Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, Sverre J Aarseth. Where the Solar system meets the solar neighbourhood: patterns in the distribution of radiants of observed hyperbolic minor bodies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 2018; 476 (1): L1 DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/sly019
Eric E. Mamajek, Scott A. Barenfeld, Valentin D. Ivanov, Alexei Y. Kniazev, Petri Väisänen, Yuri Beletsky, Henri M. J. Boffin. The closest known flyby of a star to the solar system. The Astrophysical Journal, 2015; 800 (1): L17 DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/800/1/L17
It’s the strangest human mummy you’ll likely ever see, and it’s not an alien.
The alien-like mummified specimen from Atacama region of Chile.
Credits: Bhattacharya et al. 2018.
In 2003, researchers found an incredibly bizarre mummy in Chile. Measuring a mere 6 inches, with an extremely elongated skull and several extreme abnormalities, it only remotely looked human. The questions came in fast, and they poured in: what is? Is it human — and if it is human, why does it look so strange? The specimen was auctioned off to a Spanish businessman which delayed proper studies but now, results from the first comprehensive analysis are finally in.
“This was an unusual specimen with some fairly extraordinary claims put forward. It would be an example of how to use modern science to answer the question what is it?” says senior author Garry Nolan from Stanford University.
Not an alien
Thankfully, Ata, as the skeleton was named (short for Atacama), contains some high-quality DNA which researchers were able to sequence. They compared Ata’s DNA with human and non-human primate reference genomes, including chimpanzee and rhesus macaque. To the chagrin of UFO hunters, researchers learned that Ata is very much human and even more — she has Chilean ancestry.
DNA results will certainly disappoint UFO conspiracists, but Ata is very much human — although she’s incredibly small and suffers from several malformations.
Image credits: Garry Nolan.
Although researchers believed Ata was a few years old, Nolan now believes she was either stillborn or only lived for a few days. It’s unclear exactly when Ata lived, though the skeleton seems to be at least several decades old — probably some 40 years.
Next, researchers moved on to look for more clues regarding Ata’s extremely short stature and unusual features, which aside from the obvious skull malformation, include an abnormal rib count and premature bone age. They found multiple mutations in genes associated with diseases such as dwarfism, scoliosis, and musculoskeletal abnormalities. Surprisingly, all these malformations can be explained with a relatively short list of gene mutations in genes associated with bone development, Nolan says.
However, Ata is more than just an interesting specimen. Since she had the grave misfortune of suffering such severe abnormalities, she can teach us quite a bit about how the gene mutations can affect the human body.
“This is a great example of how studying ancient samples can teach us how to analyze modern day medical samples” says co-author Atul Butte, from the UCSF.
Aside from her skeletal malformations, Ata also probably suffered from something called congenital diaphragmatic hernia — a fairly common, but also life-threatening condition where a baby’s diaphragm doesn’t form correctly. Nolan told The Guardian:
“She was so badly malformed as to be unable to feed. In her condition, she would have ended up in the neonatal ICU, but given where the specimen was found, such things were simply not available,” he said.
“While this started as a story about aliens, and went international, it’s really a story of a human tragedy. A woman had a malformed baby, it was preserved in a manner and then ‘hocked’ or sold as a strange artefact. It turns out to be human, with a fascinating genetic story from which we might learn something important to help others. May she rest in peace.”
Journal Reference: Bhattacharya S, Li J, Sockell A, Kan M, Bava F, Chen, S, Ávila-Arcos M, Ji X, Smith E, Asadi N, Lachman R, Lam H, Bustamante C, Butte A, Nolan G. 2018. Whole genome sequencing of Atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia. Genome Research doi: 10.1101/gr.223693.117.
Edit:In its original form, this article had an error regarding Ata’s age.
My wife and I have made watching Saturday Night Live a ritual in our home. Say what you will about the quality of SNL today in relation to the ‘good old days,’ the show still has its finger on the pulse of American culture. As we sat on our couch this last Saturday night, beers in hand, host Bill Hader, and the SNL cast put on a sketch about alien abduction. My wife and I realized at that moment, when our eyes met, our perception of anything related to the subject of aliens or UFOs was no longer passive, and that SNL was playing a role in establishing this active participation.
Neither my wife nor I have ever had a strange paranormal experience. We have never seen a UFO, let alone been aboard one. We have never seen aliens or ghosts or Bigfoot. My personal and scholarly interest is that of the UFO community, the individuals who form the subcultural collective which engages with the UFO phenomenon and attached discourse. My wife, who has stood by me by some curious miracle, quietly, and with great patience, tolerates my Ufological interests. Yet, by association alone, or her polite way of listening to me talk about the latest UFO scandal or phone call I had to make to a UFO witness, the cultural impact of UFOs seems to have rubbed off on her.
When Roger, the Reiki healer, played by Bill Hader, explains why a tourist couple visiting Sedona should not hike up to the top of Spirit Rock because of extraterrestrial visitors, we both sat quietly through the entire sketch. While the sketch itself was a bit of a dud, compared to Kate McKinnon’s internet-breaking alien abduction sketch with Ryan Gosling, we both had the exact same question on our minds, but were being polite and refrained from hitting ‘Pause’ on the PVR.
Hader’s Roger, playing to a fairly common Ufological paradigm, goes on to explain that he often climbs to the top of the mountain to meditate and connect with his spirit and body. It all went south one night, however, when “she revealed herself…an alien lady with a head shaped like Mr. Peanut.” The alien “initiates intercourse…because they needed DNA for their little babies.”
However, due to the alien’s unfamiliarity with human anatomy, she flipped Roger over, “spread [his] cakes and blasted [his] Raisinette with a turkey baster.” Roger awakes in his bedroom after the experience with his pants on backwards, and on his pillow is a mint with a little note that read, “Great Job!” When the tourist couple inquires as to why they probed him, obviously pointing out the whole anatomy issue, Roger responds by saying, “I guess they had to figure out the lay of the land.” The sketch continues on with strange lights hovering from above, one of the SNL cast being beamed up to a UFO, and Roger getting to hold his new alien baby.
Mysterious lights in the sky, or just some clever photography?
When the sketch concluded, I managed to speak first, “Is there more UFO stuff on TV, or are we just noticing it more?”
My wife responded with,
“I think we just notice it more. We are prone to noticing it more because it is now a part of our lives; I notice it more. When people talk about UFOs or aliens or something paranormal, I usually stop and listen. I’m tuned into it more, as if it is starting to matter to me. This is your fault.”
“with its weekly live broadcasts, the show can swiftly distill and cement public perceptions of current events.”
From a pop culture standpoint, it still has significant cachet no matter how “good” or “bad” the sketches or cast are. In regard to its coverage of UFOs and aliens, the show usually sticks to the usual and simple fare, however, it does make some interesting ideological claims. Furthermore, it puts the UFO debate into the pop culture realm, but in an approachable way.
Four years ago, Hader was in a sketch featuring actor Jon Hamm in which he was an alien poorly disguised as a sports announcer named Greg. The sketch featured Greg ‘infecting’ various others and turning them into aliens in order to invade the planet.
I previously mentioned the famous Kate McKinnon and Ryan Gosling sketch, that aired on December 5th, 2015, which involves three alien abductees being interviewed by Pentagon staffers concerning their experiences. On September 30th, 2017, Gosling returned to SNL to reprise his role with McKinnon to be interviewed again by Pentagon staff due to the lot of them being abducted a second time. Coincidently, the famous New York Times article concerning a secret Pentagon program which looked into “advanced aerial threats,” in other words, UFOs, was published on December 16th of the same year.
It seems that the writers of SNL sketches do play to the conspiracy paradigm present in UFO discourse. The interviewers in both sketches are NSA agents and have been tasked with getting to the bottom of “three confirmed cases” of alien abduction. Furthermore, the abductees in both sketches have vastly different experiences. Ryan Gosling and Cecily Strong’s characters both enjoy peacefully divine interactions with the beautiful aliens bathed in light, while McKinnon’s character is on a different part of the ship, the lower decks perhaps, where little alien grays poke and prod at her, steal her pants, and stare at her while she pees in a bowl. As McKinnon puts it, she didn’t think she was “dealing with the top brass.” This is another common experiencer narrative; the stark difference between those who are contacted for some prophetic or higher purpose, and those who experience horrifying and frightening abductions.
They’re here…
This most recent alien sketch involving Hader plays upon the alien-human hybrid plot, which arguably gained great fame when Dr. David Jacobs published his book, The Threat, in 1997. While stories of breeding programs and the harvesting human ovum and sperm existed in the 1960’s, Jacob’s work showcased many individuals who claim to have taken part in such a program, and were continuously ‘re-abducted’ to see, hold and bond with their hybrid children, or to undergo more sexual acts.
More recently, the story of David Huggins hit the news cycle in mid-2017. Huggins claims to have engaged in sexual intercourse with a female extraterrestrial for the purpose of having a hybrid child, and a recently released documentary entitled Love and Saucers tells his story.
While many within the UFO community may get upset with SNL for turning these often frightening and heartbreaking experiences into a joke, the purpose of the show is to point to our collective cultural landscape and make fun of it. When SNL targets White House staff or some current cultural issue, we take it for granted. It is truly a right of passage for every American President to have one of the SNL cast to play him or her (soon hopefully). George W. Bush had Will Ferrel, Barack Obama had Fred Armison and Jay Pharoah, and Donald Trump has Alec Baldwin. Before every popular cultural event such as the Super Bowl, The Academy Awards, and St. Patrick’s Day, the cast and writers of SNL put it through the ringer, and ensure we see the humor in our common traditions, ideologies, paradigms, and assumed truths. The purpose of parody and farce is to satirize, to allow us to giggle at something truthful and even scary.
I am not suggesting that Saturday Night Live is some Ufological savior. Nor am I suggesting that the butt of their jokes, the UFO community and the countless people who have had strange paranormal experiences, should relax and laugh a little. I think we need to appreciate that, for better or worse, we are becoming more comfortable with the realization that the “truths” we used to hold dear are beginning to shift and change. If the show is a cultural mirror, a silly twisted mirror, but a mirror none the less, with every UFO related sketch, our reflection becomes a little more otherworldly. With every UFO sketch that we laugh at, it is also informing the broader popular culture that UFO phenomenon is something worth talking about. Perhaps SNL is unknowingly normalizing the UFO phenomenon; if we laugh about it, we can also talk about it.
Perhaps the more we engage with the UFO phenomenon, the more it seems to show up in our regular lives on Saturday nights. Regardless of whether you are a fan of the show or not, SNL continues to question and poke fun at UFOs and aliens. In some way, it normalizes the strange in its various sketches and turns UFOs and the related phenomenon into approachable.
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Over mijzelf
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 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.