Satellite Photo Shows A Round Object Beneath Water Off Greek Coast

Ufologists online have come into a frenzy after the discovery of a mysterious circular shape on satellite maps of Google. They are speculating that it could be a hidden submersible off the coast of Greece.

Website Disclose.TV, which posts information about aliens and UFOs, got the people’s attention after it published the circular object online. The unidentified submersible object was reportedly viewed online through Google Maps in the Aegean Sea.

The object is approximately 220 feet long using the ruler on Google Earth for the measurement. It is not established whether the UFO has ever been seen for real or just the image as a result of an optical illusion, such as a trick of the light.

Several folks offer their suggestion as to what the satellite imagery is showing. Many of them believe that the mysterious thing is newly-found evidence that we are not alone.

One commentator says that something here doesn’t belong. They describe the find as an impressive catch and would love to hear the official excuses on this one.

A second person states that it is indeed weird as nothing in the area looks remotely like that object.

A more skeptical commenter said that the shadow underwater could be from the old pier.

However, for now, the actual cause of the bizarre shape stays a mystery. Anyone can view the location on Google Maps here.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

03-08-2018 om 23:20 geschreven door peter  

Space Agency Observes Strange Flashes Of Light On the Moon

Two great flashes of light were observed erupting on the dark side of the Moon. A sector of conspiracy theorists has suggested these lights could be alien UFOs.

On the nights of July 17 and 18, the Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System (MIDAS) observed the bizarre phenomena.

MIDAS observatories in Spain search the Lunar surface on a daily basis for asteroid and meteor impacts.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the flashes were registered almost precisely 24 hours apart, apparently in pursuit of one another.

High-sensitivity CCD cameras capture detailed photographs of the bumpy surface of the moon that show the exact moment of impact.

Both MIDAS and the ESA agree the flashes were very much extraterrestrial in origin.

The force of impact is tremendous, but current estimate suggests that the extraterrestrial objects were no larger than the average walnut.

ESA said that transient flashes such as these are hard to study and challenging to determine the cause.

Three astronomical observatories in Spain work on behalf of the MIDAS project to scan the Moon for the transient flashes. They are equipped with powerful telescopes and CCD cameras to detect and try to identify the various impacts that rock the bright orb.

MIDAS believe that understanding these lunar impacts can help protect the Earth from similar dangers.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

03-08-2018 om 23:09 geschreven door peter  

By Andrew Moseman

Deep inside Brazil, there are tunnels large enough for a person to walk through. They are neatly symmetrical—too neat to have been caused by any known geologic process. And they are lined with claw marks.

These megatunnels are probably the handiwork of giant ground sloths—humongous "paleoburrows" that no longer walk the Earth. But tens of thousands of years after these megafauna did their digging, those tunnels still dot this part of South America. Discover has a great feature up about it.

Claw marks

HEINRICH FRANKS

Up until the 2000s, little was known or written about this bounty of holes. But since he came upon his first one near Novo Hamburgo, Brazilian scientist Heinrich Frank has found more than 1,500 tunnels. Frank has found burrows that measure hundreds of feet long. Scientists have discovered one with branching tunnels that, when you measure the thing in its entirety, comes in at 2,000 feet long. It had to have been dug by many creatures over generations, not by one or two giant sloths.

The big open question is, Why? The tunnels appear to be much larger than any burrowing animal would need to get away from bad weather or hungry predators. As Frank tells Discover, "There's no explanation – not predators, not climate, not humidity. I really don't know."

Source: Discover

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

03-08-2018 om 23:02 geschreven door peter  

Bigelow's BEAM goes to space on Friday to show if this technology actually works

03-08-2018 om 22:27 geschreven door peter  

Robert Bigelow in 2013, standing in front of the BEAM habitat module currently on the International Space Station. 

Photo by Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty Images

Robert Bigelow thinks the truth is out there

{ https://www.theverge.com/ }

03-08-2018 om 22:12 geschreven door peter  

The Aviationist

Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock

• Credible reports of a meteor exploding with 2.1 kiolotons of force above a US Air Force early warning radar at Thule Air Base in Greenland have surfaced.
• The Air Force has been silent on the event.
• NASA did provide a Tweet with data showing record of an object of unspecified size traveling at 24.4 Kilometers per second (about 54,000 MPH or Mach 74) almost directly over Thule, Greenland.

---

A curious and credible Tweet from the Director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, Hans Kristensen, on August 1, 2018 at 5:14 PM Washington D.C. time claimed that a, "Meteor explodes with 2.1 kilotons force 43 km above missile early warning radar at Thule Air Base."

The Tweet apparently originated from Twitter user "Rocket Ron", a "Space Explorer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory". The original Tweet read, "A fireball was detected over Greenland on July 25, 2018 by US Government sensors at an altitude of 43.3 km. The energy from the explosion is estimated to be 2.1 kilotons." Rocket Ron's Tweet hit in the afternoon on Jul. 31.

View image on Twitter

Hans Kristensen

✔@nukestrat

Meteor explodes with 2.1 kilotons force 43 km above missile early warning radar at Thule Air Base.

https://twitter.com/RonBaalke/status/1024371681106620416 …
HT @Casillic

We’re still here, so they correctly concluded it was not a Russian first strike. There are nearly 2,000 nukes on alert, ready to launch.

Rocket Ron @RonBaalke

A fireball was detected over Greenland on July 25, 2018 by US Government sensors at an altitude of 43.3 km. The energy from the explosion is estimated to be 2.1 kilotons.

11:14 PM - Aug 1, 2018

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• 1,143 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

The incident is fascinating for a long list of reasons, not the least of which is how the Air Force integrates the use of social media reporting (and non-reporting) into their official flow of information. As of this writing, no reporting about any such event appears on the public news website of the 12th Space Warning Squadron based at Thule, the 21st Space Wing, or the Wing's 821st Air Base Group that operates and maintains Thule Air Base in support of missile warning, space surveillance and satellite command and control operations missions.

 US Air Force

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory did provide a Tweet with a screenshot of data showing record of an object of unspecified size traveling at (!) 24.4 Kilometers per second (about 54,000 MPH or Mach 74) at 76.9 degrees' north latitude, 69.0 degrees' west longitude on July 25, 2018 at 11:55 PM. That latitude and longitude does check out as almost directly over Thule, Greenland.

 JPL via Twitter

When you look at NASA's Near Earth Object (NEO) Program database for objects entering the atmosphere you see that, "The data indicate that small asteroids struck Earth's atmosphere - resulting in what astronomers call a bolide (a fireball, or bright meteor) - on 556 separate occasions in a 20-year period. Almost all asteroids of this size disintegrate in the atmosphere and are usually harmless." That is a rate of one asteroid, or "bolide", every 13 days over the 20-year study according to a 2014 article by Deborah Byrd for Science Wire as published on EarthSky.org.

But there are exceptions.

You may recall the sensational YouTube and social media videos of the very large Chelyabinsk meteor that struck the earth on Feb. 15, 2013. Luckily it entered the earth's atmosphere at a shallow trajectory and largely disintegrated. Had it entered at a more perpendicular angle, it would have struck the earth with significantly greater force. Scientists report that Chelyabinsk was the largest meteor to hit the earth in the modern recording period, over 60-feet (20 meters) in diameter. Over 7,000 buildings were damaged and 1,500 people injured from the incident.

What is perhaps most haunting about the Chelyabinsk Meteor and, perhaps we may learn, this most recent Thule, Greenland incident, is that there was no warning (at least, not publicly). No satellites in orbit detected the Chelyabinsk Meteor, no early warning system knew it was coming according to scientists. Because the radiant or origin of the Chelyabinsk Meteor was out of the sun, it was difficult to detect in advance. It arrived with total surprise.

Northern Russia seems to be a magnet for titanic meteor strikes. The fabled Tunguska Event of 1908 was a meteor that struck in the Kraznoyarsk Krai region of Siberia. It flattened over 770 square miles of Siberian taiga forest but, curiously, seems to have left no crater, suggesting it likely disintegrated entirely about 6 miles above the earth. The massive damage done to the taiga forest was from the shockwave of the object entering the atmosphere prior to disintegration. While this recent Thule, Greenland event is very large at 2.1 kilotons (2,100 tons of TNT) of force for the explosion, the Tunguska Event is estimated to have been as large as 15 megatons (15 million tons of TNT).

It will be interesting to see how (and if) popular news media and the official defense news outlets process this recent Thule, Greenland incident. But while we wait to see how the media responds as the Twitter dust settles from the incident, it's worth at least a minor exhale knowing this is another big object that missed hitting the earth in a different location at a different angle and potentially with a different outcome.

Read the original article on The Aviationist. Copyright 2018. Follow The Aviationist on Twitter.

MORE FROM THE AVIATIONIST:

• Online Flight Tracking Provides Interesting Details About U.S. Spyplane and Russian Doomsday Aircraft Operating Over The Black Sea
• Report: Meteor Made 2.1 Kiloton Explosion Over Air Force Space Command Base Thule, Greenland.
• Russian Air Force Su-34 Fullback Runway Excursion Incident

SEE ALSO: 

• Russia just showed off a potentially world-ending nuclear 'doomsday' torpedo that the US can't stop

{ https://www.businessinsider.com/ }

03-08-2018 om 22:00 geschreven door peter  

Drought played a key role in the demise of the Mayan civilization

 BY MIHAI ANDREI

The Maya built one of the greatest civilizations in the Americas, and the story of their demise has fascinated people for centuries. Now, a new study reports that environmental aspects — particularly, drought — were a key aspect of their decline.

Overview of the central plaza of the Mayan city of Palenque (Chiapas, Mexico), an example of Classic Maya architecture.

Image credits: Jan Harenburg.

The first mention of a true Maya civilization hails from millennia ago, in 2000 BC. They reached the peak of their power much later, during the Classic period, which lasted up until the year 900 CE. Most Mayan cities were sprawling architectural displays, featuring dazzling palaces, pyramid-temples, ceremonial ballcourts, and structures aligned for astronomical observation. The Mayans tended to develop haphazardly, showing little concern for what the future could bring — and who could blame them? During their zenith, they controlled the entire Yucatán Peninsula and all of the territory now incorporated into the modern countries of Guatemala and Belize, as well as the western reaches of Honduras and El Salvador.

But their lack of concern was not without consequence after all. During the 9th century, their power started to decline. Their beautiful limestone cities were abandoned and step by step, the Maya civilization withdrew and quickly entered decline. There are mentions of Mayans after the year 1000 CE, but their civilization was almost completely wiped off.

The reasons for their decline are not simple — invasion, war, environmental degradation, and collapsing trade routes all had a role to play. But in the 1990s, an interesting theory emerged: after correlating the Maya decline with environmental data, researchers found a period of extended drought — long and severe enough to affect the stability of the empire built by the Maya.

“The role of climate change in the collapse of Classic Maya civilisation is somewhat controversial, partly because previous records are limited to qualitative reconstructions, for example whether conditions were wetter or drier,” said Nick Evans, a PhD student in Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences and the paper’s first author.

“Our study represents a substantial advance as it provides statistically robust estimates of rainfall and humidity levels during the Maya downfall.”

Evans and colleagues analyzed the different isotopes of water trapped in gypsum — a mineral that can form on the bottom of lakes during periods of severe drought. They found that annual precipitation levels decreased between 41% and 54% during the period of the Maya civilization’s collapse, with periods of peak drought corresponding to a 70% reduction in rainfall.

Professor David Hodell, Director of Cambridge’s Godwin Laboratory for Palaeoclimate Research and the senior author of the current paper, was the first to draw a correlation between the drought and the period of Mayan decline. He praised the gypsum-measuring methodology, saying that it leaves very little room for interpretation.

“This method is highly accurate and is almost like measuring the water itself,” said Evans.

While the circumstances that lead to the decline of the Maya are complex and drought cannot be singled out as the one big culprit yet, it does seem that at the very least, drought was an important aspect of it.

Now, researchers will try to use more localized measurements and build more precise models, to see how the drought would have affected agriculture — most importantly, the Maya’s staple crops, such as maize.

Journal Reference: Nicholas P. Evans, Thomas K. Bauska, Fernando Gázquez-Sánchez, Mark Brenner, Jason H. Curtis, David A. Hodell. Quantification of drought during the collapse of the classic Maya civilization. Science, 2018 DOI: 10.1126/science.aas9871

The Lost Maya - KuriaTV

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

03-08-2018 om 21:36 geschreven door peter  

Scientists identify exoplanets where life could develop as it did on Earth

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC LMB), found that the chances for life to develop on the surface of a rocky planet like Earth are connected to the type and strength of light given off by its host star.

Their study, published in the journal Science Advances, proposes that stars which give off sufficient ultraviolet (UV) light could kick-start life on their orbiting planets in the same way it likely developed on Earth, where the UV light powers a series of chemical reactions that produce the building blocks of life.

The researchers have identified a range of planets where the UV light from their host star is sufficient to allow these chemical reactions to take place, and that lie within the habitable range where liquid water can exist on the planet's surface.

"This work allows us to narrow down the best places to search for life," said Dr. Paul Rimmer, a postdoctoral researcher with a joint affiliation at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory and the MRC LMB, and the paper's first author. "It brings us just a little bit closer to addressing the question of whether we are alone in the universe."

The new paper is the result of an ongoing collaboration between the Cavendish Laboratory and the MRC LMB, bringing together organic chemistry and exoplanet research. It builds on the work of Professor John Sutherland, a co-author on the current paper, who studies the chemical origin of life on Earth.

In a paper published in 2015, Professor Sutherland's group at the MRC LMB proposed that cyanide, although a deadly poison, was in fact a key ingredient in the primordial soup from which all life on Earth originated.

In this hypothesis, carbon from meteorites that slammed into the young Earth interacted with nitrogen in the atmosphere to form hydrogen cyanide. The hydrogen cyanide rained to the surface, where it interacted with other elements in various ways, powered by the UV light from the sun. The chemicals produced from these interactions generated the building blocks of RNA, the close relative of DNA which most biologists believe was the first molecule of life to carry information.

In the laboratory, Sutherland's group recreated these chemical reactions under UV lamps, and generated the precursors to lipids, amino acids and nucleotides, all of which are essential components of living cells.

"I came across these earlier experiments, and as an astronomer, my first question is always what kind of light are you using, which as chemists they hadn't really thought about," said Rimmer. "I started out measuring the number of photons emitted by their lamps, and then realised that comparing this light to the light of different stars was a straightforward next step."

The two groups performed a series of laboratory experiments to measure how quickly the building blocks of life can be formed from hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulphite ions in water when exposed to UV light. They then performed the same experiment in the absence of light.

"There is chemistry that happens in the dark: it's slower than the chemistry that happens in the light, but it's there," said senior author Professor Didier Queloz, also from the Cavendish Laboratory. "We wanted to see how much light it would take for the light chemistry to win out over the dark chemistry."

The same experiment run in the dark with the hydrogen cyanide and the hydrogen sulphite resulted in an inert compound which could not be used to form the building blocks of life, while the experiment performed under the lights did result in the necessary building blocks.

The researchers then compared the light chemistry to the dark chemistry against the UV light of different stars. They plotted the amount of UV light available to planets in orbit around these stars to determine where the chemistry could be activated.

They found that stars around the same temperature as our sun emitted enough light for the building blocks of life to have formed on the surfaces of their planets. Cool stars, on the other hand, do not produce enough light for these building blocks to be formed, except if they have frequent powerful solar flares to jolt the chemistry forward step by step. Planets that both receive enough light to activate the chemistry and could have liquid water on their surfaces reside in what the researchers have called the abiogenesis zone.

Among the known exoplanets which reside in the abiogenesis zone are several planets detected by the Kepler telescope, including Kepler 452b, a planet that has been nicknamed Earth's 'cousin', although it is too far away to probe with current technology. Next-generation telescopes, such as NASA's TESS and James Webb Telescopes, will hopefully be able to identify and potentially characterise many more planets that lie within the abiogenesis zone.

Of course, it is also possible that if there is life on other planets, that it has or will develop in a totally different way than it did on Earth.

"I'm not sure how contingent life is, but given that we only have one example so far, it makes sense to look for places that are most like us," said Rimmer. "There's an important distinction between what is necessary and what is sufficient. The building blocks are necessary, but they may not be sufficient: it's possible you could mix them for billions of years and nothing happens. But you want to at least look at the places where the necessary things exist."

According to recent estimates, there are as many as 700 million trillion terrestrial planets in the observable universe. "Getting some idea of what fraction have been, or might be, primed for life fascinates me," said Sutherland. "Of course, being primed for life is not everything and we still don't know how likely the origin of life is, even given favourable circumstances—if it's really unlikely then we might be alone, but if not, we may have company."

 Explore further: Researchers show role for cyanide in origins of life

More information: 

• P.B. Rimmer el al., "The origin of RNA precursors on exoplanets," Science Advances (2018). 
• DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar3302 , http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaar3302 

{ https://phys.org/ }

03-08-2018 om 17:53 geschreven door peter  

People claim to be healed thanks to the “Bosnian pyramids” in Visoko

Among more than 3,000 volunteers from 62 countries who visited Visoko at their own expense in order to “dig the world’s largest mystery”, was Veronika Vranko from Slovakia. She had problems with her lungs that had only 47 % of capacity, and after the recommendation of specialists in lung diseases Peter Hajduk from Prague, she decided to visit Visoko.

03-08-2018 om 17:12 geschreven door peter  

03-08-2018 om 17:02 geschreven door peter  

It’s gotten to the point where it seems as if the Chinese Communist Party mines dystopian science fiction for ideas. Of course, life reflects art and art reflects life, so it’s likely both are just making use of new technological and social developments for their own benefit. Whatever the case is, ever since Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China’s governing party has found new innovative ways to keep track of its citizens and more importantly, their thought-crimes.

Aside from the Orwellian Social Credit System the commies recently unveiled, a new report published by the South China Morning Post points out that Chinese surveillance has already taken a turn for the terrifying. It turns out that as far-fetched as it may seem, Chinese military and government agencies are using robotic birds to surveil citizens from the skies. Can any bird be trusted in light of this revelation?

MOVE ALONG, CITIZEN.

Disguising spy drones as birds is pretty ingenious. Do any of us really look that closely at birds flying overhead? The drones can fly high enough that they look like any normal bird, are close to silent, and even realistically flap their wings. The SCMPreports that 30 different agencies have deployed the birdbots in at least five different Chinese provinces.

Yang Wenqing, an associate professor at the School of Aeronautics at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian, worked on the team which developed the dove drone project, code-named “Dove” appropriately enough. Yang says that while the drones are still only being rolled out on a small scale, the ChiComs plan to fill their skies with flocks of the dystopian avian onlookers in the near future:

The scale is still small. We believe the technology has good potential for large-scale use in the future … it has some unique advantages to meet the demand for drones in the military and civilian sectors.

The drones have already been used in China’s restive Xinjiang “autonomous” region to keep tabs on the Uyghur people who aren’t happy that the Chinese Communist Party drew their new borders around them without asking. Great job choosing a symbol of peace as a symbol of unwanted control too, CCP.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, CITIZEN.

While it’s easy to dismiss this as another example of China’s ongoing march deeper into a dystopian sci-fi hellscape with Chinese characteristics™, it has to make you wonder next time you’re out and about: are those birds overhead really just birds? If China is filling their skies with robot spies, it’s only inevitable that other countries already are too. Who knows where else technological spies might be lurking? That creepy always-on home smart speaker you use to tell you the weather? The microphone and camera you carry around in your pocket everywhere you go? Your microwave? Inside your head? 

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.

Forget hats. Wrap your whole house in tin foil, throw out all your devices, and go off grid.

The doves are coming.

RISE OF THE DRONES - NOVA (full documentary)

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

03-08-2018 om 16:55 geschreven door peter  

Moon size UFO recorded by NASA near Earths sun, July 31, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: July 31, 2018

Location of sighting: Earths sun, SOHO images

Here is a moon size UFO near our sun this week. The UFO has several long arms, which makes me think this is a space station that wanders our solar system. Currently its near our sun because its trying to use some rare particles that the sun produces to power its craft and devices. Found in the SOHO NASA images, this UFO is just one of many per day that visit our sun. Some UFOs are many times bigger than this, yet go unreported, because...how would the public react if they knew that not only were we not alone in our solar system, but UFOs bigger than earth itself commonly passed by our planet? The public would panic, suicide rates would skyrocket, alien religions like Scientology would become powerhouses in the religious sectors, anti alien groups would form and arm themselves. And what effect would this have on financial and judicial systems of the world? There would be chaos! Therefore the governments of the world remain silent. 

Scott C. Waring

03-08-2018 om 16:34 geschreven door peter  

Ancient Underground City and Pyramid Found near Tiwanaku

A group of archeologists from Bolivia has found an underground city dating back to pre-Inca times outside the ancient archaeological site of Tiwanaku, in the province of Ingavi, in the department of La Paz, as reported by the Bolivian Ministry of Cultures and Tourism.

“With new data obtained with the help of modern technology, consisting of precision cameras that took pictures from the air and infrared surveys, was found a pre-Hispanic citadel outside the archaeological perimeter. There, we found an underground plaza and up to two platforms of what is considered a pyramid,” wrote in a statement the Bolivian Ministry of Cultures and Tourism.

The discovery took place within the framework of the preservation and conservation works of Tiwanaku, carried out in the area with the cooperation of scientists from Japan and UNESCO.

According to experts, the excavation could take up to 50 years to reveal that what is hidden beneath the surface.

“Excavation drilling will be carried out in the southwest and north, with the aim of confirming or delegitimizing the data obtained,” said Julio Condori, general director of the Center for Archaeological, Anthropological and Administration Research of Tiwanaku (Ciaat).

The ancient citadel of Tiwanaku, together with Puma Punku, are some of the most mysterious ancient sites in Bolivia. Home to stones and megaliths that defy logic, these two sites are a treasure trove for archeologists.

It is one of the main tourist destinations in Bolivia. Its main attractions are the Temples of Kalasasaya and Puma Punku, the Puerta del Sol, the Pyramid of Akapana and a series of other gigantic monoliths that were erected thousands of years ago by a mysterious people.

It is believed that its builder civilization arose on the shores of Lake Titicaca in the year 1,580 B.C., and disappeared by 1200 AD. In 1945, Arthur Posnansky estimated that Tiwanaku dated to 15,000 BC based on his archaeoastronomical techniques.

It is suspected that climatic effects and pests decimated the population.

According to the experts, one of the oldest cultures in South America, the ancestor of the Aymaras and the Quechuas, called the area their home.

If researchers confirm the new discovery, it would force us to rethink the idea that Tiwanaku was only a ceremonial center and consider it was a massive ancient metropolis, divided by several large complexes.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

03-08-2018 om 01:51 geschreven door peter  

The tech bound for the sun’s atmosphere had to be tested for heat, rattle and cold

BY 

LISA GROSSMAN 

 

HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT  The Parker Solar Probe, shown in this artist’s illustration, is about to go where no spacecraft has gone before: the sun. To make sure the probe can survive a dip in the solar atmosphere, engineers had to get creative in testing the technology.

APL, NASA GSFC

NASA has a mantra for preparing spacecraft to launch: “Test as you fly.” The idea is to test the entire spacecraft, fully assembled, in the same environment and configuration that it will see in orbit.

But the Parker Solar Probe, set to launch August 11, is no ordinary spacecraft (SN Online: 7/5/2018). And it’s headed to no ordinary environment. Parker will sweep through the sun’s scorching hot atmosphere for humankind’s first close encounter with the star at the center of the solar system.

“Solar Probe is a little bit special,” says space plasma physicist Stuart Bale of the University of California, Berkeley. Getting the whole kit and caboodle into a setting that simulated the sun’s energetic particles, intense light and searing heat “was deemed impossible.” Scientists had to get creative to test the technology that will touch the sun, using everything from huge mirrors to dust tunnels to reams of paper.

Taking the heat

The first order of business was to find materials that can stand the heat. The sun’s atmosphere, or corona, sizzles at millions of degrees Celsius — but it is so diffuse that it doesn’t pose much threat to the spacecraft (SN Online: 8/20/17). Direct sunlight, however, can heat exposed components to around 1370° Celsius. Two of the spacecraft’s scientific instruments, plus parts of its solar panels and its revolutionary heat shield, will be exposed to that searing sunlight at all times.

“Normal things … would melt,” says solar physicist Kelly Korreck of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

Korreck works on the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons instrument, known by its acronym SWEAP, which will catch the charged particles of the solar wind with a sensor called a Faraday cup (SN Online: 8/18/17). “It actually sticks around the heat shield and will be able to touch the sun,” Korreck says. “That cup is special.”

FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE Tests of the probe’s revolutionary heat shield in a huge vacuum chamber at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center checked its ability to handle swings between hot and cold temperatures.

ED WHITMAN/JHU-APL, NASA

To build the cup and other instruments that will see the sun directly, engineers settled on three main materials — a niobium alloy called C103 that is used in rocket engines, an alloy of titanium, zirconium and molybdenum called TZM, and tungsten. Some cables carrying power to the SWEAP cup are also lined with sapphire, a good insulator at high temperatures. And the probe’s heat shield is made of two kinds of carbon-based materials.

Figuring out how each of these materials would behave in space was tricky. Engineers couldn't just use an oven to test the metals, which in heat can react with oxygen to rust or corrode. Carbon also can react with oxygen to combust. So the team had to test pieces of the instruments in airless vacuum chambers.

“Getting things hot on Earth is easier than you would think it is,” says Elizabeth Congdon of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., the lead engineer for the heat shield. “Getting things hot on Earth in vacuum is difficult.”

One way the Parker team mimicked the sun’s heat was using actual sunlight. Engineers took material samples to the world’s largest solar furnace, the PROMES facility in Odeillo, France. A series of 63 mirrors built on a hillside redirect sunlight onto an enormous concave mirror on the side of an eight-story building. That mirror then focuses the sunlight into a beam no more than 80 centimeters wide that heats materials to 3000° C inside a small vacuum chamber in a laboratory on stilts.

The beam is so hot, “you can take a two-by-four and swing it through the beam, and it burns right off,” Bale says. “Just a flash of smoke and it’s gone.” Bale leads another of the probe’s experiments called FIELDS that also needed heat testing. FIELDS is comprised of five long antennas, four of which will be exposed to the sun, that will measure electric and magnetic fields in the corona.

The SWEAP team needed an even more realistic simulator, one that would deliver intense sunlight at the angles that Parker will experience. They found an unlikely solution in IMAX film projectors, which emit light in a similar range of wavelengths to the sun.

“It took a completely custom test facility to do it,” says astrophysicist Anthony Case of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, who also works on the SWEAP instrument. He and his colleagues turned four IMAX projectors around so the lamps focused light into a small vacuum chamber, rather than spreading it across a huge screen. That gave the team the right light intensity and angles to test their instrument.

HOT HOT HOT The Parker Solar Probe team used the world’s largest solar furnace, fueled by sunlight reflected by this series of mirrors in the Pyrenees mountains in France, to test the materials used to build the probe.µ

H. ZELL/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Biting the dust

Solar heat isn’t the only threat to the Parker Solar Probe. The region around the sun is also expected to be full of dust, left over from the formation of the planets. Scientists don’t know exactly how much dust to expect, but it’s likely to be moving almost as fast as the spacecraft, about 170 kilometers per second.

That’s a big worry for Parker’s twin telescopes, together called the Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR. One of the telescopes will be facing the direction that Parker is traveling, so it will be heading directly into the dust storm. “It can’t be protected,” says astrophysicist Russell Howard of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

Dust particles hitting the telescope’s lens leave it pocked with little craters. Only 0.6 percent of the lens should be pitted by the end of Parker’s seven-year mission, according to computer models of dust in the inner solar system. But even a few pits can skew the data, so the team wanted to minimize the damage by choosing the right glass.

Howard and colleagues tested three possible materials for the lens in a dust acceleration tunnel at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. The tunnel accelerated charged iron particles, ranging from half a micrometer to 3 micrometers wide, to speeds between half a kilometer per second to 8 kilometers per second — fast enough for the scientists to extrapolate up to the dust speeds Parker might experience.

Sapphire withstood the barrage best, but it was unclear how it would behave as a lens. The team also rejected diamond-coated BK7 glass, commonly used for space telescopes, after the coating separated from the glass and left an extra ring around the impact spot. Regular, uncoated BK7 was the winner.

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What's what

The Parker Solar Probe will use four sets of scientific instruments plus innovative self-protective measures to explore the environment near the sun. Take a tour of the spacecraft’s tech.

Tap or click to explore the tech.

H. THOMPSON, E. OTWELL, T. TIBBITTS

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Swinging the temperatures 

Most of the spacecraft won’t have to worry about the dust or the sun’s extreme heat. Aside from SWEAP and FIELDS, almost everything is tucked behind the all-important heat shield.

That 2.5-meter-wide heat shield is made of carbon foam sandwiched between two carbon sheets. The whole thing is just 11.5 centimeters thick, and is coated on the sun-facing side with white ceramic paint to reflect as much sunlight as possible. Even then, that side could get as hot as 1370° C. But behind it, the bulk of the spacecraft will chill at an average of just 30° C (about 85° Fahrenheit).

“We hide in the shadows,” says solar physicist Eric Christian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. He’s the deputy principal investigator of the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun experiment, which will measure solar particles across a wide range of energies. His team was able to build with ordinary materials and skip the rigorous heat testing. “We’re the lucky ones.”

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER To make sure it was ready for flight, engineers tested the Parker Solar Probe, in a nearly fully assembled form, in a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center from January to March.

ED WHITMAN/JHU-APL, NASA

But Parker won’t always be near the sun. The spacecraft’s orbit will bring it as far from the sun as Venus, where temperatures are around –270° C. At that distance, the spacecraft that will touch the sun needs onboard heaters to keep it at 20° C. So Parker needed to be tested for cold and extreme temperature changes, too.

“We’re not just worried about hot cycles, we’re worried about hot then cold then hot then cold,” says Congdon.

In January 2018, the entire spacecraft was lowered into a thermal vacuum chamber at NASA Goddard for two months of testing. The chamber, a cylinder standing 12 meters tall and 8 meters wide, was cooled to –180° C. A radiator glowing at about 315° C represented the heat coming from the back of the heat shield — but most of that heat never reached the scientific instruments since a titanium truss holds the heat shield at a safe distance from the spacecraft’s main body.  The team cycled through hot and cold several times to simulate what Parker will experience.

Another challenge was keeping the probe’s solar panels cool. “You think, obviously, you’re going to the sun, solar power makes the most sense,” Congdon says. “But solar panels don’t like to get hot.” So the panels are threaded with veins that carry water to cool them off. The water absorbs heat from the panels and carries it to radiators that release the heat into space.

The solar panels are also on a shoulder joint, so they can tuck behind the heat shield at Parker’s closest approaches to the sun. Only the last row of cells will see the sun then. “That single row of cells can produce the same amount of power as the full wing can when we’re by the Earth,” says solar physicist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the probe’s project scientist.

 

CHARGE ME UP Engineers used lasers to test the probe’s solar panels, which will provide energy to the craft as it orbits the sun. The test simulated the vigorous vibrations of a launch to make sure that each segment of the solar panels remained electrically connected to the spacecraft.

ED WHITMAN/JHU-APL, NASA

Up and away

Before Parker can peer into the sun’s secrets, though, it must survive the trip to space.

The violent shaking during a spacecraft’s launch make it a tense time for scientists, even if they’ve tested all of the parts in an acoustic vibration chamber. Watching SWEAP’s vibration test “made me swear,” Korreck says. “It’s very scary to watch this thing you’ve spent 10 years on flop around as it keeps shaking more and more.”

Her team faced an unusual challenge in making Parker ready to rattle. It could not glue screws in place to prevent them from shaking loose, because epoxies would melt in the sunlight. So the SWEAP team twisted thin niobium wire by hand to tie hundreds of screws together in such a way that, if one comes loose, the others hold it in.

Launch can be a high-pressure time for the spacecraft, too — literally. Engineers initially thought Parker’s launch aboard a powerful Delta IV Heavy rocket, would subject the heat shield to a force 20 times that of Earth’s gravity, although later the team realized the launch force wouldn’t be so severe. To make sure the 72.5-kilogram shield wouldn’t bend or break, the team stacked 1,360 kilograms of paper on top of it.

Once it’s passed the final test of launching and deploying, Parker’s first scientific data should start trickling back to Earth in December. These missives will let scientists take the first step to unlocking the secrets of the sun’s superheated atmosphere and its energetic winds.

“It’s like being a proud parent. I worry that something could happen, but I don’t worry that we didn’t prepare or test her well,” Fox says. “I just hope she writes home every day with beautiful data.”

Citations

• NASA. Parker Solar Probe.
• N.J. Fox et al. The Solar Probe Plus Mission: Humanity’s first visit to our star. Space Science Reviews. Vol. 204, December 2016, p. 7.

Further Reading

• M. Temming. NASA’s Parker probe is about to get up close and personal with the sun. Science News. Vol. 194, July 21, 2018, p. 12.
• L. Grossman. The sun’s outer atmosphere is far more complex than previously thought. Science News Online, December 19, 2017.
• L. Grossman. Eclipse watchers will go after the biggest solar mystery: Why is the corona so hot? Science News Online, August 20, 2017.
• L. Grossman. Where does the solar wind come from? The eclipse may offer answers. Science News Online, August 18, 2017.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

03-08-2018 om 01:39 geschreven door peter  

SETI Researchers Want to End the Alien-Detection Hype

03-08-2018 om 01:26 geschreven door peter  

9 Strange, Scientific Excuses for Why Humans Haven't Found Aliens Yet

By Brandon Specktor, Live Science Senior Writer

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Photo Credit: JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute/NASA

Photo Credit: JPL-Caltech/NASA

2. The aliens are imprisoned on "super-Earths."

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

03-08-2018 om 01:15 geschreven door peter  

NASA moon landing SHOCK: Secret Apollo 11 tapes recovered after 49-years

NASA will celebrate the 49th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing this month and to mark the occasion, hundreds of never-before-heard audio tapes have been dug out from the US space agency's vaults.

03-08-2018 om 00:24 geschreven door peter  

Rapidly moving UFO is accidentally caught on camera as man zooms in on moon… but is it the international space station?

• Video of moving UFO accidentally captured in U.S. city of Trenton in New Jersey
• The camera zooms and focuses on to the cratered surface of the moon 
• Skeptics were quick to explain what the flying object could have been 

By GRETA LEVY FOR MAILONLINE

Mysterious new footage has captured what appears to be a rapidly moving UFO between the earth and the moon.  

The extreme close-up on the moon focuses on the crater-marked surface of earth's natural satellite.

As the camera moves in closer and slowly examines each crevasse - what appears to be a metallic craft darts across the frame panning frame.

The extreme close-up on the moon focuses on the crater-marked surface of earth's natural satellite

In mere moments, the face of the moon is no longer the focus - but a circular object flying through the sky.  

The aircraft whizzes across the face of the moon for five seconds and abruptly vanishes.

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The videographer, who asked to remain anonymous said: 'It's pure luck that the UFO came into the picture while I was zooming in on the edges.

'I was doing a closeup of the Moon. I typically like to zoom in on the craters and the edges of it.' 

The video was shot in the U.S. city of Trenton in New Jersey and posted online. 

The video was shot in the U.S. city of Trenton in New Jersey and posted on Youtube but skeptics were quick to justify the bizarre sighting caught on camera

Some posted the metallic object was merely falling ice from a plane, and others suggested a meteor or space debris

But skeptics were quick to justify the bizarre sighting capture on camera. 

Some posted the metallic object was merely falling ice from a plane, and others suggested a meteor or space debris.

But the videographer said: 'I think it's the International Space Station (ISS),

The object whizzes across the face of the moon for five seconds and abruptly vanishes

'Based on what I see on Google search, it's the explanation that makes the most sense.' 

Travelling at 17,227mph, and at an altitude of between 205 miles and 255 miles, the space station orbits earth 15.5 times a day. 

The ISS experiences 16 sunrises and sunsets per day and appears as a slow-moving bright dot from the ground.    

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

02-08-2018 om 23:51 geschreven door peter  

What have Egyptian Experts said about Bosnian Pyramids?

It’s almost 10 years since the first visit of a team of leading Egyptian experts to the Bosnian pyramids.

Prof. dr. Nabil Swelim, a triple doctor of archeological science and founder of four pyramids in Egypt, Dr. Ali Barakat, who worked in Egypt’s Public Administration for Underground Wealth, Prof. dr. Mona Aly, the head of the Conservationist Department of the Archeological Faculty of the University of Cairo, and Prof. dr. Hamed El Haweli, an Egyptologist from the University of Cairo, visited the first European pyramids in the summer of 2017.

After a week-long visit to all archeological locations in Visoko, their conclusion is unanimous: “The Bosnian Sun Pyramid is the largest pyramid in the world and the world will know Bosnia as a land of pyramids. The prime minister of the Federation, the prime minister of the Zenica-Doboj Canton and the mayors of Sarajevo and Visoko met with them. The Minister for Culture, who did everything he could to stifle the project of exploring the pyramids, and the members of the Commission for National Memorials, who three times expanded the protective zone around the Bosnian Sun Pyramid and, therefore, made further exploration by the Foundation “Archeological Park: Bosnian Sun Pyramid” impossible, refused to meet the team.”

The head of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities stopped the international promotion of the Bosnian pyramids. Geologist Ali Barakata was dismissed after his return from BiH and Dr. Swellim was threatened with the loss of his pension if he continued to support the project.

Despite the efforts of domestic and international archeologists and historians, the Bosnian pyramids became the most active archeological location in the world at which each year, several hundred volunteers from across the world work, which many world renown experts visits and tens of thousands of guests from all continents come to visit.

(Source: Hayat.ba)

Egyptian Experts About the Bosnian Pyramids

{ http://www.sarajevotimes.com/ }

02-08-2018 om 23:31 geschreven door peter  

UFOs: I KNOW WHAT I SAW - 2017 Best UFO HD Movie UFOTV®

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02-08-2018 om 23:31 geschreven door peter