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 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 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...
04-09-2018
Giant Square-Shaped UFO Photographed
Javion Hill says he took this photo on U.S. 74 southwest of Charlotte on Aug. 18. Javion Hill
Giant Square-Shaped UFO Photographed
A strange and large square-shaped UFO was photographed on August 18th.
Javion Hill drove southwest of Charlotte, NC when he took the mysterious photo and posted it on his Facebook page later.
Here, the lights have a slightly pink color on the craft.
Javion Hill
He believes he witnessed an experimental military craft. Hill told the Charlotte Observer that there was something frightening about the experience. He also claimed that he didn't sleep that night anymore.
“I was on my way home with my wife on the speaker phone, and it looked like there was a tornado coming, so I was trying to take a picture of the clouds for my wife. But then I saw something that wasn’t normal and I was, like: ‘Oh my god, what is that?’ I started trying to take as many pictures of it as possible while I was driving,” said Hill.
Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system, but had delayed growth early on. Scientists weren’t sure why, but now might have an answer.
Spectacular view of Jupiter from the Juno spacecraft, acquired April 1, 2018.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS. Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran created this image using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager.
Jupiter is sometimes called the king of the planets in our solar system, due to its enormous size. It has some 300 times Earth’s mass. Jupiter is thought to have become the largest planet early in our solar system’s history. Still, questions remained about how quickly (or not) Jupiter kept growing, with earlier evidence suggesting Jupiter’s growth was delayed for about two million years. The reason for this delay was unknown. Now, astrophysicists in Switzerland think they have an answer. Their work was published August 27, 2018, in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy.
Especially interesting is that it is not the same kind of bodies that bring mass and energy [to Jupiter].
In other words, these scientists used computer modeling to show that – billions of years ago, early in our solar system’s history – Jupiter underwent a delayed growth phase as material of varying sizes and typesaccreted onto it.
Artist’s concept of a very young Jupiter. Scientists think that Jupiter, Earth and the other planets in our solar system formed from a disk of gas and dust surrounding the young sun.
Image via Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Planets – like Earth or Jupiter – are thought to grow by accretion from the gas-and-dust clouds, or nebulae, surrounding young stars. That is, they grow as small bits of material in the cloud collide, stick together, and become increasingly bigger. Once the planets themselves get big enough, they begin to sweep up even more material from the solar nebula, via the power of their gravitational pull.
So what happened during these different phases of Jupiter’s growth? It’s thought that, during the first million years or so, Jupiter’s planetary core was built rather quickly from small, centimeter-sized pebbles of rocky material. During the next two million years, there was a slower accretion of larger, kilometer-sized rocks called planetesimals. A lot of heat was released during this period as the planetesimals collided with the young, growing planet. As explained by Alibert:
During the first stage the pebbles brought the mass. In the second phase, the planetesimals also added a bit of mass, but what is more important, they brought energy.
Jupiter continued to grow after this, reaching 50 Earth masses after about 3 million years. This led to the beginning of the third phase, where runaway concretion of gas fueled the continued growth of Jupiter, until the planet reached a staggering 300 Earth masses. This is the Jupiter we know and love today.
But why exactly was there the period of slowed growth? First, the researchers found that the period where Jupiter was between 15-50 Earth masses lasted longer than previously thought. The collisions with the larger planetesimals were intense enough that the atmosphere was heated sufficiently to prevent rapid cooling, contraction and further gas accretion. The growth process was therefore delayed. As noted in the new paper:
Pebbles are important in the first stages to build a core quickly, but the heat provided by planetesimals is crucial to delay gas accretion so that it matches the timescale given by the meteorite data.
Scientists now think they know why Jupiter’s growth went through 3 distinct stages. This diagram depicts the 3 stages of Jupiter’s growth, in millions of years.
Image via Nature Astronomy/Yann Alibert (Universität Bern) et al.
Below are the three stages of Jupiter’s growth, in brief. Note that they relate to the image above:
Stage 1: until 1 million years: Jupiter grows by accretion of pebbles (blue dots). Large primordialplanetesimals (big red dots) show high collision velocities (red arrows) leading to destructive collisions (yellow) and producing small, second generation planetesimals (small red dots).
Stage 2: 1-3 million years: The energy resulting from the accretion of small planetesimals prevents rapid gas accumulation and thus rapid growth (gray arrows).
Stage 3: beyond 3 million years: Jupiter is massive enough to accrete large amounts of gas.
The new formation scenario described by Alibert and team also fits nicely with previous data taken from meteorites. Based on analysis of the meteorites, scientists had concluded that the solar nebula in the primordial early solar system had somehow been divided into two different regions over two million years. When Jupiter had grown to 20-50 Earth masses, it acted as a barrier, disturbing the dust disk (debris disk) surrounding the young sun. This created an overdensity – a greater than normal density – within the dust disk, trapping pebbles outside its orbit.
As a result, material from farther out could not mix with other material closer in to the sun, at least not until Jupiter grew enough to scatter those pebbles inward with its gravity.
Image via NASA/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran.
Beyond Jupiter, the researchers also say that their new results can also be used to help solve some long-running puzzles about the formation of Uranus and Neptune, as well as some similar exoplanets. This could be especially relevant to the so-called hot Jupiters, which are gas giant planets the size of Jupiter or larger that orbit much closer to their stars – and other gas giants found in other solar systems.
How did those planets grow even larger than Jupiter and why do many of them orbit so much closer to their stars (i.e. the hot Jupiters)? Maybe this new research will help shed some light.
Bottom line: Scientists have found that Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, went through “growing pains” as it was forming, with a period of time where its growth had slowed down considerably. Scientists involved in the new study now think they understand why.
“The Tantalizing Connection Between Volcanoes and Extraterrestrial Life in the Outer Solar System” –Today’s Top Space Headline
“The Tantalizing Connection Between Volcanoes and Extraterrestrial Life in the Outer Solar System” –Today’s Top Space Headline
All in all, Rosaly Lopes, planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has toured 63 active volcanoes and lava lakes — research that helps her better understand such infernos on other planets and moons across the solar system. That dangerous region in Ethiopia, for example, is dotted with yellow and green hot springs that bear striking similarities to Jupiter’s sulfur-studded moon, Io. And Laki, an ancient volcano in Iceland — which last erupted over 200 years ago, spewing a poisonous fog that smothered the globe for nearly a year — looks remarkably similar to a feature on Saturn’s moon Titan.
In 1979, Sicily’s Mount Etna lurched to life, sending a plume of ash and several chunks of molten rock skyrocketing into the air. The outburst was unexpected. And for Rosaly Lopes, continues Shannon Hall in Quanta, a 22-year-old graduate student in planetary science at the time, it was a close call. She and her colleagues had left the summit that morning to work roughly a mile downhill. But others were caught in the terrifying blast, which killed nine people. A man died on his honeymoon. A little boy’s parents were both killed.
“It was a very sobering experience,” Lopes said. But she returned to the summit the next morning, and in the ensuing decades, she has traveled to volcanoes on every single continent. With every trip, she has an evacuation route in mind and knows that if the volcano unexpectedly erupts, she should look skyward to carefully dodge the falling lava bombs. But for many of those volcanoes, lava is not the only danger. She visited a lava lake in Ethiopia a year before several researchers were shot and killed there. She braved the numbing cold of Antarctica to gaze at Mount Erebus, which holds a lava lake that puffs steam and launches lava bombs. And she hoped to visit Nyiragongo, a lava lake in the Congo, earlier this year, but an Ebola outbreak forced her to delay her plans.
Lopes knows these alien features of Jupiter and Saturn’s moons nearly as well as she knows their terrestrial doppelgängers — in part because she discovered most of them. As a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), she analyzed images from the Galileo mission to Jupiter, identifying 71 active volcanoes on Io — a feat for which she has been recognized with a Guinness World Record. She later found icy volcanoes on Saturn’s moons. And today she focuses her efforts on the tantalizing connection between volcanoes and extraterrestrial life in the outer solar system.
Quanta’s Hall spoke with Lopes about volcanoes across the solar system and the open questions she hopes to soon answer.
Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Left: The dark regions in this image from the Galileo spacecraft show areas of recent volcanic activity. The large dark region toward the center of the image did not exist five months before this picture was taken.
The first mission you worked on at JPL was Galileo. Tell me a little about Jupiter’s moon Io — why is it so exciting?
I was a student when Voyager spotted volcanoes on Io. It was such a sensation because it was beyond what we had seen on Mars, Venus, Mercury and the moon. That this little moon could actually host volcanic activity is pretty phenomenal when you consider that it’s about the size of Earth’s moon. It should have been dead long ago. But it’s not. Instead, Io is a volcanologist’s paradise, with over 150 detected active volcanoes.
But these volcanoes look different that those on Earth. Although Io has mountains, the mountains are not active volcanoes. The volcanoes are calderas on the ground where lava bubbles away. What’s more, when I started working with our highest-resolution data from Galileo, we noticed that several of these calderas showed a pattern with hot edges — a signature of a lava lake. In a lava lake, the crust cools pretty fast, forming this skin of cooler lava on top of the molten lava. That skin then sloshes around and hits the caldera walls where it breaks up and reveals the molten lava underneath. So it’s quite common to actually see hot areas near the margins of the calderas.
But it was a surprising find because lava lakes are very rare on Earth. Although we only have a few, I have now visited nearly all of them, including Mount Erebus in Antarctica.
Photo of Lopes in 2014 above one of the lava lakes at Ambrym, an exceptionally active volcano in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.
Have those places helped us understand Io?
Oh yes. We joke that the Danakil Depression — a surreal landscape in Ethiopia that is covered by bright yellow and green hot springs full of sulfur and sulfur dioxide — is like Io on Earth. Not only do the colors resemble Io, but it also has a very active volcano, Erta Ale, with a spectacular lava lake. And that lava lake has helped inform our studies on Io. Like a lot of things, unless you see something up close it can be hard to really understand it. But we saw the lava lake’s hot edges and watched how the crust moved and sunk — all while taking a number of temperature measurements.
Those measurements are key because there is still an open question about the composition of lavas on Io. And while we have no direct measurements on Io, we can use temperature as a proxy because we see on Earth that different lavas melt at different temperatures. Unfortunately, temperatures measured on Io are just on that borderline between basalt — like the lavas you find in Hawaii and elsewhere on Earth — and lavas that are called ultramafic — like the primitive lavas on Earth that erupted mostly billions of years ago.
But if Io’s lavas are truly primitive, then we could study Io in order to better understand what happened on Earth a long time ago. It also makes me wonder if lava lakes were a lot more prevalent in Earth’s past than they are now.
Erta Ale, a volcano in the north of Ethopia, contains a lava lake that has been active for at least five decades.
It sounds like Io is different from Earth in a number of ways — why?
Io, under the surface, is a very different world than Earth. Our planet is the only known body that has plate tectonics, but Io is heated by tidal heating — caused by the gravitational push and pull between Jupiter and the other big moons. So the guts of Io’s volcanoes may be really quite different from those on Earth.
Luckily, volcanoes — the process by which planets and moons lose heat — can help shed light on Io’s interior. There are several different models, for example, of how that gravitational push and pull heats the interior of Io. Of the two extreme models, one of them suggests that tidal heating is mainly dissipated in the deep mantle, forming large convection cells that rise up toward the poles where volcanoes ultimately form. But the other extreme model suggests that tidal heating is mainly dissipated in the shallow asthenosphere [the uppermost region of the mantle], forming convection cells that rise up toward the equator, thus leading to more volcanoes there instead. Then, of course, there are some models in between the two extremes.
In 1999, I wrote a paper that looked at the number and distribution of active volcanoes — only to find that more volcanoes are located in the equatorial regions. That said, not all volcanoes are created equal. What’s more, we used data from the Galileo mission, which did not have a good view of Io’s poles.
So a few colleagues and I decided to take a second look. We’re currently working on a second study — led by Julie Rathbun at the Planetary Science Institute — that doesn’t just look at the distribution of volcanoes but also at their relative heat flow using three different data sets from space missions. That paper has yet to be published, but in it, we argue that the correct model is not one of the extreme models — where heat dissipates in either the mantle or the asthenosphere — but some combination of the two.
Could these studies help us potentially understand rocky exoplanets?
Oh yes. Many exoplanets are thought to be super-Ios, where volcanism is still occurring on a large scale thanks to tidal heating. And many exoplanets are also thought to be ocean worlds. Those two characteristics bring about the possibility that life could have evolved there, since you have two of the necessary ingredients: heat and water.
Another question that I’m quite curious about is whether we will find an exoplanet that hosts plate tectonics. So far, Earth is the only known place in the solar system with plate tectonics, and scientists still argue about why or how plate tectonics got kick-started here. Is it the presence of water, which lubricates the movement of the subducting plates? Is it because the crust has a certain thickness relative to the size of Earth? We think the Martian volcanoes, for example, are so much bigger because the Martian crust is thicker relative to the size of the planet. Because plate tectonics couldn’t start on Mars, volcanoes kept erupting in the same places and growing to enormous proportions.
But if we found another world with plate tectonics, it would shed light on the problem and be a big find.
Video: Rosaly Lopes explains why it’s worth exploring the huge variety of volcanoes on other worlds.
More recently, you’ve switched gears to focus on Saturn’s moon Titan. Is Titan volcanic?
That is still a little controversial. But I think that Titan does host cryovolcanoes, or ice volcanoes, which erupt slushy ices instead of molten rocks. We used the radar instrument on the Cassini spacecraft to find features that look dramatically similar to volcanoes and lava flows. I think the best example is a region that contains one of the tallest peaks of Titan, Doom Mons — named after Tolkien’s Mount Doom — and the deepest pit discovered so far on Titan, Sotra Patera. Those features, which are surrounded by flowlike features, simply look volcanic. In fact, they remind me of the Laki complex in Iceland — although Laki of course is not a cryovolcano.
In addition, there have been several indirect hints that Titan is still alive. A postdoc of mine, Anezina Solomonidou, found a change in brightness on the surface that coincided with the area I just mentioned. That could be attributed to degassing. Additionally, Titan’s atmosphere has methane. But methane is destroyed by sunlight — a strong hint that it could be replenished from the interior thanks to those cryovolcanoes.
There are still so many outstanding questions that we really need a new mission to Titan. It is such a fascinating world. Titan has a liquid ocean under its ice crust. It has lakes of liquid methane and rivers of liquid methane. It could still have active cryovolcanoes. It has organic materials that we think make their way through fractures in the ice crust and down into the ocean. Titan is really wild. I love Io, but I think that Titan is actually the most fascinating place in the solar system — not only geologically, but also because life could have evolved there.
Do scientists think that Titan’s subsurface is habitable?
I recently put together a team that will try to answer that exact question. The project was funded this May, and we will spend the next five years studying whether Titan’s subsurface ocean could be habitable, and then whether the material from the ocean could come to the surface and potentially contain detectable biomarkers.
Some team members, for example, will try to decipher if there are organisms that can survive the pressure and cold temperatures below Titan’s icy surface. To me, one of the most fascinating parts is that my colleagues will conduct experiments that simulate Titan’s ocean in order to find out what kind of bugs — as I call them — could actually survive. These bugs are bacteria like E. coli. And they’re quite hardy in that you can actually train bugs to survive high pressures like this. And it doesn’t mean we’ll have that exact bug on Titan, but maybe we’ll have something like it.
Now, of course you might think that life is sealed off from discovery, but here is where cryovolcanism comes in. Those icy volcanoes will bring that material from that ocean to the surface and the atmosphere — where we could potentially detect it. And it is true that we have not detected any volcanic activity on Titan directly, but that does not mean that the material cannot come back to the surface. Even if there is no cryolava, for example, gases could still be released — and with those gases, biosignatures. So the project will also look at what kind of biosignatures those bugs would produce and where we would go to detect them.
How optimistic are you that life exists beyond Earth?
I can’t be sure one way or another because we have a sample of one. But I treat it mostly as an experimentalist. We have to predict where and how we would find life on another planet, and we have to go look because that is really what’s going to tell us. If we find some kind of life on another world, there is no doubt it will be the most magnificent discovery in science. And several of us can contribute in small ways toward that grand goal.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETRusland heeft vandaag een onderzoek opgestart naar een lek in capsule die aan het Internationaal Ruimtestation ISS hangt. Door een gaatje in de wand was de druk aan boord vorige week donderdag een beetje weggevallen. Het Russische ruimtevaartbureau Roscosmos sluit ondertussen niet uit dat iemand bewust een gat in de capsule zou hebben gemaakt.
Eind vorige week was er in het ISS een noodsituatie omdat er zuurstof lekte uit een scheurtje van ongeveer twee mm in de Sojoez-MS-09 die aan de spacemeccano hangt, en die voor transport naar en van het ISS zorgt. Aanvankelijk dacht men dat het gat door de inslag van een micrometeoriet was veroorzaakt. Vandaag sloot directeur-generaal Dmitri Rozogin van Roscosmos die verklaring al uit.
Daarna opperde hij menselijk falen, bijvoorbeeld bij raketbouwer Energija of bij tests op de lanceerbasis Bajkonoer. Uiteindelijk sloot Rozogin zelfs het bewust veroorzaken van een lek niet uit.
Er zijn volgens de topman van de Russische ruimtevaart meerdere pogingen geweest om van binnenuit een gat te maken in de Sojoez die aan het Russische segment van het ISS hangt. “Wij onderzoeken de versie van een op de Aarde (veroorzaakt probleem), want er zijn sporen van een boor die door de wand is gegaan. Maar er is ook een ander versie die wij niet uitsluiten: een doelbewuste interventie in de ruimte.”
Het door Russische kosmonauten uiteindelijk gedicht gat lijkt door een “weifelende hand” te zijn veroorzaakt, aldus Rozogin. “Waar gaat het om, een fabricagefout of een doelbewuste daad”, vroeg hij zich volgens het Russische staatspersbureau Ria Novosti af.
Plakband
Op de vraag waarom het scheurtje sinds de aankomst van de Sojoez in juni niet is opgemerkt, antwoordde Rozogin dan weer: “Stel dat een slordige werknemer een fout heeft gemaakt. Dan werd hij bang en dichtte hij het gat met speciale lijm. Het bleef lange tijd onopgemerkt. Dan droogde de lijm op en was ze weg”.
Volgens het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartbureau NASA is het scheurtje, in een deel van de Sojoez dat niet voor de terugkeer naar de Aarde bestemd is, aanvankelijk met thermoresistente plakband afgedicht geweest. Een Russische commissie moet uitklaren wie verantwoordelijk is. “We zullen het vinden”, beloofde Rozogin.
Ondertussen zijn er verificaties bij alle ruimtetuigen van het type Sojoez en Progress (voor onbemand transport naar de ruimtekolos), zei een bron uit de Russische ruimtevaartsector aan Ria Novosti.
In het ISS wonen en werken momenteel twee Russen, drie Amerikanen en één Duitser van het Europese Ruimtevaartbureau ESA. De Amerikaan Drew Feustel is gezagvoerder. Als het gat niet werd gedicht, zou het ISS in achttien dagen tijd zonder zuurstof hebben gezeten en hadden alle bemanningsleden kunnen stikken.
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Sabotage in de ruimte? Russen sluiten bewust lek in ISS niet uit
Sabotage in de ruimte? Russen sluiten bewust lek in ISS niet uit
Bron: BELGA
Rusland heeft dinsdag een onderzoek opgestart naar een lek in een aan het Internationaal Ruimtestation ISS hangende Sojoez waarbij eind vorige week - zonder gevaar voor de zeskoppige bemanning - drukverlies is ontstaan. Het Russische ruimtevaartbureau Roscosmos sluit ondertussen niet uit dat iemand bewust een gat in de capsule zou hebben gemaakt.
Eind vorige week was er in het ISS een noodsituatie omdat er zuurstof lekte uit een scheurtje van ongeveer twee mm in de Sojoez-MS-09 die aan de spacemeccano hangt, en die voor transport naar en van het ISS zorgt.
Aanvankelijk dacht men dat het gat door de inslag van een micrometeoriet was veroorzaakt. Maandag sloot directeur-generaal Dmitri Rozogin van Roscosmos die verklaring al uit. Daarna opperde hij menselijk falen, bijvoorbeeld bij raketbouwer Energija of bij tests op de lanceerbasis Bajkonoer. Uiteindelijk sloot Rozogin zelfs het bewust veroorzaken van een lek niet uit.
“Boor door de wand”
Er zijn volgens de topman van de Russische ruimtevaart meerdere pogingen geweest om van binnenuit een gat te maken in de Sojoez die aan het Russische segment van het ISS hangt. “Wij onderzoeken de versie van een op de Aarde (veroorzaakt probleem), want er zijn sporen van een boor die door de wand is gegaan. Maar er is ook een ander versie die wij niet uitsluiten: een doelbewuste interventie in de ruimte.”
Het door Russische kosmonauten uiteindelijk gedicht gat lijkt door een “weifelende hand” te zijn veroorzaakt, aldus Rozogin. “Waar gaat het om, een fabricagefout of een doelbewuste daad”, vroeg hij zich volgens het Russische staatspersbureau Ria Novosti af.
Speciale lijm?
Op de vraag waarom het scheurtje sinds de aankomst van de Sojoez in juni niet is opgemerkt, antwoordde Rozogin dan weer: “Stel dat een slordige werknemer een fout heeft gemaakt. Dan werd hij bang en dichtte hij het gat met speciale lijm. Het bleef lange tijd onopgemerkt. Dan droogde de lijm op en was ze weg”.
Volgens het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartbureau NASA is het scheurtje, in een deel van de Sojoez dat niet voor de terugkeer naar de Aarde bestemd is, aanvankelijk met thermoresistente plakband afgedicht geweest. Een Russische commissie moet uitklaren wie verantwoordelijk is. “We zullen het vinden”, beloofde Rozogin.
Ondertussen zijn er verificaties bij alle ruimtetuigen van het type Sojoez en Progress (voor onbemand transport naar de ruimtekolos), zei een bron uit de Russische ruimtevaartsector aan Ria Novosti. In het ISS wonen en werken momenteel twee Russen, drie Amerikanen en één Duitser van het Europese Ruimtevaartbureau ESA. De Amerikaan Drew Feustel is gezagvoerder.
Long Yellow UFO Docked At Space Station On Live Cam, UFO Sighting News.
Long Yellow UFO Docked At Space Station On Live Cam, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: Feb 14, 2014
Location of discovery: International Space Station
This post is dedicated to Streetcap1, may you rest in peace brother.
This is the raw footage of what Streetcap1 caught docked at the space station on live Internet cam back in 2014. This UFO is the best UFO ever recorded at the space station, and there are a thousand videos out there. Streetcap1 was watching the live cam on the Internet when he noticed that a long canoe-like space ship was actually docked at the space station. The door that attaches from the space station to the Soyuz capsule is under it. With two and a half minutes of NASA footage, we can all agree that this is the most amazing catch ever at the ISS. I remember Streetcap1messaged NASA asking what it was, but of course NASA never replied.
Mysterious Square-Shaped UFO Photographed Over Charlotte, North Carolina
Mysterious Square-Shaped UFO Photographed Over Charlotte, North Carolina
A mysterious square-shaped UFO was photographed on the night of Aug 18, 2018 by Javion Hill as he drove southwest of Charlotte, North Carolina.
He posted the image of the square UFO on his Facebook page on Aug 28, 2018 and while he believes what he saw may have been an experimental military craft, Hill told the Charlotte Observer that there was something frightening about the experience and he didn't sleep that night.
Hill said “I was on my way home with my wife on the speaker phone, and it looked like there was a tornado coming, so I was trying to take a picture of the clouds for my wife.”
“But then I saw something that wasn’t normal and started trying to take as many pictures of it as possible while I was driving, then I pulled over at the next exit to try and get video, but the aircraft had vanished; a heavy rain followed instantly.”
George Knapp the Secret UFO Conference That No One Knows About
George Knapp the Secret UFO Conference That No One Knows About
COAST TO COAST AM.
George Knapp was joined by legendary ufologist Jacques Vallee, who discussed a recent discrete gathering of international UFO experts that was not mentioned to the public. He revealed that the two-day conference was organized by the French version of NASA, known as CNES, and featured 30 presentations to about 100 attendees. According to Vallee, the focus of the conference revolved around determining the best way to gather and research UFO cases as well as how to synthesize that data. He attributed the event to a change in the French scientific community, where a new generation has emerged that is willing to take a fresh look at the UFO phenomenon. Unlike UFO research in the United States, which is beset with ideological disputes, Vallee noted, this examination of the phenomenon centered around “a good long look at the data.”
A Brief History Of Some Of Australia’s Weirdest UFO Encounters
A Brief History Of Some Of Australia’s Weirdest UFO Encounters
Thanks in so small part to movies like Close Encounters and Signs, the imagery of UFO encounters and alien abductions is deeply tied to the American mid-west. Aliens rustle amongst fields of corn. Strange sounds emanate from big red barns. People in plaid shirts recount grabbing the shotguns out of their pickups because they saw some strange lights up in the sky and wish to respond the only way they know how. But the American heartland doesn’t have a monopoly on UFO sightings — hell, neither does the entire contiguous United States. People believing that aliens are real transcends all borders; possible UFO sightings crop up all over the world constantly, even in our tiny, huge corner of the world.
Arguably the biggest incident in the Australian UFO mythos is the Westall UFO encounter. According to a combined 200 students and teachers, on April 6, 1966, a UFO was spotted hanging around over two different schools (Westall High School and Westall State School) for about 20 minutes, before landing in a nearby paddock and eventually flying off again.
The object was described as being a silvery disc with a purple hue, roughly the size of about two cars. One of the explanations put forth is that they saw a weather balloon but, 50 years later, we still have no concrete idea what all these people saw.
Studio 10 spoke to a bunch of the witnesses for a special 50th-anniversary show and a bunch of them are still pretty adamant about what they saw:
The man described seeing a blue-grey disc around 25 feet in diameter rise out of a nearby lagoon before flying off. Upon inspection, a section of the lagoon the size and shape of the saucer appeared to have formed a whirlpool ‘devoid of all plant life’. Afterwards, dead reeds started to float to the surface, forming the ‘nest’ from which the incident takes its name. According to Pedley, when he told the owner of the sugarcane farm on which the incident happened, the owner said that, a few hours before Pedley saw the saucer, his dog had been acting strangely, barking in an agitated fashion and running in the direction of the lagoon from which the saucer supposedly emerged.
Pictured: It’s definitely aliens.
Albert Pennisi, the owner of the neighbouring sugarcane farm, reportedly told a journalist from Sydney that he had been dreaming of UFOs all week before the event. Hell yeah, dude.
Next, we cast our beady eyes on South Australia in the year 1988, when a family driving through the Nullarbor claimed to have their entire car lifted off the ground by — you guessed it — fuckin’ aliens.
According to a wonderfully detailed dive into the story by the ABC, the Knowles family was making the long drive from Perth to Melbourne when they were ‘tormented’ by a large glowing sphere of light for 90 minutes. The glowing ball chased them before landing on the roof and lifting them clear off the ground, as described by a police spokesperson at the time:
It apparently picked the car up off the road, shook it quite violently and forced the car back down on the road with such pressure that one of the tyres was blown.
One of the family members in the car reported hearing their voices distort as if time was slowing down, either a symptom of shock or just the coolest UFO shit in the world. If that’s not creepy enough, here’s what the mum told reporters happened after it picked them up:
I wound down the window and I felt this thing on the roof… all of this smoke stuff started coming into the car, the car was covered in black stuff. It was a small light and all of a sudden it became big like this, like a big ball.
I think we can all agree: what the fuck.
Five years later, we had the Cahill Abduction, in which a woman driving back to Melbourne from the Dandenong Rangesclaimed to have been abducted by aliens in Narre Warren North. Kelly Cahill (not her actual name) and her husband Andrew reported seeing what looked like a blimp with a ‘ring of orange headlights’.
Cahill said that, as they got closer, she became blinded by the light coming from the object and then woke up later, noticing that she had lost an hour of time. It doesn’t end there though: she claimed to notice a new, triangular shaped mark on her stomach and, after a few weeks, began to recall more and more details of the abduction.
Cahill described seeing ‘skinny black figures with bulging red eyes’, in addition to seeing people in two other cars who also witnessed the abduction — although none of these people have spoken to the media outside of UFO researchers.
Pictured: Cahill’s depiction of the aliens, which are REAL.
Keen-eyed UFO enthusiasts may have spotted a rather prominent omission from this list, which is, of course, the disappearance of Frederick Valentich in 1978. Valentich and his Cessna 182L disappeared after he reported being followed by a flying object that he described as “not an aircraft“.
I didn’t get into this one because someone else has already done the hard work for me, in the form of our Australian mysteries podcast, the All Aussie Mystery Hour (available on iTunes and Spotify). Mel and Jose get way, way deep on this one and it is well worth your time if you reckon aliens are either a) real or b) fake but super cool.
The fascinating 'UFO landing pad' in the Argentinian desert
The fascinating 'UFO landing pad' in the Argentinian desert
The fascinating 'UFO landing pad' that has been built in the middle of the Argentinian desert. Photo / Nora Aliessi
Daily Mail
By: Jennifer Newton
This fascinating 'UFO landing pad' has been built in the middle of the Argentinian desert by a man who claimed aliens told him to construct it.
It's a collection of white and brown rocks in the shape of a star, known as an 'ovniport' - and it appeared in the small town of Cachi in the province of Salta, MailOnline Travel reports.
It is believed to have been built by Swiss man Werner Jaisli, who travelled to the area in search of extraterrestrials.
Visitors flock to the site - and no wonder. Because it's stunning.
It is believed to have been built by Swiss man Werner Jaisli, who travelled to the area in search of extraterrestrials.
Photo / Nora Aliessi
A fact that's highlighted by aerial images.
After travelling to Argentina, Jaisli is reported to have claimed he received a 'telepathic message' from aliens telling him they needed a place to land on earth.
He told Argentine newspaper El Tribuno: 'They landed about 100 metres above our heads and projected on us a beam of light that made us both see their own brightness.
'The funny thing is that it did not affect our vision. Something began to bubble through my brain: it was an order. They asked me telepathically to build the airport.'
He is thought to have immediately got to work, making a large star in 2008 with 36 points that measures 48 metres in diameter.
Jaisli also made a smaller star and it took him until 2012 until his work was complete.
As well as tourists, the site is also popular with UFO enthusiasts, who believe they may be able to contact beings from another world from the site.
Visitors flock to the site - and no wonder. Because it's stunning.
Photo / Nora Aliessi, Flickr
However, soon after the ovniport was built, locals around Cachi stopped seeing Jaisli, who had a large beard and would often wear a Druid outfit.
It is unclear where he travelled to but some locals joked that he may have been abducted by aliens.
However, it is thought he actually went to Bolivia - with another theory that he travelled back to Switzerland.
Orbitz entices UFO enthusiasts with extraterrestrial tourism posters.
According to the travel fare aggregate Orbitz, “we are not alone,” and they have a list of places aliens may have already visited on Earth you can visit too.
“We selected 10 intriguing sightings from across the globe and created vibrant posters illustrating and explaining the events that took place,” according to an Orbitz representative. “Sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects has happened for millennia. Is it life from other planets? Are we alone in the universe? Have a look at these engaging posters and decide for yourself.“
The alleged events of extraterrestrial visitation Orbitz have decided to highlight in their posters span from Ancient Egypt in 1440 B.C., to Norway in 2009. The collection includes the famous Roswell, New Mexico event when alien visitation went awry. In 1947, an alleged alien spacecraft crashed outside of Roswell in 1947. However, the majority of the rest of the events featured in the posters are much more obscure, including the most recent incident.
In 2009, witnesses saw and photographed a beautiful giant glowing swirl in the skies. Many speculated that a massive portal to another dimension had been activated. Astronomers and scientists said it was a rocket mishap and the swirl effect was due to rocket fuel leaking in a swirling pattern as the rocket spun in the air.
The later is the most likely explanation, and examples of similar rocket failures including the swirling phenomenon have been recorded before. Of course, there are those who are skeptical of this more mundane theory, which is understandable. It is more fun to think it is a dimensional portal.
The following is a list of the posters with explanations of the events they are portraying:
DISKS OF FIRE, Ancient Egypt, 1440 BC
The scribes of Pharaoh Thutmose III report unearthly fiery disks floating over the skies.... Do they come in peace to observe, or to do battle? Their origins and intentions? Unknown.
GALACTIC GLOBE FALLS TO EARTH, Italy, 91 BC
Roman writer, Julius Obsequens, reports a potential threat from outer space. Terrifying noises come from the sky as a globe of fire gyrates towards earth, lands, and then rises again, making its way east.
JUDGEMENT DAY, Germany, 776
Saxon invaders besieging the Sigiburg Castle flee in horror when they encounter a spacecraft in the skies. Eyewitnesses report the craft to bear the likeness of two large flaming shields.
THEY CAME FROM THE STARS... TO FIGHT FOR PLANET EARTH, Germany, 1561
Citizens of Nuremberg witness an epic battle. Blood-red circular arcs and globes fly back and forth, fighting each other for more than an hour, until all the crafts fall to the earth and burn with black smoke.
THAT'S NO MOON, England, 1801
Reports emerge of a mysterious moon-like globe appearing in the sky, which bathes Hull in a mysterious blue light. Suddenly and without warning, it splits into seven fireballs. No traces are left behind.
SHE CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, Japan, 1803
Local fishermen spot an unusual vessel adrift and tow it to land. A woman with red and white hair appears. She speaks a language utterly foreign to them. They return her and her vessel to the sea, and she drifts away.
THEY'RE HERE, USA, 1947
In Roswell, New Mexico, the US Armed Air Forces encounter a crashed flying saucer and capture its alien occupants. The millitary engage in a cover-up, and continue to deny the encounter to this day.
YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE, USA, 1952
In Flatwoods, West Virginia, eyewitnesses see a bright object cross the sky and land. They gather a group to investigate and encounter a 10 foot mutant, who glides towards them hissing. They run for their lives.
ATTACK OF THE TENTACLED TORMENTOR, South Africa, 1996
In Erasmuskloof, Pretoria, a glowing disc emitting bright green tentacles is spotted by police. A helicopter is dispatched and a chase ensues. The mysterious craft makes a vertical ascent and evades capture.
A spiralling light is spotted in the night sky. The light vanishes, as what looks to be a wormhole opens up. Russian authorities claim the anomaly is the result of a failed missile test, but many doubt this explanation.
According to The Washington Post, UFOs are “suddenly a serious news story.” If more people are open to the possibility Earth may be a tourist stop for aliens, then it only makes sense Earth-bound tourist would want to see what the aliens found so great about the places they have allegedly visited.
The civilization of Venus described in a declassified report
The civilization of Venus described in a declassified report
The possibility of life on Venus leads to a revolution in thought, because many of us believe that the solar system is an oasis in the desert with only one Earth. So how can we accept the idea that our space brothers are there, near the nearby planet, and reach out and wait patiently and calmly for the green lights to light up in our minds? (Article published at UFO Spain Website)
The Earth Has Been Hit by 144 Major Earthquakes in the Last Week And No One Is Talking About It
The Earth Has Been Hit by 144 Major Earthquakes in the Last Week And No One Is Talking About It
solar minimum?? planetary alignments??? pole shift??? this is a week old ...there was some major quakes...are there more to come???
The debate regarding the impact of the human population on the world around us has been an ongoing one, reignited each time we witness a significant shift in the climate or the environment as a whole. In fact, this whole situation has become so commonplace in our society that it no longer phases us the…
this guy in the vid has a good take on it....he also speaks about the upcoming planetary alignment...they gonna line up again on the other side of the sun in october....thats twice in a year....unheard of......
Nieuwe animatie brengt klimaatverandering op huiveringwekkende wijze in beeld
Nieuwe animatie brengt klimaatverandering op huiveringwekkende wijze in beeld
Caroline Kraaijvanger
“Het maakt niet uit hoe je het visualiseert; het ziet er eng uit.”
Aan het woord is Antti Lipponen, onderzoeker aan het Finse Meteorologisch Instituut. Hij zette de zogenoemde GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (kortweg GISTEMP) om in onderstaande animatie.
In de animatie zie je de temperatuurafwijkingen die in individuele landen tussen 1880 en 2017 werden gemeten. Er is sprake van een afwijking als het kouder of warmer is dan normaal in een specifieke periode en op een specifieke plek het geval is. De term ‘normaal’ verwijst hierbij naar de gemiddelde temperatuur die op die plek en in die periode tussen 1951 en 1980 werd gemeten.
Verandering In de animatie is goed te zien dat er in de laatste jaren van de negentiende eeuw en beginjaren van de twintigste eeuw sprake is van een lagere temperatuur dan ‘normaal’. Maar dat verandert als we het einde van de twintigste eeuw naderen. En aan het begin van de 21e eeuw kleuren huiveringwekkend veel landen donkerrood.
Nog een animatie Het is niet voor het eerst dat Lipponen met een pakkende animatie omtrent klimaatverandering op de proppen komt. Een jaar geleden presenteerde hij onderstaande animatie die eveneens duidelijk laat zien dat landen stuk voor stuk warmer worden. En niet zo’n klein beetje ook.
Met de animaties komen de op data gefundeerde waarschuwingen van wetenschappers tot leven. Je kunt met eigen ogen zien hoe de aarde warmer wordt. De animaties zijn bedoeld als wake-upcall. Niet alleen voor de burger, maar met name ook voor politici, die na het alom bejubelde Parijse klimaatakkoord te hebben gesloten er eigenlijk nog weinig aan hebben gedaan om dat klimaatakkoord handen en voeten te geven.
The description on the video reads: “The object was dropping a lot of glowing material while flying. She did know what this object was, but she was sure this was not something man made.
“It did not produce any sound at all. When I analysed the footage I noticed the object ejected a lot of material.”
Many of UFO Today’s followers were convinced the footage was of genuine UFO activity.
YouTuber David Leach wrote: “Excellent viewing. Leaking a lot of material. Near the end it looks like a smaller UFO breaks off and goes upward.”
UFO sighting: ‘Alien spaceship’ shot down over Scotland
(Image: GETTY • YOUTUBE)
Starman 2710 added: “Came through the portal to fast and lost control?”
AKIJPN continued: “Definitely looks like some flying object is flying loosing its control. Amazing.”
However, there does seem to be a more logical explanation for the strange phenomenon.
According to locals who have taken to the social news aggregator site Reddit, the strange sightings are actually caused by people attaching sparklers to kites.
The UFO was actually a kite
(Image: YOUTUBE)
There have apparently been several instances over the last month with residents not too concerned of an alien invasion.
Reddit user Space Pecs said it is “the third time this month” that a kite with sparklers has been launched.
Bory Truro replied: “Didn't have much of a clue at first, but now that you mention it, it does look a lot like someone stuck a sparkler on a kite.”
Another alleged UFO sighting near Charlotte has appeared on Facebook and in this case, it was posted by a husband and father who says he doesn’t necessarily believe in UFOs.
Javion Hill, 35, of Kings Mountain, North Carolina, says he took several photos of the object during a storm on the night of Aug. 18, as he drove on U.S. 74 southwest of Charlotte.
The images feature something square hovering above the treeline, with its edges fringed in lights. Hill told the Charlotte Observer the craft frightened him to the point that he didn’t sleep that night.
“I was on my way home with my wife on the speaker phone, and it looked like there was a tornado coming, so I was trying to take a picture of the clouds for my wife,” says Hill.
“But then I saw something that wasn’t normal and I was, like: ‘Oh my god, what is that?’ I started trying to take as many pictures of it as possible while I was driving.”
Hill says he pulled over at the next exit to try and get video, but the aircraft had vanished. A heavy rain followed instantly, he said.
Hill says it’s possible what he saw was a military craft. Conspiracy theorists maintain many UFO sightings in the region are actually an experimental military spacecraft known as the TR-3B, an anti-gravity craft that hovers. Some believe the craft is from one of the state’s military bases, which include Fort Bragg, Pope Air Force and Camp Lejeune.
Military.com reports the TR-3B “doesn’t exist officially.”
Reaction to Hill’s photo has included mostly questions, but at least one person, Shelby native Eric White, said he also saw something in the same area that “vanished in thin air.”
Hill says what he saw is actually bigger than what is seen in the photo.
“I was worried for my safety,” he said. “I didn’t believe in UFOs until that moment.”
NASA Just Gave the Opportunity Rover a Survival Deadline on Mars—Here's What That Means
NASA Just Gave the Opportunity Rover a Survival Deadline on Mars—Here's What That Means
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
An artist's depiction of the Opportunity rover on the surface of Mars.
Credit: NASA
NASA on Thursday (Aug. 30) announced a deadline for its recovery of the Mars rover Opportunity, which has been silent for months while battling a dust storm, and some scientists intimately familiar with the project say that new timeline doesn’t do the grizzled robot justice.
The rover, which launched in 2003 and landed on Mars in January 2004, has been giving its humans the cold shoulder since June 10, when a fierce dust storm enveloped the Red Planet and blocked the sun from the robot's solar panels. The storm has started to die down, so the team hopes that with enough time, the rover should be able to power on again and get back to work after its long hibernation.
But scientists familiar with the mission say that NASA's new schedule doesn't offer the hardworking rover that time. "Opportunity has everything going for her," Tanya Harrison, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and a science team collaborator on Opportunity, told Space.com. She said that depending on how the timeline aligns with Martian weather, "We're not giving it a fair shot." [Send the Opportunity Mars Rover Your Support (and a Postard)]
Here's NASA's plan: First, the team will wait until the tau — a measurement of how much dust clouds the air — lowers to 1.5. (At the peak of the storm, the tau was likely around 10, a level one rover expert called "terrifying.") Then, the team will begin a 45-day active-listening period, during which they will send commands up to the rover that should force it to respond.
Finally, if the silence continues, the team will transition into passive listening, eavesdropping on Mars-observing antennas for chance signals from Opportunity. Regardless of when that 45-day period ends, the team will continue passively listening through the end of January, John Callas, Opportunity project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Space.com. (NASA's original release about the decision said simply that the team would be given "several months" for passive listening after the period of active listening ends.)
But at the end of January, the rover's time will be up, and with it, the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, which originally consisted of Opportunity and its sister robot, Spirit. "We're not ending the mission after 45 days," Callas told Space.com. "But I'm not going to keep full staffing around for six months or eight months if the chance of success is low."
Dust in the wind
These side-by-side images of Mars show the planet appeared in May 2018 (left) and in July 2018 after the planet's surface was completely covered by a massive dust storm. NASA used images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to create these views.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
If this year's dust storm is indeed the end of Opportunity, no one will be able to say the rover wasn't a survivor. Opportunity and Spirit, which landed on the planet in 2004, were expected to last only 90 Martian days (each about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day), on the planet's surface — in part because scientists expected that dust would slowly bury the robots, according to Don Banfield, a planetary scientist at Cornell University who works with the Mars Exploration Rover team. But Spirit lasted for seven years, and Opportunity was approaching its 15th year at work when the storm hit. [Mars Dust Storm 2018:What It Means for the Opportunity Rover]
Banfield said that this storm is serious business, one of the biggest observed from the Martian surface to date. Although the storm is clearing, it's difficult for scientists to predict how tau, their crucial measure of light penetrating to the surface, will fare. "Getting that last little bit of dust out of the air takes a good amount of time," Mike Seibert, a former flight director for the Mars Exploration Rovers program, told Space.com.
There's also one big problem with the Martian skies clearing: All that dust has nowhere to go but down. "I think that's the real scary thing right now is that we know that the dust is going to fall out of the sky, but it has to go somewhere," Banfield said. Dust sitting on Opportunity's solar panels will block the rover's power supply just as effectively as dust in the air does, and, according to Seibert, engineers have no way to figure out how dusty the panels are.
One factor could rescue Opportunity's solar panels from that fate, a phenomenon that surprised scientists when they first observed it early in the rovers' careers: a predictable seasonal cycle of winds that are strong enough to blow dust off instruments and rovers. Those wind events should begin, in terrestrial time, in November and last until January, said Harrison, who began her work with the Mars Exploration Rovers team by producing Martian weather forecasts when there were still twin robots.
But it's not yet clear how that will align with the 45-day window opening after the atmosphere hits 1.5 tau — so, from what NASA has stated publicly so far, engineers trying to reach the rover may not be able to send it active commands at the times when those commands are most likely to work.
The overwhelming team consensus Harrison has heard is that active listening should continue through dust-cleaning season, "which, in the grand scheme of things, is not that long from now," she said. "You're not going to suddenly be saving tens of millions of dollars by cutting the mission short."
Twin rovers, different fates
Harrison and Seibert were both struck by the timeline Opportunity is being offered in comparison to how its twin, Spirit, fared nearly a decade ago, when its travels came to an abrupt end. "We did everything we could have done: Spirit was in much worse condition going into that fourth winter than Opportunity was going into the dust storm," Seibert said. "Spirit had much less of a chance of actually returning to contact with Earth than Opportunity does now."
In April 2009, Spirit got stuck in a position that meant the robot lost power when winter came, likely freezing vital electronics on the rover. The team left the robot alone over the Martian winter, but in July 2010, NASA began an intensive, 11-month-long listening campaign that blended active and passive listening, Seibert said.
Anywhere from three times a week to daily, the team would call Spirit, performing what they nicknamed a "sweep and beep" maneuver. That included one procedure to force the rover's radio to a specific frequency and a second to cue a signal. Sessions usually lasted an hour but occasionally stretched as long as 5 hours, and they took place day and night to fit the Martian schedule.
Between those active-listening sessions, engineers with the Deep Space Network, which communicates with Martian missions, automatically scanned their feeds for signals that may have come from the trapped rover. [10 Amazing Mars Discoveries by Rovers Spirit & Opportunity]
After nary a whisper, NASA declared the rover permanently dead in May 2011. That decision came after a meeting with all the senior team members, which Seibert said he remembers well. "It was a very purely democratic discussion," he said, adding that he was the first to hesitantly suggest giving up on Spirit, focusing the mission's resources on Opportunity alone.
"It hurt to say, but in my mind, I was OK saying it, because we had done so much to try to recover Spirit and the odds were so much against that rover," he said. And back then, the team still had a piece of the mission at work. "Mars Exploration Rovers continued on. It was just losing half of the spacecraft, but there was still plenty to do."
"Shock and awe and sadness"
But there's no longer a second active rover, and Opportunity scientists and engineers have been publicly speaking out about how demoralizing the rover's silence is. Earlier this week, they realized that NASA was deciding how to proceed, with one rumor suggesting that the rover would be given 30 days of active listening after tau reached 1.5. On the evening before the meeting deciding the rover's fate, they enlisted mission allies to launch a Twitter campaign showing public support under the hashtag #SaveOppy. And they saw a flood of responses, which Harrison thinks may have influenced the managers' decision.
But even a 45-day period isn't satisfying to her or Seibert, who said that he hasn't seen the same sort of exhaustive efforts for Opportunity as he and his colleagues conducted for Spirit. "It just seems like it's an easier thing to say we're done than putting the extra effort into soldiering on in the face of adversity," Seibert said. "It still seems like it's walking away early."
NASA doesn't seem to be effectively communicating with current team members about their decisions either, said Harrison, who added that the team didn't get a heads-up about the Aug. 30 announcement. "It seems pretty arbitrary, because [a] tau of 1.5 is still relatively high and we're not sure where that number came from. That information has not been released to the team," she added.
(In addition, tau measurements may not be particularly precise right now. Banfield mentioned that tau is more difficult to measure with confidence when the rover itself is out of order, because Curiosity is on the opposite side of the planet, forcing scientists to rely on images taken by orbiters.) [Top 10 Discoveries by Mars Rovers Spirit & Opportunity: A Scientist's View]
But Callas, JPL's project manager for Opportunity, said NASA has to draw the line somewhere, as sympathetic as he is to his grieving colleagues. "It's just like a loved one that's missing in action — the more time that passes, the less likely you are" to hear anything, he said. "I mean, you still hold out hope, and we are. We'll still listen. But we have to be realistic, too, as difficult as that is emotionally."
Other Opportunity team members may not be there yet, still focused on hoping for the best for the robot they've tended to for more than a decade. And the emotional strain is reaching beyond engineers in mission control.
"It's killing me not to be there and not to be in the trenches with that team working on the problem," Seibert said. He's told friends still working with the mission to call when they get a signal, so he can jump on a plane and foot the bill for celebratory drinks. "I really hope I get that phone call soon."
Space.com senior writer Mike Wall contributed reporting to this article. Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.comor follow her @meghanbartels.
Amatrice, the epicenter of the 2016 Italian earthquake.
Credit: Youtube, Wikimedia Commons.
An aftershock is like an echo — a smaller earthquake that occurs soon after a larger one, hitting the same area as the main shock. Large magnitude quakes can generate aftershocks of varying magnitudes over a period of months. For people living and working around the site of an earthquake, the subsequent days and weeks are filled with anxiety — when will there be a new one?
Seismologists have crafted models that fairly accurately predict when an aftershock is going to take place and how violent (i.e. magnitude) it will be. Now, researchers at Google and Harvard have teamed up to produce an artificial intelligence system that can also predict where the aftershock will hit next.
The collaboration devised an AI that was fed a database of 131,000 earthquakes and the location of their subsequent aftershocks. The machine learning algorithm was instructed to spot the patterns in this complex landscape of variables upon variables.
There are a lot of things that shape a seismic event — from the composition of the ground to the interactions between tectonic plates to the ways seismic waves propagate through the Earth. Making sense of all the intricate layers upon layers can be maddening. However, this sort of high-volume pattern matching is what machine learning algorithms excel at. Such AIs are currently being used by tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google to sell you virtual assistants or to show search results.
“After earthquakes of magnitude 5 or larger, people spend a great deal of time mapping which part of the fault slipped and how much it moved,” said Brendan Meade, a Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.
“Many studies might use observations from one or two earthquakes, but we used the whole database…and we combined it with a physics-based model of how the Earth will be stressed and strained after the earthquake, with the idea being that the stresses and strains caused by the main shock may be what trigger the aftershocks.”
Meade was first inspired to neural networks to predict aftershocks several years ago during his two sabbaticals at Google in Cambridge. At the time, deep learning algorithms were not as established as they are today but the idea immediately sounded too good to pass.
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After years of work, Meade and colleagues came up with a model which has much better predictive power than anything before it. On a scale of accuracy from 0 to 1 — where 1 is a perfectly accurate model and 0.5 is essentially the accuracy of flipping a coin — the new AI system scored 0.849 while the previously most precise model scored only 0.583.
The neural network was able to work so well thanks a little quirk it managed to uncover all by itself. The complex calculations take into consideration a factor known as the “von Mises yield criterion”, which predicts when a material will break under a stress. It’s been mostly used by engineers in the field of metallurgy. Now, it has also found its place in earthquake science, the authors reported in the journal Nature.
“This is a quantity that occurs in metallurgy and other theories, but has never been popular in earthquake science,” Meade said. “But what that means is the neural network didn’t come up with something crazy, it came up with something that was highly interpretable. It was able to identify what physics we should be looking at, which is pretty cool.”
Another advantage of the new AI is that it works for different types of faults. Because it’s generalizable, the system can just as well predict aftershocks around slip-faults, such as those seen in California, or shallow subduction zones, as seen in Japan.
Before you get overly excited though, be aware that this AI has a number of important limitations. The system only works with aftershocks caused by permanent changes to the ground, so-called static stresses. Aftershocks, however, can also be triggered by dynamic stresses that do not permanently change the applied load and thus can trigger earthquakes only by altering the mechanical state or properties of the fault zone.
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The AI is also too slow to work in real-time, which is a must-have considering that most aftershocks occur in the first day following an important earthquake.
Going forward, the researchers hope to overcome these challenges one by one. What’s more, Meade also has his mind set to predicting the magnitude of earthquakes themselves — something which is still considered highly esoteric and, perhaps, impossible to do.
“I think there’s a quiet revolution in thinking about earthquake prediction,” he said. “It’s not an idea that’s totally out there anymore. And while this result is interesting, I think this is part of a revolution in general about rebuilding all of science in the artificial intelligence era.
“Problems that are dauntingly hard are extremely accessible these days,” he continued. “That’s not just due to computing power — the scientific community is going to benefit tremendously from this because…AI sounds extremely daunting, but it’s actually not. It’s an extraordinarily democratizing type of computing, and I think a lot of people are beginning to get that.”
Celebrate Labor Day tonight (Sept. 3) by watching a bright-green cometapproach the sun in a live webcast by the Slooh online observatory.
Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner will make its closest approach to Earth on Sept. 10. That same day, it will swing by the sun, appearing bigger and brighter as solar radiation strips particles from its icy surface, creating that characteristic comet "tail."
Astrophotographer Alexander Vasenin captured this photo of Comet 21P/Giacobani-Zinner from Moscow Oblast, Russia, on Aug. 18, 2018, at 12:32 a.m. local time (2132 GMT on Aug. 17).
Comet 21P is a periodic comet that orbits the sun about once every 6.6 years. It is the source of the Draconid meteor shower, which happens every year in October when Earth passes through the trail of debris that Comet 21P leaves behind as it orbits the sun.
When Comet 21P flies by Earth on Sept. 10, it will be 36 million miles (58 million kilometers) away. "On the night of September 3rd, the comet will lie just over 1 degree from bright star Capella in Auriga, making it far easier to spot," Slooh officials said in a statement.
While the comet can be seen with small telescopes and binoculars, it won't be quite bright enough to spot with the naked eye, according to EarthSky.org. "The comet is expected to reach a visual magnitude of 6.5 to 7. That means it will not be visible to the eye … but nearly," EarthSky.org reports.
During the Labor Day webcast, Slooh astronomers Paul Cox and Paige Godfrey will join Slooh's storyteller Helen Avery to talk "all about comets and what they mean to us ground observers," Slooh officials said.
Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience.
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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.
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UFO researchers release video of strange craft hovering in sky over Carolina town
