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.
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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!!!
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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 Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
02-10-2018
Earth Could Be Crushed to The Size of a Soccer Field by Particle Accelerator Experiments, Astronomer Warns
Earth Could Be Crushed to The Size of a Soccer Field by Particle Accelerator Experiments, Astronomer Warns
Martin Rees, a well-respected British cosmologist, has made a pretty bold statement when it comes to particle accelerators: there’s a small, but real possibility of disaster.
Particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider, shoot particles at incredibly high speeds, smash them together, and observe the fallout.
These high speed collisions have helped us discover lots of new particles, but according to Rees, this isn’t without its risks.
“Maybe a black hole could form, and then suck in everything around it,” he writes, as Sarah Knapton reports over at the Telegraph. “The second scary possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets.”
“That in itself would be harmless. However under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across.”
That’s approximately 330 feet, or around the length of a soccer field.
And that’s not all. The third way that particle accelerators could destroy the Earth, according to Reese, is by a “catastrophe that engulfs space itself”.
“Empty space – what physicists call the vacuum – is more than just nothingness. It is the arena for everything that happens. It has, latent in it, all the forces and particles that govern the physical world. The present vacuum could be fragile and unstable.”
“Some have speculated that the concentrated energy created when particles crash together could trigger a ‘phase transition’ that would rip the fabric of space. This would be a cosmic calamity not just a terrestrial one.”
Sounds frankly terrifying. But should we really be worried? Surely the smart people at the LHC can clear this up.
“The LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) reaffirms and extends the conclusions of the 2003 report that LHC collisions present no danger and that there are no reasons for concern,” CERN writes on their website.
“Whatever the LHC will do, nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies.”
And this is an important point – cosmic rays are basically natural versions of what the LHC and other particle accelerators are doing. And these rays hit Earth constantly.
The team behind the LHC have an answer for strangelets as well.
“Could strangelets coalesce with ordinary matter and change it to strange matter? This question was first raised before the start up of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC, in 2000 in the United States,” they explain.
“A study at the time showed that there was no cause for concern, and RHIC has now run for eight years, searching for strangelets without detecting any.”
Even the late, great Stephen Hawking gave his blessing to the particle accelerator:
“The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on. The LHC is absolutely safe. … Collisions releasing greater energy occur millions of times a day in the earth’s atmosphere and nothing terrible happens,” said Hawking.
In a way, Rees is correct. We’re not 100 percent sure, and might never be. But as he explains, many scientific advances can have risks, but that’s not to say we need to stop entirely.
“Innovation is often hazardous, but if we don’t forgo risks we may forgo benefits,” he writes in On The Future.
“Nevertheless, physicists should be circumspect about carrying out experiments that generate conditions with no precedent, even in the cosmos,” Rees writes.
“Many of us are inclined to dismiss these risks as science fiction, but give the stakes they could not be ignored, even if deemed highly improbable.”
We’ll leave that gargantuan task to the particle physicists.
By Gordon Slovut, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
They sat quietly, leaning toward the lectern in a dark-paneled room near Lake Calhoun, Minn., as a professor from New York told of his encounter with one of the mysterious Men in Black.
In the audience were people such as biophysicist Otto Schmitt, a retired professor of electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota; retired aircraft developer and physicist Cecil Behringer; physician Steven Zuckerman and polymer scientist Arthur Coury.Peter Rojcewicz told them there have been hundreds - perhaps thousands - of such encounters over the centuries.
"The Men in Black are part of the extraordinary encounter continuum - fairies, monsters, ETs, energy forms, flying saucers, flaming crosses," said Rojcewicz, a 37-year-old professor of humanities and folklore at New York's Juilliard School.
The modern era of Men in Black - visitations by mysterious, black-clad men who seem evil and threatening - goes back to at least the early 1950s when a man named Albert Bender reported seeing a UFO in Bridgeport, Conn., and was later frightened by a visit from three Men in Black.
Rojcewicz told the audience that his own MIB (Men in Black) experience occurred in 1980. "I have never gone public with this before," he said.
Most of the modern era MIB encounters have followed sightings of UFOs or strange lights. Rojcewicz's encounter involved no sightings. He said he was just sitting in the University of Pennsylvania library, reading a UFO book suggested by another professor who thought that Rojcewicz would be interested in such phenomena.
"Then in the corner of my vision I noticed a black pants leg and a black shoe, scuffed," Rojcewicz said. Standing in front of him, Rojcewicz said, was a very gaunt, very pale man. He wore a black suit, black shoes, black string tie and a bright white shirt.
Rojcewicz told the man he didn't know much about flying saucers and wasn't sure he was very interested in the phenomena.
The Man in Black screamed: "Flying saucers are the most important fact of the century and you are not interested?"
"I tried to calm him," Rojcewicz said. The man got up, once again all in a single awkward movement, put his hand on Rojcewicz's shoulder and said: "Go well on your purpose" and left.
Rojcewicz said he thinks his experience - and that of others who have been exposed to the Men in Black - are somewhere "in the crack" between real life and fantasy. He has been studying anomalous phenomena such as the Men in Black ever since his 1980 experience. He has interviewed many people who have reported UFOs, flying saucers and Men in Black experiences.
You’d think that physicist Stephen Hawking’s favorite place on Earth would be his native England, but it’s actually someplace completely different – as he explains in a new 25-minute documentary from CuriosityStream.
“Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places” is an exclusive offering from the online video-on-demand channel, founded last year by John Hendricks, who was the mastermind behind the Discovery Channel. It’s the first episode in what’s expected to be a series of original “Favorite Places” features, supplementing CuriosityStream’s library of science documentaries from the BBC and other providers.
The real-life Hawking has to use a computer-equipped wheelchair to get around nowadays, but CuriosityStream’s documentary uses CGI magic to put the good doctor into the cockpit of the S.S. Hawking, a spaceship he designed himself.
From that vantage point, Hawking takes viewers on a tour through time and space – and talks about his own journey through life as well.
“My goal is simple: complete understanding of the universe,” Hawking said in a statement. “It’s always been a dream of mine to explore the universe. So, what if I could? Imagine I could go anywhere and see anything.”
Here are the five places that Hawking picked:
1. The Big Bang:
The S.S. Hawking starts its trip with a visit to the beginning of the universe, giving Hawking the opportunity to explain that the Big Bang wasn’t as big of a bang as people think. “There are no fireworks,” he says. “Light won’t exist for hundreds of thousands of years.” But Hawking spins the time dial fast enough to get to a satisfying flash, 380,000 years after the beginning.
2. The Milky Way’s central black hole:
When Hawking gets to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way, fans of the movie “Interstellar” will recognize the scene. It’s a bigger version of Gargantua, the huge black hole in the movie that’s based on calculations by one of Hawking’s pals, Caltech physicist Kip Thorne. To CuriosityStream’s credit, the scene neatly explains the mechanism behind a black hole’s “Hawking radiation” and why Hawking changed his thinking on black hole behavior.
3. Gliese 832 c:
Hawking journeys to one of the likeliest nearby candidates for habitability beyond Earth – Gliese 832 c, a super-Earth that orbits a red dwarf star located 16 light-years from our solar system. “Plants here wouldn’t be green,” he says. “Photosynthesis from the sun’s red light would produce purple or black foliage. There could be animals, too, perhaps intelligent ones.” Hawking notes that Gliese 832 c (like the more recently discovered Proxima Centauri b) is under observation by the Breakthrough Listen SETI campaign. “Finding intelligent life would be the single greatest discovery in history,” Hawking said. “We would be forced to change.”
4. Saturn:
Hawking’s in love with the giant planet’s rings and its more than 60 moons. “I have no doubt in the future it will be a massive tourist hot spot, complete with hot-dog stands and screaming children,” he says. The S.S. Hawking spends a few extra moments zooming past Enceladus, an ice-covered moon that spews geysers of water vapor and may well harbor life in its hidden ocean.
5. Earth:
The whole planet counts as a favorite place for Hawking, but he’s especially fond of sunny Santa Barbara, Calif., where he spent many happy hours with his young family in 1974. At the time, Hawking held a position at Caltech in nearby Pasadena and was coping with the early stages of his neurodegenerative disease. “My home away from home … It was a world away from the gray skies of Cambridge,” he said. “I’ve traveled the globe, but I’ve never found anywhere quite like this.” Even today, he stops by Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, which he calls “the perfect place for blue-sky thinking.”
CuriosityStream works on an ad-free subscription model, with a month’s free trial. Standard-definitiion access is $2.99 a month, HD is $5.99 a month, 4K Ultra HD is $11.99 a month. More than 1,500 titles are available. For more information about the service, check out the website.
WETENSCHAP Aan de rand van ons zonnestelsel, ver voorbij alle planeten, bevindt zich een mysterieus object. Het is een klein rotsblok dat er 44.000 jaar over doet om een baan rond onze zon te draaien.
Het object heeft de wetenschappelijke naam 2015 TG387 gekregen. Hij is ongeveer 300 kilometer in doorsnee. Mogelijk is hij een dwergplaneet, net als Pluto. De ontdekking is dinsdag bekendgemaakt door de Internationale Astronomische Unie, de wetenschappelijke organisatie die over het onderzoek naar het heelal gaat.
2015 TG387 draait in een ovale baan rond de zon. Toen hij werd ontdekt, was de afstand tot de zon tachtig keer zo groot als de afstand van de aarde tot de zon. Als hij het dichtst bij de zon staat, is dat nog altijd 65 keer de afstand zon-aarde, twee keer zo ver weg als Pluto. En op het verste punt is de afstand tot de zon 2300 keer de afstand van de aarde tot de zon. Er zijn mogelijk duizenden van zulke objecten in de buurt, maar ze zijn erg moeilijk te vinden vanwege de enorme afstand. Tot nu toe zijn er maar een paar gevonden. “We konden 2015 TG387 alleen ontdekken toen hij het dichtst bij de zon kwam. Tijdens 99 procent van zijn omloop was hij te vaag om te zien”, aldus de Amerikaanse onderzoeker David Tholen.
‘Planeet X’
De ontdekkers denken dat er mogelijk een negende, nog niet ontdekte planeet in die uithoek van het zonnestelsel te vinden is. Rotsblokken als 2015 TG387 zijn volgens hen “broodkruimels” die naar die ‘Planeet X’ kunnen leiden. De zwaartekracht van die planeet kan de baan van de rotsblokken namelijk beïnvloeden. Als ze de omloopbanen van de dwergplaneten kennen, kunnen ze uitrekenen waar die zwaartekracht vandaan komt en waar de mysterieuze planeet zich bevindt.
Het is ontegenzeglijk het eerdere object, maar wat het is, is een volkomen raadsel. Een buitenaards ruimteschip of, zo blijkt later, een geweldig grote drone die misschien voor een marketingcampagne wordt gebruikt. De tijd zal het leren, hopen we.
Update: 22 september 2018:
De avond voordat de getuige de bijzondere opname maakte van een ruimteschip dat boven de weg hing, is datzelfde object ook door een andere getuige op video vastgelegd.
Dit gebeurde bij de Shakopee Archery Range, eveneens in Minnesota en op ongeveer 85 kilometer afstand van de eerste waarneming.
Er bestaat geen enkele twijfel dat het om hetzelfde object gaat. Maar wat is het?
Origineel artikel: 17 september 2018
Wanneer je ’s avonds laat naar huis rijdt in het donker en je ziet opeens iets vreemds in de lucht, dan doet dat heel onwerkelijk aan.
Maar, als je het met je eigen ogen ziet en je slaagt er ook nog eens in om dit object te fotograferen, dan wordt het wel heel echt. Het volgende voorval speelde zich af op 14 september 2018 in Stillwater in de Amerikaanse staat Minnesota en is ingediend bij Mufon onder nummer 94921.
Een man reed samen met zijn vriendin naar huis toen ze plotseling iets vreemds boven de weg zagen.
De getuige is er absoluut van overtuigd dat het geen weerspiegeling of iets dergelijks is omdat nadat dit object een minuut of vier boven de weg had gehangen, dit opeens met grote snelheid wegvloog. Iets dat door hem en zijn vriendin beiden is gezien.
Ufoloog Scott Waring is heel benieuwd of er die avond ergens in de buurt mensen zijn vermist of tijdelijk zoek geweest zijn. Hij denkt namelijk dat wanneer een ruimteschip zo dichtbij de weg komt er een reden voor moet zijn. En die reden zou heel goed kunnen zijn dat ze van plan waren om één of meerdere mensen te ontvoeren.
Something is mysteriously killing the great cows of Argentina and their owners, not to mention the great chefs of Europe and the rest of the world, are getting worried … especially since the cattle appear to be being mutilated with a precision and instrumentation that may be out of this world. Aliens? Chupacabra? Something even worse? Is it worthy of a novel or a movie … or both?
The latest cattle mutilation report came less than two weeks ago from the Argentine media conglomerate Cadena 3. Raúl Báez, a cattle rancher in Villa Ojo de Agua, a village in the Santiago del Estero Province in north central Argentina, told reporters that he went out to find “ten cattle animals of his property were dead and four of them had mutilations.” The death of the cows was strange.
“He told us that it seemed strange to him that he did not observe blood and that it seems that the animals would not have defended themselves.”
The mutilations were even more mysterious, especially to a veterinarian who examined them.
“The cuts attracted his attention because that makes it a kind of laser scalpel because it has scars.”
We demand some answers!
A laser scalpel? What kind of Chupacabra has a laser scalpel, fingers to hold it and the patience to carefully remove eyes, tongues, lips, internal organs and other parts of the cow while making sure no blood was spilled? Yet “Chupacabra!” was the first cry of locals, just as it often is. However, another similarattack and mutilation in August has cattle ranchers fearing something worse … extraterrestrials. The bovines in that case had similar precision cuts and witnesses reported seeing “strange lights” before and after the attacks were believed to have occurred.
However, the residents of Villa Ojo de Agua reported no such lights in the September mutilations. Could they have been caused by something else? Yes, say animal experts … Hocicudo.
Hocicudo? Is this some kind of new cryptid? Not hardly, but people across South America might wish they were as rare as the Chupacabra. The Hocicudo is a long-nosed mouse of the genus Oxymycterus. Its 17 species include the rare Argentine hocicudo (Oxymycterus akodontius) and the more common Paramo hocicudo (Oxymycterus paramensis). Both found in Argentina. Animal expert Juan Calla Fontana says it’s common for animals to die at this time of the year in Argentina (early spring) due to exposure and lack of food. Once they hit the ground, Hocicudo move in and dine on their soft parts.
Paramo hocicudo
While that explanation sounds reasonable, it doesn’t explain the precision of the cuts that were reported in these and other mutilation cases. The cattle industry is huge in Argentina, both in exports and in feeding its beef-loving population. Could this be a party-line explanation to avoid panic among ranchers and citizens?
If you want to know who was killing the great chefs of Europe, check out the movie of the same name or the book it was adapted from. If you want to know what is killing the great cows of Argentina … keep asking questions.
At this point, it seems obvious that it’s become a question of when a war in space will break out, not if. The U.S. Military has been preparing for Space War I for some time now, and the world’s other superpowers aren’t too far behind – or maybe they’re even a step ahead. Observers have noted that many Russian spacecraft and satellites have begun behaving in unknown and unprecedented ways lately, and China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force has been spotted testing unknown low-orbit hypersonic aircraft. Where’s the Space Force when you need it?
To add more fuel to the apparent space war brewing, an unidentified new weapon was recently seen being tested by a MiG-31 aircraft at Zhukovsky Airport outside of Moscow, Russia’s base for testing new aircraft and weapons. In his analysis over at The War Zone, aviation sleuth Tyler Rogoway writes that the weapon appears to be either a hypersonic missile similar to the ones tested in China recently, or an air-to-space rocket designed to blow satellites to orbital smithereens.
The weapon, whatever it is, is labeled “81 Blue” and is nearly the size of the MiG carrying it. There are few details to go on yet, but the weapon appears to be similar to other anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons. Such air-to-space ASAT rockets have been tested by the U.S. Air Force as early as the 1980s, and with so much recent attention paid to the oncoming satellite wars, there’s no telling for what the rocket could be intended.
World superpowers have been testing anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons for decades.
If all of the attention paid to satellites and space supremacy hints at anything, it’s that war in space is coming. Soon. Could all of this recent development and testing of space weapons be related to the recent spate of mysterious booms heard round the world? At this point, I’d be amazed if it wasn’t. Just put those booms alongside other recent developments: increased sightings of fireballs in the sky; unexplained booms rattling the ground; “killer” satellites waking up and acting erratically; the United States creating a Space Force; China and Russia testing new space weapons.
It’s only a matter of time before fiery debris starts raining down around us.
Awesome UFO Footage Of Disk Over Mexico City, Sept 28, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Awesome UFO Footage Of Disk Over Mexico City, Sept 28, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: September 28, 2018
Location of sighting: Mexico city, Mexico
Source: Live Cam
ColourUFO channel of Youtube recorded this outstanding footage of a disk over Mexico City on live Internet cam. The footage clearly shows the classic flying saucer hovering over the city. Lucky for us someone was recording while watching that cam and caught this mind-blowing footage. The UFOs in Mexico City probably come from Colima or Popocatepetl which are both known for UFOs entering and exiting them. I have often said that alien bases sit 4-6km below those to volcanos in Mexico City.
Now I have followed ColourUFO for over five years. I can honestly say he puts in more hours per week than 99% of UFO researchers worldwide.
NASA and Skywatcher caught same Huge Object near the Sun
NASA and Skywatcher caught same Huge Object near the Sun
NASA’s Satellite EI 284 captured on Sep 30, 2018 01.06 AM a huge bright object that seemly leaves the Sun's surface.
On the evening of September 29, skywatcher Stefano Farigu in Italy was witnessing the sunset phase and started to photograph the Sun with a Nikon D800 camera.
Only after viewing the images Stefano noticed the presence of a bright unknown object near the Sun.
Image left: NASA images of the object -
Image right: Skywatcher images of the object.
Stefano talks about a celestial body, like the infamous planet X, Nibiru or planet Nine but since the images from NASA as well as from the skywatcher were taken within the same time frame we may assume that they have captured the same object (UFO?) near the sun.
Smiley UFO with scout fleet above Denmark was a group of unidentified flying objects caught on photo on September 19th 2018 at 3.25 PM local time. They were photographed high in the sky west south-west of Odense city. I did not see them while taking my archive photos of clouds in the sky. But two days later, now in the writing, I discovered them in one of my photos.
I am lucky that I have a Canon EOS 60D with a 300mm zoom lens producing JPEG images in the resolution of 5184 x 3456 pixels (18 Mega Pixels). A smaller resolution would have rendered these objects as fuzzy and nearly invisible blobs. But I caught them with only 190mm focal length and the largest object reveals a surprisingly strange little surprise.
It´s a smiley 🙂 with a big smile 🙂 big surprise! I can further describe this object as a light grey spherical cloud-like object with a horseshoe-shaped glowing white light on it.
Smiley UFO is luminous white
The two pictures above has been filtered with Auto Tone in Photoshop to make the objects more clear for the viewer. But in that process, the large object got a yellow-orange glow which is not the real color. In the original cropped and zoomed version below it is luminous white. It is nearly invisible in the sunlight coming from bottom left in the photo.
Image below has been processed in Photoshop (brightness and contrast adjusted).
My first thought then I saw this thing was “lens flare”. But I have never seen a lens flare with that look (on it´s face) and I have seen many. The object also comes with a small fleet of luminous orb-like objects? It is not a lens flare if you ask me. Space aliens in an extraterrestrial vehicle? We will probably never find out…
NASA’s uncrewed New Horizons probe flew past Pluto, its primary target, in 2015, but its mission is far from over. Soon it will continue on through the Kuiper Belt, and just after midnight on January 1, 2019, New Horizons will perform a flyby of Ultima Thule. The name may sound like a dragon spell from Skyrim or the name of a kindly Norwegian innkeeper, but it’s actually the common name of Kuiper Belt object KBO 2014 MU69, which floats out in space beyond the edges of our solar system. It’s among a class of objects believed to be cosmic leftovers from the early times of planetary formation billions of years ago.
Artist's illustration of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft encountering 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt object that orbits 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto. The encounter will occur on Jan. 1, 2019. With public input, the team has selected the nickname Ultima Thule for the object, which will be the most primitive and most distant world ever explored by a spacecraft.
Credit: Steve Grivven/NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
In a live NASA Science Chat on Wednesday, three of the top New Horizons team members explained the plan for the 2019 flyby, which, at a billion miles beyond Pluto, will be the most distant planetary flyby in human history. Given this fact, KBO 2014 MU69’s name is especially fitting, as Ultima Thule is a medieval phrase that means “beyond the known world.” But New Horizons is going to make it part of our known world.
“We’re gonna zoom right up to it, image it, find out what it’s made of, find out if it has moons or rings, and lots more about it,” Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator, told viewers.
What we do know about Ultima Thule is that it’s about 23 miles across and approximately 10 times the size of an average comet. We also know its trajectory, which makes it the perfect candidate for New Horizons’ secondary mission objective.
Despite its status as a secondary mission, though, the Ultima Thule flyby is taking a good deal of prep. When the Earth-based team woke the probe back up in June, they did system checks and performed system updates to support the flyby, Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager, told viewers on Wednesday.
“In August, we transitioned the spacecraft into a mode where we could take pictures, so we are taking pictures now of Ultima Thule,” said Bowman. “We call those optical navigation measurements, and we are using those to target the object.” The image below is an example of one such optical navigation measurement.
Left: Composite image taken by New Horizons showing the estimated range of Ultima Thule in the yellow box. Right: A zoomed-in image of the area inside the yellow box, showing Ultima Thule where scientists predicted it would be.
By tracking Ultima Thule, which was only discovered in 2014, scientists have been able to identify it as a classical Kuiper Belt object, which means it’s likely one of the oldest objects in our solar system. But because it is a poorly understood object, scientists need to keep monitoring it to make sure it moves as they expect.
Researchers need to know exactly where Ultima Thule is to get as close as they want. The New Horizons team plans to fly the New Horizons probe 2,200 miles from Ultima Thule, much closer than the 7,800 miles that separated it from Pluto in 2015. Most importantly, though, the simple fact is that we know very little about Ultima Thule, and this flyby will give us some of the first facts about the ancient object.
“This has all the elements of an unbelievable set of discoveries that are justoutside our reach at the moment but will come into view soon,” Jim Green, NASA’s chief scientist, told viewers on Wednesday. “We know we’re gonna flyby January first, that’s a given. It has the excitement of what are we gonna see?”
Unfortunately, it’ll take quite some time before we find out what New Horizons sees. When the probe performs its epic flyby, it will begin sending its data back to Earth, but with the spacecraft sending a low-powered signal over 4 billion miles, the data won’t reach Earth for about a year. It’ll surely be worth the wait, though, to glimpse an object that may be even older than Earth.
THE LIFESPAN OF a typical Berndnaut Smilde sculpture is 10 seconds—just long enough to be photographed. And his sculptures are as unusual as they are ethereal: Smilde makes perfect miniature clouds in a diverse array of indoor locations, from coal mines to cathedrals.
He’s been at for several years now and calls the ever-expanding series Nimbus. Last month, he brought his weather wizardry to Frieze New York. There Smilde allowed onlookers to sit in on two days of his work inside NeueHouse, an upscale co-working space.
His materials are little more than smoke and water vapor, and the results vary with the size and temperature of the location. The space must be cold and damp, with no air circulation. Smilde creates a wall of water vapor with the type of spritzer you might use on houseplants. A smoke machine then sends a puff of faux fog on a collision course. He likes to keep the clouds no bigger than six feet so they don’t fall apart too quickly. "I really like my clouds concentrated, with a lot of texture," he says.
Nimbus Bonnefanten.
BERNDNAUT SMILDE
The artist tinkers with the formula for a few days until he’s created what he believes to be the ideal cloud. For one shoot, he might create 100 clouds to get the image.
The result is stunning, an ephemeral artwork caught just before it vanishes. The bare, often austere locations heighten the drama. While Smilde makes his clouds, he has a photographer right there to capture the moment. He prefers to work with photographers with experience shooting architecture, so the wood, metal and other elements are in sharp focus, a contrast to the soft, fluffy clouds. Smilde likes that his creations last but a moment.
"I see them as temporary sculptures of almost nothing—the edge of materiality," he says. "It looks like you can dive into them or grab them, but they just fall apart. There’s a duality that I really like where you’re trying to achieve this ideal thing that then collapses just moments later."
If he could figure out the technical aspects, Smilde would like to create clouds within the vast Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. Marketers from cloud computing companies in Silicon Valley have approached him to make sculptures at conventions, but he’s declined. For him, it’s more than a parlor trick.
"Clouds are quite universal," he says. "Everyone can relate to them, but by putting them indoors you kind of change the context. It can become strange or even threatening. They can stand in for the divine, but also for misfortune."
Did a Huge Impact Blast Out Moons of Mars? Old Data Bolsters Theory
Did a Huge Impact Blast Out Moons of Mars? Old Data Bolsters Theory
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
Phobos is the larger of Mars' two small moons and bears the scars of millennia of small impacts.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Scientists have struggled for decades to explain how the two tiny moons of Mars came to be, but a new study relying on old data bolsters one of the two major hypotheses.
That idea argues that Phobos and Deimos formed in the aftermath of a giant impact with Mars itself, which makes an awful lot of sense given their orbital paths. But that explanation hasn't been a perfect fit: Both these tiny moons appear incredibly dark, like a certain class of carbon-rich asteroids, suggesting that they were born in the asteroid belt, flew too close to Mars and got trapped by the planet's gravity. Phobos is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) across, while Deimos is 8 miles (13 km) wide.
"The fun part for me has been taking a poke at some of the ideas out there using an old data set that's has been underutilized," lead author Tim Glotch, a geoscientist at Stony Brook University in New York, said in a statementreleased by the American Geophysical Union, which runs the journal that published the new research. [Moons of Mars: Amazing Photos of Phobos and Deimos]
That old data set was gathered in 1998 by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which measured the heat signature of Phobos, the larger of the two Martian moons. Glotch and his colleagues compared that data with data from a range of terrestrial rocks and a tiny piece of a meteorite gathered near Tagish Lakein western Canada. Scientists think this meteorite broke off from an asteroid of the same type suspected to have formed the moons.
But it turned out that the old Phobos data didn't match that Tagish meteorite very well. "In fact, what matches Phobos most closely, or at least one of the features in the spectrum, is ground-up basalt, which is a common volcanic rock, and it's what most of the Martian crust is made out of," Glotch said in the statement.
"That leads us to believe that perhaps Phobos might be a remnant of an impact that occurred early on in Martian history," he said. That old Martian material would be mixed with other material from the impact.
If the research team is proven correct, the insight would resolve the perceived flaw in the giant-impact theory of Martian moon formation. And conveniently enough, scientists may not have to go fishing through more decades-old data to answer this question.
That's thanks to a planned Japanese mission called Martian Moons Exploration. The spacecraft, which the Japanese space agency hopes to launch in the early 2020s, is being designed to orbit both moons and bring home a sample from one of them. Scientists could then study that sample, as well as asteroid samples brought back by the Japanese mission Hayabusa2and the U.S. mission OSIRIS-REx, to compare the composition of the three different solar system bodies — and, with some luck, solve the Martian moon mystery once and for all.
The new research is described in a paper published Sept. 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
Those bold plans include: planning a new Moon landing, long-term human deployment on and around the Moon, reassertion of America's leadership in space, strengthening private space companies, and figure out how to get American astronauts to the surface of Mars.
There are a lot of unknowns built into the plan, not the least of which is whether or not scientists can figure out a way to keep astronauts safe from the many hazards of space.
Those smarties at NASA took that into account when detailing expected timelines for completing each goal in the 21-page report - from low Earth orbit (LEO), to cislunar space and then on Mars.
(NASA)
Indeed, the timeframe within which NASA expects to reach key milestones along the way to their goals includes dates that NASA expects it will actually figure out certain parts of the plan.
That's important because it means NASA will be able to incorporate what it learns along the way.
Any claims - like the one published in NASA's new report - that astronauts will stroll around on Mars by the 2030s has flexibility built in and could change if NASA researchers hit a snag or two in the process.
For instance, NASA plans to wait until the results of the Mars 2020 mission, during which a rover will collect and analyze samples from Mars' surface, before it will even begin to draft up a budget ask for the crewed mission that is slated for some time in the 2030s.
That's just good thinking.
But before NASA even starts to think about sending astronauts to Mars, there are even more fundamental mysteries to solve.
For instance, NASA will be launching 13 CubeSats into low Earth orbit in 2020 so it can learn how to better prepare payloads for space travel, whether it be to the Moon, Mars, or beyond.
Once those satellites are in orbit, NASA hopes to use what it's learned to put astronauts in lunar orbit by June 2022.
These gaps in NASA's proposed plans aren't an accident - they represent key gaps in our understanding of space and interplanetary travel. Put another way: they represent the things NASA scientists want to learn.
And if NASA sticks to this timeline, it will hopefully achieve it, which will guide us further into exploring space.
The Center for Process Innovation, a British technology research company, thinks they’ve got the next big step in aviation transportation figured out. They want to remove the windows from passenger planes and replace them with OLED touch-screens that extend along the plane’s entire length and display the view from outside through cameras mounted on the plane’s exterior.
According to them, windows are one of the greatest sources of unnecessary weight in passenger planes. Solid walls are stronger and allow the walls to be built thinner as well. The OLED screens that replace the windows would display the view outside and allow passengers to select entertainment and stewardess service.
The technology does have its detractors, however – some are concerned about light pollution inside the cabin, and the panoramic view probably won’t do much to help those who are afraid of flying.
Why Scientists Searched 7,000 Meters Below Sea Level for a Winged Fish
Why Scientists Searched 7,000 Meters Below Sea Level for a Winged Fish
Ten years later, they finally knew where to find them.
Left to right: Purple, pink and blue. (Published in inverse.com)
By Thomas Linley and Alan Jamieson, The Conversation
From an unmanned submersible, protected by a casing of stainless steel almost an inch thick and a window made from super strong sapphire crystal, we can observe the life that thrives at our planet’s most extreme and darkest depths. Thanks to technology and sheer material strength, we can temporarily trespass into this high-pressure environment. But in stark contrast to the robust deep sea imaging equipment we rely on, the creatures our camera records look extremely fragile.
Four-and-a-half miles beneath our research vessel, which was floating on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, we captured footage of several previously undiscovered species of hadal snailfish. With delicate fins and transparent, gelatinous bodies, they are some of this environment’s most enigmatic inhabitants, fish that — at first glance — look like they should be incapable of surviving under such enormous pressures. And yet, it appears they are thriving in this strange world.
In spring, a team of 40 scientists from 17 different nations conducted an expedition to the Atacama Trench, which runs along the west coast of South America. We were there to find a particular snailfish.
The Atacama trench is the dark blue line off the coast of Chile and Peru.
On a previous expedition, our principal investigator (Alan Jamieson) had photographed a snailfish with long, wing-like fins at a depth of 7,000 meters. Only one species, Notoliparis antonbruuni was known to inhabit this area at such a depth. It had been described from a single specimen, so badly damaged that we are not able to use it to identify our images of living animals. We wanted to find this elusive winged snailfish again to learn more about it and observe it in its natural habitat.
These hadal snailfish tend to live at depths between 7,000 and 8,200 meters (“hadal” simply means anywhere below 6,000 meters), but their apparent rarity is perhaps misunderstood. Because of their extreme habitat (at least for humans), they are difficult to observe rather than actually “rare” as we know it. And with the right equipment and opportunity, we were confident, after 10 years of study, that we knew where and how to find them.
The Atacama Trench is part of the Peru-Chile subduction zone, a large 590,000 square kilometer area where one tectonic plate is being forced under another and the ocean floor quickly plunges to more than 8,000 meters. Its volume is almost the same as the neighboring Andes mountain range, which the tectonic subduction zone also creates, and exploring it is no easy feat.
Deep dive.
A Trio of Snailfish
We deployed our freefalling cameras 27 times — from the relative shallows at 2,500 meters to the trench’s deepest point, Richard’s Deep, at just over 8,000 meters. This enabled us to take more than 100 hours of video and 11,000 photographs at the seabed — and the results did not disappoint. The snailfish we were looking for made an appearance — and it wasn’t alone. Two other previously unknown hadal snailfish species were present in the footage. In fact, all three species appeared in the same shot on one occasion. Out of necessity, they were given quick, stand-in names: we called them the “purple”, the “pink,” and the “blue” Atacama snailfishes.
Left to right: purple, pink and blue.
The “blue” appeared to be the “winged” species Jamieson had recorded previously. Its long trailing fins and prominent snout resembled the Ethereal snailfish we had recorded on another expedition to the Mariana Trench, far away on the other side of the Pacific.
The “pink” species, meanwhile, was more robust and was closer in appearance to the Mariana snailfish (Pseudoliparis swirei) that we described in 2017 and which also inhabits the Mariana Trench. To see these two species — with such different body plans — sharing a trench again got us thinking: they must be doing something different to one another down there to both carve themselves a niche.
The third species, a small purple fish, looked more like the snailfish we would expect to see on the shallower abyssal plains — at a depth of around 3,500 meters. But one of these purple snailfish, just 9cm long, followed its invertebrate prey into one of our traps. This small fragile fish is currently the only physical specimen of the new species and should eventually allow us to give it a formal scientific name. And while we much prefer our video of the living animal, only a physical specimen can be deposited in a museum and used to formally describe a new species.
Meet the specimen. It died due to warm temperatures and low pressure long before it reached the surface.
Preservation
Once on the surface, we photographed this specimen while it was suspended in chilled seawater — its body is simply too fragile to support itself in air, and we didn’t want it to suffer the same fate as the poor blobfish, which, for the record, really aren’t that sad-looking (their jelly-like bodies just collapse when exposed at the surface).
Blobfish aren’t sad at all in their natural habitat.
Over the following months, we then put the specimen through several stages of preservation to avoid shrinking its largely gelatinous body. So that scientists (and the interested public) don’t have to fight over access to a single, fragile specimen, it was also CT scanned at the Natural History Museum, London, creating a detailed 3D digital model of it, inside and out. Such digital back ups are gaining traction in science – take the Scan All Fishes project, for example. And disasters like the recent fire at Brazil’s National Museum, which will have wiped out many unique specimens, also show why they are so important.
See also: First Ever Footage of Angler Fish Mating
But what have we discovered about these mysterious creatures? First, as fish approach the absolute extremes of the environmental conditions that they can cope with, they do not simply eke out an existence but thrive. It is also emerging that some trenches support not only a single specialist species but multiple species with body plans that hint at different lifestyles within the trench.
Second, the snailfish family (Liparidae) is not only the absolute winner of the deepest fish award (having been found in multiple other trenches), but species are living in trenches that at times are over 10,000km apart and entirely isolated from one another. Incredibly, snailfish exist at these extreme depths, wherever these extreme depths are, and in numbers never thought possible.
And the snailfish is just one story that emerged from our expedition. Over the coming months, we will continue to process the huge amount of data we collected, the most we have ever gathered on a single voyage. Our assessment of the large mobile animals we filmed will feed into the project’s larger goal to understand the biological and chemical processes within the trench as a whole.
Strange Blobs Beneath Earth Could Be Remnants of an Ancient Magma Ocean
Strange Blobs Beneath Earth Could Be Remnants of an Ancient Magma Ocean
By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Contributor
Credit: Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock
Mysterious blobs deep in the Earth's mantle could be minerals that precipitated out of an ancient magma ocean that formed in the collision that also created the moon.
These blobs, called ultralow velocity zones, are found very deep in the mantle, close to the Earth's core. They are known only because when seismic waves from earthquakes travel through them, the waves slow dramatically. This indicates that the blobs are somehow different from other parts of the mantle, but no one knows how.
Now, new research suggests that the blobs could be an iron oxide-rich mineral called magnesiowüstite. If so, their existence would hint at a former magma ocean that might have existed 4.5 billion years ago, when a huge chunk of space rock rammed into Earth, spun off the material that would become the moon, and possibly melted large portions of the planet. [In Photos: Watery Ocean Hidden Beneath Earth's Surface]
"If one can Identify that these patches do contain an amount of magnesiowüstite that would be an indication that there was a magma oceanand it crystallized in this fashion where the iron-rich oxide precipitated out and sank down to the base of the mantle," said study leader Jennifer Jackson, a professor of mineral physics at the California Institute of Technology.
Odd blobs
The mantle is around 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) thick, and the ultralow velocity zones are less than a mile to up to 62 miles (100 km) thick and wide, Jackson told Live Science. They slow down seismic waves that travel through them from 30 to 50 percent.
Studying these weird blobs directly isn't possible, so Jackson and her colleagues had to mimic the pressures of the deep mantle right at Earth's surface. To find out if the mineral magnesiowüstite has the kind of properties seen in ultralow velocity zones, the researchers took a small sample of the mineral, put it in a pressure chamber and squeezed it hard with a pair of diamond anvils. The whole pressurized apparatus is small enough to fit in the palm of a hand.
"Sometimes I'll say that I'm carrying around the core-mantle boundary pressure in my pocket," Jackson said.
The researchers bombarded the sample with X-rays from different angles and then measured the energy of the X-rays as they exited the sample, looking for how interactions with the crystalline structure of the mineral changed them.
Under pressure
They found that high pressures change everything. At atmospheric pressure, Jackson said, waves exiting a magnesiowüstite sample are always the same, no matter what direction they travel through the crystal. [Photos: The World's Weirdest Geological Formations]
At core-mantle boundary pressures, though, the direction the waves travel matters a lot. There can be up to a 60 percent difference in the speed of a wave going through the crystal depending on how it passes through. A transverse wave traveling through the mineral moves at a little less than 1.8 miles per second (3 km/s) in one direction and a little more than 3.1 miles per second (5 km/s) in another, Jackson said.
The fastest direction of travel for the waves at atmospheric pressure — along the edge of the crystal structure — is the slowest direction of travel for waves at core-mantle pressures, she said. The fastest direction of travel at core-mantle pressures is across the face of the crystal in the lab. These differences in how waves travel depending on the direction and the crystalline structure are called anisotropies.
What does this mean for the real mantle? Well, Jackson said, anisotropies have been observed down there, too. No one has really looked to see if ultralow velocity zones have them, but there's reason to think they might. If the cooling-magma-ocean theory is true and there is magnesiowüstite deep in the mantle, it could be pushed, squished and nudged into an anisotropic configuration by pieces of continental crust that have been pushed deep into the mantle in the process of subduction. (Subduction is when one piece of crust pushes below another and dives into the mantle, as happens along the coast of California today.)
"If we can look for it, it would be really good evidence to suggest this interaction of ancient slab subduction and ultralow velocity zones that contain this iron-rich oxide," Jackson said.
Now, Jackson hopes to work with seismologists to see if seismic waves that enter ultralow velocity zones come out differently depending on the direction of travel. If they do, it will further bolster the magnesiowüstite hypothesis.
"The presence of this mineral, being shaped by the slab, could give us insight to Earth's magma ocean and its crystallization," Jackson said.
Phosphates, essential ingredients for DNA-based life forms, may have originated from space, according to a new study that recreated the formation of the molecules in a laboratory setting. The life-seeding phosphates would have then made their way to Earth through asteroids and comets that impacted the planet billions of years ago.
Phosphate compounds may have arrived on Earth delivered by comets, such as comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM.
Without phosphates and diphosporic acid, living things wouldn’t be able to synthesize DNA. They are the main components of chromosomes, thread-like structures in which the DNA is packaged. Phosphorus is also part of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which stores energy in the cell and powers cellular processes. Bones and teeth are also made up of phosphorus.
A long-standing debate among scientists is whether these chemical compounds were forged on Earth or someplace else in the universe, hitching a ride on cosmic bodies that collided with our planet.
Although the debate sounds impossible to solve, researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manatoa have now offered compelling evidence that phosphates can be generated in space.
For their experiment, the researchers worked with the chemical phosphine, which is derived from phosphorus and can be found in the atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter or Saturn, but also those of comets such as the famous 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, explored by the Rosetta spacecraft in 2016.
First, the team recreated icy grains — the kind typically found in interstellar space — in a vacuum chamber where the temperature sat just 5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero (-450°F/-267.7°C). Then, they added water, carbon dioxide and — very carefully because it is highly toxic — phosphine. Finally, the researchers fired ionized radiation — the kind found in cosmic rays — at this, triggering chemical reactions that formed phosphoric acid and diphosphoric acid.
“On Earth, phosphine is lethal to living beings,” said Andrew Turner, lead author of the study in Nature Communications, in a statement. “But in the interstellar medium, an exotic phosphine chemistry can promote rare chemical reaction pathways to initiate the formation of biorelevant molecules such as oxoacids of phosphorus, which eventually might spark the molecular evolution of life as we know it.”
In deep space, it’s reasonable to assume such nanoparticles became embedded in large objects like asteroids and comets, which would have eventually made their way to Earth.
“Since comets contain at least partially the remnants of the material of the protoplanetary disk that formed our solar system, these compounds might be traced back to the interstellar medium wherever sufficient phosphine in interstellar ices is available,” said Cornelia Meinert of the University of Nice.
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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 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
