Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
23-10-2018
NASA's first image of Mars from a cubesat
NASA's first image of Mars from a cubesat
One of NASA's twin MarCO spacecraft took this image of Mars on October 2 -- the first time a CubeSat, a kind of low-cost, briefcase-sized spacecraft -- has done so.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's MarCO mission was designed to find out if briefcase-sized spacecraft called CubeSats could survive the journey to deep space. Now, MarCO - which stands for Mars Cube One - has Mars in sight.
One of the twin MarCO CubeSats snapped this image of Mars on Oct. 3 - the first image of the Red Planet ever produced by this class of tiny, low-cost spacecraft. The two CubeSats are officially called MarCO-A and MarCO-B but nicknamed "EVE" and "Wall-E" by their engineering team.
A wide-angle camera on top of MarCO-B produced the image as a test of exposure settings. The MarCO mission, led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, hopes to produce more images as the CubeSats approach Mars ahead of Nov. 26. That's when they'll demonstrate their communications capabilities while NASA's InSight spacecraft attempts to land on the Red Planet. (The InSight mission won't rely on them, however; NASA's Mars orbiters will be relaying the spacecraft's data back to Earth.)
This image was taken from a distance of roughly 8 million miles (12.8 million kilometers) from Mars. The MarCOs are "chasing" Mars, which is a moving target as it orbits the Sun. In order to be in place for InSight's landing, the CubeSats have to travel roughly 53 million miles (85 million kilometers). They have already traveled 248 million miles (399 million kilometers).
MarCO-B's wide-angle camera looks straight out from the deck of the CubeSat. Parts related to the spacecraft's high-gain antenna are visible on either side of the image. Mars appears as a small red dot at the right of the image.
To take the image, the MarCO team had to program the CubeSat to rotate in space so that the deck of its boxy "body" was pointing at Mars. After several test images, they were excited to see that clear, red pinprick.
"We've been waiting six months to get to Mars," said Cody Colley, MarCO's mission manager at JPL. "The cruise phase of the mission is always difficult, so you take all the small wins when they come. Finally seeing the planet is definitely a big win for the team."µ
Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study
Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study
By Marlowe HOOD Paris (AFP)
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported Monday.
In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal such as a sponge, they reported in the journal Nature Geosciences.
"We discovered that brines" -- water with high concentrations of salt -- "on Mars can contain enough oxygen for microbes to breathe," said lead author Vlada Stamenkovic, a theoretical physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
"This fully revolutionises our understanding of the potential for life on Mars, today and in the past," he told AFP.
Up to now, it had been assumed that the trace amounts of oxygen on Mars were insufficient to sustain even microbial life.
"We never thought that oxygen could play a role for life on Mars due to its rarity in the atmosphere, about 0.14 percent," Stamenkovic said.
By comparison, the life-giving gas makes up 21 percent of the air we breathe.
On Earth, aerobic -- that is, oxygen breathing -- life forms evolved together with photosynthesis, which converts CO2 into O2. The gas played a critical role in the emergence of complex life, notable after the so-called Great Oxygenation Event some 2.35 billion years ago.
But our planet also harbours microbes -- at the bottom of the ocean, in boiling hotsprings -- that subsist in environments deprived of oxygen.
"That's why -- whenever we thought of life on Mars -- we studied the potential for anaerobic life," Stamenkovic.
- Life on Mars? -
The new study began with the discovery by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover of manganese oxides, which are chemical compounds that can only be produced with a lot of oxygen.
Curiosity, along with Mars orbiters, also established the presence of brine deposits, with notable variations in the elements they contained.
A high salt content allows for water to remain liquid -- a necessary condition for oxygen to be dissolved -- at much lower temperatures, making brines a happy place for microbes.
Depending on the region, season and time of day, temperatures on the Red Planet can vary between minus 195 and 20 degrees Celsius (minus 319 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit).
The researchers devised a first model to describe how oxygen dissolves in salty water at temperatures below freezing.
A second model estimated climate changes on Mars over the last 20 million years, and over the next 10 million years.
Taken together, the calculations showed which regions on the Red Planet are most likely to produce brine-based oxygen, data that could help determine the placement of future probes.
"Oxygen concentrations [on Mars] are orders of magnitude" -- several hundred times -- "greater than needed by aerobic, or oxygen-breathing -- microbes," the study concluded.
"Our results do not imply that there is life on Mars," Stamenkovic cautioned. "But they show that the Martian habitability is affected by the potential of dissolved oxygen."µµ
An 'octomite', or a speculative alien produced by natural selection.
Courtesy Helen Cooper/Cambridge University
What would convince you that aliens existed? The question came up recently at a conference on astrobiology, held at Stanford University in California. Several ideas were tossed around – unusual gases in a planet’s atmosphere, strange heat gradients on its surface. But none felt persuasive. Finally, one scientist offered the solution: a photograph. There was some laughter and a murmur of approval from the audience of researchers: yes, a photo of an alien would be convincing evidence, the holy grail of proof that we’re not alone.
But why would a picture be so convincing? What is it that we’d see that would tell us we weren’t just looking at another pile of rocks? An alien on a planet orbiting a distant star would be wildly exotic, perhaps unimaginably so. What, then, would give it away as life? The answer is relevant to our search for extraterrestrials, and what we might expect to find.
Astrobiology – the study of life on other planets – has grown from a fringe sub-discipline of biology, chemistry and astronomy to a leading interdisciplinary field, attracting researchers from top institutions across the globe, and large sums of money from both NASA and private funders. But what exactly is it that astrobiologists are looking for? How will we know when it’s time to pop the Champagne?
One thing that sets life apart from nonlife is its apparent design. Living things, from the simplest bacteria to the great redwoods, have vast numbers of intricate parts working together to make the organism function. Think of your hands, heart, spleen, mitochondria, cilia, neurons, toenails – all collaborating in synchrony to help you navigate, eat, think and survive. The most beautiful natural rock formations lack even a tiny fraction of the myriad parts of a single bacterial cell that coordinate to help it divide and reproduce.
And living things, unlike dirt and wind, appear to be trying to do things – eat, grow, survive, reproduce. If you’ve ever tried to squish a resilient bug, you know that it doesn’t require a complex mind for an organism to appear to want to survive. Or for a squirrel to ‘want’ to jump from one branch to the next. Or for a plant to ‘try’ to reach towards the Sun and soak up nutrients from the soil. Not only do living things have many intricate parts, but all of those parts have the same, common purpose – survival and reproduction. This combination of complex design and apparent purpose, also known as adaptedness, defines life. When we look at that photo of an alien, it’s exactly this adaptedness that would make us go: ‘Aha!’ We would see, clearly, the difference between a disappointing pile of rocks and an exciting alien – design. This is good news, because there’s only one way to get such design: natural selection.
Scene from a desert planet: a panoramic view of the Payson outcrop near the Opportunity rover’s landing site. With its ocean long gone, Mars may yet have liquid reservoirs underground, and spacecraft have seen signs of surface flows. Life, if it ever existed, most likely followed the water.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Cornell)
Natural selection occurs whenever you have a collection of things (cells, replicators, birds, an imaginary species we’ll call ‘Glipgloops’) that have three properties: variation, heredity and differential success. For example, some of the Glipgloops we posited have longer eyestalks than others (variation). Long-eyestalked Glipgloops have long-eyestalked babies (inheritance of the variation). And Glipgloops with long eyestalks can see out of their methane holes better and therefore have more babies (differential success linked to that variation). The result is that, over time, Glipgloops evolve to have elongated eyestalks.
This is the process by which the apparent design in nature is generated: in every generation, at every instant, individuals with traits linked to better reproduction are being ‘selected’. As a result, over time, populations consist of individuals who appear designed for the purpose of reproducing. It’s exactly because the selection criterion is always the same that design can develop. Imagine a car that was constructed using a different blueprint at every step – well, you likely wouldn’t end up with a car. It’s natural selection’s unwavering mantra – the contribution of genes to future generations – that allows for design to appear without a designer.
In fact, the selection criterion is so consistent, that an organism cannot be designed for anything other than contributing genes to future generations. This is why we don’t get organisms who sacrifice for the good of their species. In general, organisms are selfish – reproducing yourself at the expense of others is a great way to pass on genes. We do sometimes see sacrifice and cooperation in nature – but only when the benefits of cooperation come back to you, or the sacrifice benefits relatives. Relatives share genes, so a bee can sacrifice for the queen (its mother), if it means she’ll produce 100 more sisters, each carrying half the bee’s genes. The calculus of which traits lead to more genes, and exactly when and how much to sacrifice, is precise and rigid. This is why evolutionary biologists can make mathematical models that correctly predict how many helpers a bird should allow at her nest, and how often wasps should cannibalise their siblings. But this algorithmic rigidity of natural selection also comes in handy for the astrobiologist.
Curiosity’s study of a formation called Whale Rock revealed evidence of flowing water, one of the main clues scientists look for to assess whether a site was once habitable.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Athread should be revealing itself: life is special because of its apparent design. The only way to get design without a designer is natural selection. Therefore, aliens must be the product of natural selection. And natural selection follows certain rules, and can produce only certain kinds of organisms. Thus, astrobiologists can use the theory of natural selection, and the mathematics of evolution, to make predictions about aliens.
Are there exceptions? We can’t get complex life, even something as simple as a bacterium, without natural selection. Even a postorganic, computer-based alien would ultimately be the product of a product of natural selection. But let’s consider a borderline case. Imagine a collection of replicating molecules, like tiny naked genes, on an alien planet. If these replicators made copies of themselves (inheritance), but replicated perfectly every time (no variation or differential success), you wouldn’t get natural selection.
Would this be life? Maybe, but it wouldn’t be very exciting. For one, without variation, the molecules can never change, or become more adapted, or evolve into anything more interesting or complex. Finding bacteria or bears on a distant planet would suggest that the universe might be teeming with life of all shapes and sizes. These replicators wouldn’t suggest anything. Even more problematic, their existence would likely be fleeting – without natural selection, they wouldn’t be able to cope with changes on their planet, and so would disappear before we found them.
The argument from natural selection is robust, even at the boundaries. This frees us up to use the same evolutionary tools we use on Earth to make predictions about life elsewhere.
Previous work in astrobiology has extrapolated from what’s happened on Earth, potentially limiting our vision to certain special features, such as DNA or carbon-based life, that won’t hold on other planets. Natural selection, on the other hand, is universal. It doesn’t depend on DNA (remember, Charles Darwin knew nothing of genes) or carbon chemistry or the presence of water. It’s incredibly simple – it just requires a few ingredients – and it’s the only way to generate life.
A mental image of that prized photo, showing entities apparently designed to fit their surroundings, is beginning to form. We can’t say whether the grainy picture of the alien will have eyes, or limbs, or be green. That’s not the kind of prediction good evolutionary theory can make. But natural selection tells us that its forms, goals and evolutionary pathways are constrained.
One example posed by our team in the sketch above is what we playfully call ‘the octomite’ – a conglomerate of once-separate entities now working together to survive, reproduce and evolve. How would we recognise an alien? It would include a hierarchy of entities, with the interests of each lower level aligned with components in levels above. The photo we envision would show division of labour, with various parts specialising in various tasks in a mutually dependent way.
This work of incorporating evolutionary theory into our astrobiological toolkit is only just beginning. What else can Darwin tell us about aliens? Presumably quite a lot. The photo, if and when it comes, will be something entirely exotic to the naked eye. But to the student of evolutionary biology, it might look surprisingly familiar.
More evidence of water on Mars: Close-up views show features like those left on Earth after water evaporates.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
In 1996, even closer microscopic views inside a Martian meteorite led to claims of fossil life—which today are mostly discounted.
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Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua's Surprise Arrival Still Thrills Scientists One Year Later
Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua's Surprise Arrival Still Thrills Scientists One Year Later
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
Artist's illustration of 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar asteroid.
Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO
A year ago, astronomers spotted a strange object barreling through our solar system on a very weird path — the first discovery of an interstellar object, now called 'Oumuamua, which means "messenger from afar" in Hawaiian.
During the abrupt flyby, scientists made frantic observations of the object before it passed out of range of even the most-powerful telescopes. Ever since then, 'Oumuamua has provided scientists a seemingly endless supply of questions, with most answers still very much up in the air.
Astronomers got their first glimpse of 'Oumuamua on Oct. 19, 2017, through the Pan-STARRS1 telescope based in Hawaii, which is fine-tuned to catch temporary phenomena like passing comets. Right away, scientists knew this wasn't your average comet; its path was way too strange. They'd caught sight of the object on its way out of our solar system, so scientists are still trying to figure out where its journey began. ['Oumuamua: The Solar System's 1st Interstellar Visitor Explained in Photos]
'Oumuamua has also endured a bit of an identity crisis during its first year in the scientific literature. At first, astronomers thought it was a comet. Then, they realized there was no cloud of gas and dust enveloping the object, so they reclassified it as an asteroid. But that proved problematic when they realized it was moving faster than an asteroid ought to be, as if getting a little boost of speed from volatile materials evaporating off its surface, like those that form a comet's surrounding cloud.
Another puzzle is the object's strange shape: long and thin, something like six times longer than it is wide. That's unlike most cosmic objects, which are generally lumps. It's also spinning strangely, tumbling end over end like a stick tossed for a cosmic dog. Some of the hypotheses to explain that elongated shape are that 'Oumuamua had a messy run-in with an asteroid or that the incredible gravitational pull of a giant planet stretched the object.
Because they can't gather any more data about 'Oumuamua, scientists have turned their attention to spotting another such interstellar visitor, hoping to find one sooner rather than later. (Researchers have said the objects should be pretty common, and scientists had in fact been waiting for a flyby like 'Oumuamua's for decades.)
But regardless of the mysteries scientists may never be able to solve with the observations they did gather in time, one thing about 'Oumuamua is nearly certain: It's not an alien spaceship broadcasting back to its creators. Yes, they checked.
Salty Martian Water Could Have Enough Oxygen to Support Life
Salty Martian Water Could Have Enough Oxygen to Support Life
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Pockets of salty water just beneath the Martian surface may contain enough oxygen to support life — in some places, even complex multicellular life such as sponges, a new study suggests.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Salty water buried just beneath the Martian surface could have enough dissolved oxygen to support microbes, and perhaps even simple animal life such as sponges in some places, a new study suggests.
This surprising conclusion could help reshape scientists' understanding of the Red Planet's habitability, both past and present, study team members said.
"We live in exciting times," said lead author Vlada Stamenković, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Especially as there is so much more work still needed to better understand the Martian habitability, I hope this creates excitement in the [scientific] community, in the world, to think of Mars as a potential place for life to exist maybe even today." [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]
Water underground
Water flowed liberally across Mars' red dirt in the ancient past, as observations by spacecraft such as NASA's Viking orbiters, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity rovers have shown. Indeed, many scientists think the Red Planet even featured oceans billions of years ago.
This surface water disappeared long ago, after Mars lost most of its atmosphere and transitioned to the cold, dry world that we know today. But researchers believe that some wet stuff probably persists underground to this day — in deeply buried aquifers as well as in salty brine pockets, some of which may lie just below the surface.
For example, some scientists think the seasonal Martian dark streaks known as recurring slope lineae are caused by the escape of such brines, which can remain liquid at much lower temperatures than "pure" water because of their salt content.
The dark streaks on some Martian slopes known as recurring slope lineae — imaged here by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — may be caused by salty liquid water, some scientists think. The Red Planet could have pockets of oxygen-rich brines just below its surface.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
Stamenković and his colleagues modeled the oxygen-harboring potential of near-surface brine reservoirs, calculating how much dissolved O2 they could contain at various locales around the Martian globe.
This an interesting astrobiological question. Life as we know it doesn't necessarily need oxygen; the earliest Earth organisms were anaerobic, after all, as is a huge chunk of the planet's modern microbial diversity. But oxygen is such a rich energy source that its availability makes possible many interesting evolutionary pathways, such as the rise of complex plant and animal life. (Nearly all known multicellular species here on Earth breathe oxygen in some fashion.)
The researchers found that Martian brines could hold a lot of oxygen — enough to support aerobic microbial life pretty much everywhere, if the requirements of these hypothetical Mars bugs mirror those of Earth. And the models showed that dissolved-oxygen capacity varies greatly both over time and from place to place, because it depends on temperature and, to a lesser extent, pressure. (The temporal variation is tied to shifts in Mars' obliquity — the tilt of its axis of rotation.)
Colder temperatures promote greater oxygen entry into brines. So, especially frigid pockets near the Martian poles could potentially be oxygen-rich enough to support complex multicellular organisms such as sponges, the researchers determined. Such "aerobic oases" may be common today above 67.5 degrees north latitude and below 72.5 degrees south latitude. [Photos: The Search for Water on Mars]
Astrobiologists therefore shouldn't turn their noses up at extremely cold environments just because relatively warm ones tend to be better for life as we know it here on Earth, Stamenković said.
"Each environment has its own pros and cons," he told Space.com.
Spurring the search
There is some observational evidence to back up the new modeling results, study team members said. For example, the Curiosity rover has spotted manganese oxides during its exploration of Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater.
It takes a lot of dissolved oxygen to produce these minerals, Stamenković said. Here on Earth, he added, manganese oxides formed only after O2 began persisting in the atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago — a milestone known as the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE).
"Our model says that [manganese oxide formation] is possible to occur on Mars, because of the briny environment and the low temperatures," Stamenković said.
The GOE was tied to the rise of oxygenic photosynthesis, which produces virtually all of the oxygen in Earth's air today. There's only a small amount of abiotically produced oxygen in Mars' air, but that doesn't mean that none of the stuff can make it into buried brines. For instance, in addition to the trace atmospheric oxygen, radiation emitted by radioactive elements in Martian rocks could split water molecules into their constituent hydrogen and oxygen, Stamenković said.
Indeed, radiolysis and/or other processes may have been important players for nearly all of the Red Planet's history, raising the possibility that Mars life — if it ever arose — has had access to energy-rich oxygen for billions of years. And the same may be true on other worlds with chilly habitable environments, such as the buried-ocean moons Europa and Enceladus (which orbit Jupiter and Saturn, respectively), Stamenković said.
"There are so many abiotic ways of creating small but sufficient amounts of oxygen which then, at the colder temperatures, can be absorbed effectively, and could actually maybe trigger evolution in a different way than we got on the Earth," he said. "This is all hypothetical, but worth exploring."
Both NASA and the European Space Agency (in partnership with Russia) aim to launch life-hunting rovers toward Mars in 2020. But both of those robots will be hunting for signs of past life. The last, and so far only, spacecraft to look for present-day Red Planet organisms on the Martian surface were NASA's twin Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers, which touched down in 1976.
Stamenković would like for that to change, and he said he hopes the new study — which was published online today (Oct. 22) in the journal Nature Geoscience — provides a little momentum in that direction.
"There is still so much about the Martian habitability that we do not understand, and it's long overdue to send another mission that tackles the question of subsurface water and potential extant life on Mars, and looks for these signals," he said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There," will be published on Nov. 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.
In its current form, Mars isn’t the best place to host life — but some of its subsurface oases may be pretty welcoming, a new study reports.
Credits: NASA.
In order to sustain life, a planet (or any celestial body) must fulfill quite a lot of conditions. You need sufficient gravitational pull, an atmosphere with a specific chemical makeup, a Goldilocks temperature — and that’s just the start of it. All in all, the stars need to align just right to provide the necessary conditions for life to evolve.
Mars definitely fulfills some of those requirements. It’s a rocky planet, lies at a reasonable distance from its star, and shows signs of hosting water. Its atmosphere, however, isn’t conducive to life as we know it. Aside from being very thin (just 6% the density of Earth’s atmosphere on average), it comprises 96% carbon dioxide and only contains traces of free oxygen. Due to the scarcity of oxygen, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration, researchers write in a new study.
However, there are some places where Mars could, in fact, host life: underground. But the story isn’t that straight-forward.
Here on Earth, oxygen and life go hand in hand. Photosynthesis evolved at least 2.3 billion years ago, and aerobic (or oxygen-breathing) life evolved with it. We haven’t seen any sign of that on Mars, however. Furthermore, life requires liquid water — and with an average surface temperature of -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 Celsius), liquid water is a scarce commodity on the red planet. There’s no clear evidence that liquid water exists (or could exist) on Mars’ surface, but there are some hints that liquid water could exist underground, in the form of brine (very salty water).
Water mixed with salt freezes at lower temperatures than freshwater. While pure water will freeze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 Celsius), salty water will still be liquid at that temperature. But salt also reduces the amount of oxygen that water can store, while low temperatures increase the amount of oxygen. So salt, temperature, and oxygen are trapped in a constant push and tow.
To study this dance, Vlada Stamenković and colleagues calculated how much molecular oxygen could be dissolved in subsurface Martian liquid brines. They found that molecular oxygen concentrations are particularly high in the polar regions, and remarkably, some of them could even contain enough oxygen to support aerobic life.
These findings also fit with surface observations, particularly oxidized rocks observed by rovers exploring Mars’ surface.
“That’s the thing of habitability; we never thought that environment could have that much oxygen,” saysStamenković, a planetary scientist and physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
This completely changes our understanding of the potential for life on current-day Mars, he adds. Of course, it doesn’t mean that there is life on Mars — but the fact that could be is already pretty exciting.
The study has been published in Nature Geoscience.
NASADe rechthoekige ijsplaat: een geheime militaire basis, of een gril van Moeder Natuur?
MILIEUWetenschappers van NASA hebben op de zuidpool een opmerkelijk fenomeen gespot. Tussen een chaotische wirwar van drijvend ijs, zagen ze plots een perfect rechthoekige ijsberg drijven. Een geheime militaire basis, of een gril van Moeder Natuur?
De natuur is vaak rommelig, onregelmatig en asymmetrisch. Rechte vormen en hoeken van 90 graden zijn eerder zeldzaam. Toch is deze plateauvormige ijsberg volkomen natuurlijk. De foto werd gemaakt tijdens NASA’s IceBridge-project. Daarbij worden de poolgebieden jaarlijks vanuit de lucht gefotografeerd en in kaart gebracht om te zien hoe de gigantische ijsplaten en het zee-ijs zich door de jaren heen ontwikkelen.
Dat de ijsplaat zo mooi afgelijnd is, komt niet omdat iemand het ijs heeft zitten snoeien. “Wellicht is ze nog maar recent afgebroken van een groter geheel”, vertelt Kelly Brunt van de universiteit van Maryland. “Onder invloed van de wind en de zee zal het strakke lijnenspel van deze plaat snel minder scherpe vormen aannemen.” De grootte van de plaat is niet gemeten en is alleen op basis van een foto moeilijk in te schatten, maar Brunt vermoedt dat ze minstens 1,6 kilometer breed is.
If it looks like a volcanic eruption and acts like a volcanic eruption, is it a volcanic eruption … even if it’s on Mars, which hasn’t had an eruption at this particular volcano in at least 50 million years and hasn’t had a lava flow anywhere in at least 2 million years? That question is currently being hotly debated by astronomers and conspiracy theorists after many people looking at recent pictures from the European Space Agency’s Mars webcam on board its Mars Express orbiter spotted what looks like a volcanic plume over Arsia Mons, a volcano on the Tharsis bulge near the Martian equator. Is it a volcano or is it something else? Is it being covered up or is it something else?
Let’s start by saying that no one questions that something DID happen on Mars over the Arsia Mons volcano and it WAS photographed by the webcam on the ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. The pictures being referenced appear to be from 9-5-2018 to 10-20-2018. Further investigation by Forbes found that NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey mission also picked up clouds over Arsia Mons in September 2018. Those photos didn’t cause the same controversy in the conspiracy community since the looked more like fog than a volcanic plume.
Photo of plume
(ESA)
Speaking of the conspiracy community, multiplesites picked up the photographs, called it a volcanic eruption and speculated it was being covered up with their evidence being the recent shutdown of the solar observatory in New Mexico, shutdowns of other observatories and the conspiracy theorists’ inherent distrust of NASA. Those shutdowns have been explained (the one in New Mexico was due to a criminal investigation and possible threats) and one wonders why a ‘solar’ observatory would be shut down over a Martian eruption. The answer is point three – they don’t trust NASA.
For those who do trust NASA, at least occasionally, it sent Tanya Harrison, Director of Research for Arizona State University’s Space Technology and Science Initiative and a Science Team Collaborator on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity, to Twitter to explain the plume.
“It’s not a plume of smoke, but rather water ice clouds condensing out over the summit of the Arsia Mons volcano. We see them quite often over this particular volcano.”
She also showed another view of the Arsia Mons from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in October showing ice clouds and explained further:
“We see these clouds hang out over the summit of Arsia for weeks at a time during this time of year, every year. It’s a combination of its high elevation and the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere at this time of year causing the clouds to form.”
Another view of Arsia Mons couds
(NASA)
A report about the plume in Forbes agrees with Harrison, referencing similar plumes in 2015 and a 2005 study in the Journal of Geophysical Research about “persistent water ice clouds on the flanks of Arsia Mons Volcano.” Jacob Richardson, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, gives the accepted volcanic history of Arsia Mons in a 2017 study:
“We estimate that the peak activity for the volcanic field at the summit of Arsia Mons probably occurred approximately 150 million years ago—the late Jurassic period on Earth—and then died out around the same time as Earth’s dinosaurs. It’s possible, though, that the last volcanic vent or two might have been active in the past 50 million years, which is very recent in geological terms.”
And yet … the distrust of all things NASA leads to the current questioning of all things Arsia Mons. Perhaps the real question we should be asking is this: if this truly is the first recorded volcanic eruption on Mars in 50 million years, wouldn’t NASA and the ESA be shouting just as loudly … not to mention fighting over whose discovery it was?
One of the strangest cases in my files comes from a woman who, back in the 1990s, had a series of experiences that left her seriously ill, and which took her several months to fully recover from. Alison, of Texas was seventeen when, in late 1998, she began to feel ill. The first symptom was a rapid loss of weight: around ten pounds in less than a month – which is definitely not a good thing. Given her age at the time, it’s perhaps not unreasonable that Alison’s mother tactfully asked if all was okay with her. When her mother brought up the issue of her weight loss, Alison became noticeably defensive, but denied that she had anorexia or bulimia.
Nothing more was said: Alison continued to have a healthy appetite, despite continuing to steadily lose weight. It was around ten days later, however, that Alison’s mother became deeply worried: early on a Sunday morning Alison screamed for her mother, who quickly came running to her bedroom. To her horror, she saw Alison laying on the bed, her face deathly pale. When her mother tried to help Alison to sit upright, Alison’s eyes rolled into her head and she fainted. Luckily, the pair lived only a few minutes’ from the local hospital and so Alison’s mother got her into the car and raced to the emergency room. In no time, she was being examined.
As Alison – who regained consciousness in the car, but who felt weak and dizzy – rested, a doctor asked her mother about Alison’s general health. She explained that Alison had lost a lot of weight in the last few weeks. Maybe not surprisingly, the doctor too asked questions about anorexia and bulimia. When Alison recovered, the pair left the hospital, with the doctor suggesting to Alison’s mother that she keep a very close eye on her daughter, and – if she had any more fainting spells – to take her to their regular doctor. They were wise words: Alison fell sick on three more occasions, and as her weight began to plummet: a final total of approximately twenty pounds in around six weeks. She was admitted to hospital and watched very carefully.
Tests showed that, physically, Alison was exhibiting all the physical signs associated with early anorexia. But, there was always someone with her when she ate her meals in her hospital room – and at home, too. In fact, she was eating eagerly. On top of that, Alison’s mother sat with her for hours after eating each meal – on the suggestion of one of the doctors, to make sure she didn’t make herself ill, bulimia-style, by vomiting up her meals. Further tests were run but no answers were to be found. At least, not by conventional medicine.
At the height of her illness, when Alison even started to take on a jaundiced look, she confided in her mother that there was something she had not told her – or the doctors. Alison’s mother feared, initially, that her daughter was going to say she had been using and abusing hard drugs. But, no. Alison said that four or five days before she began losing weight, she woke in the dead of night to see a pale-faced woman, attired in a long and black, hooded robe, standing next to the bed. The woman was very tall – around six-foot-three or –four. Her skin was white, and her eyes were staring and bulging. Alison found herself unable to move as the woman closed in on her, looming over the bed as Alison struggled to move. The woman gave a loud, satisfying groan at the very same time that Alison suddenly felt ill and cold. The woman retreated into the darkness of the bedroom and vanished.
Alison put the whole thing to a bad dream – and told her mother that she didn’t think any more about it. That is, until the pale hag returned the next night, and the next night, and…well, you get the picture. Alison’s mother listened, in fear and dread, as her daughter told her how, every night for weeks, the woman appeared in the bedroom. And, all the time, Alison was getting sicker and thinner. Alison even claimed to have seen the woman in her hospital room – as if, said Alison, the Woman in Black knew where she was at all times. Alison confided one other thing in her mother: four or five nights before the woman first appeared, Alison and two of her friends had been playing with an old Ouija-board. Alison’s mother was more terrified than she was angry – after all, she only wanted to get her daughter well, not pass judgment when she was severely ill.
As luck, or fate, would have it, Alison’s mother had a friend, Jennifer, who worked in the field of alternative medicine and who also had deep knowledge of the world of the supernatural. Jennifer agreed to perform a cleansing of not just the family home, but also of Alison herself. Since the pale, supernatural woman only ever appeared at night, Jennifer said it would be a good idea for her to sit in the bedroom while Alison slept – to ensure that if the woman did appear she would be ready to deal with her.
Jennifer arrived the following evening, armed to the teeth with just about everything she needed to ensure that the evil entity in the home would be banished for good. Jennifer’s weapons included sea salt – which is said to have the ability to prevent supernatural creatures from crossing certain thresholds, including doorways to rooms. So, Jennifer scattered more than liberal amounts of sea salt at the front- and back-doors of the home, in front of Alison’s bedroom, and across the window-sill in her room. That was followed by the use of sage. Traditionally, and for centuries, sage has been seen as both a powerful protector and a cleanser. So, Jennifer did what she does best: she performed a lengthy cleansing program that went on for several hours, and ensuring that the smoke reached all corners of the home. Then, it was a case of watching and waiting.
Alison’s mother stayed in the living-room, at the suggestion of Jennifer – who sat by Alison’s bed, ready for just about anything. The black-garbed woman did not put in an appearance, but there were two inexplicable things that did happen that night: Alison’s bedroom was briefly filled with an odor like rotting meat, and, for a few moments, rapid scratching noises were heard on the walls of the bedroom. Alison and Jennifer held hands tightly, and prayed that the hideous thing would leave – and leave now. By all accounts, the rituals worked. The eerie woman was never seen again and over the course of five or six weeks Alison’s health returned to normal. Today, and now in her late thirties, Alison is convinced that whatever the woman was, she was feeding on her, something which led to the weight loss and anorexia-like side-effects and symptoms. To this day, Alison keeps both sea salt and sage in her home – which, today, is in Arizona.
If you’ve seen the movie “Titanic,” you know that icebergs are not ice cubes. Apparently, Netflix isn’t available in Antarctica because a plane operated by NASA to scan the ice photographed a berg that looks more like a tombstone or a sheet cake or a frozen Christmas present … in other words, it’s nothing like a chunk of the Larsen C ice shelf it broke off of. Is it real or are the scientists stationed in Antarctica killing time with picks, chainsaws and tape measures?
The iceberg suspected of sinking the Titanic
“What makes this one a bit unusual is that it looks almost like a square.”
In an interview with LiveScience, Kelly Brunt, an ice scientist with NASA and at the University of Maryland, described the block of ice spotted by a plane belonging to NASA’s Operation IceBridge fleet – a project whose purpose is to measure annual changes in the thickness of Antarctica’s ice and glaciers in order to predict future break-offs and meltings caused by climate change. The planes give a closer and quicker look at these occurrences than the IceSat satellites. Should we be worried that the ice is suddenly breaking off in such neat and precise rectangular cuboid bergs?
“We get two types of icebergs: We get the type that everyone can envision in their head that sank the Titanic, and they look like prisms or triangles at the surface and you know they have a crazy subsurface. And then you have what are called ‘tabular icebergs.'”
Despite the predictable Internet panic when NASA posted photos on its NASA ICE #IceBridge Twitter feed, Kelly assures the masses that this mass is rare but normal. For the non-scientists (much appreciated, Kelly), she likens the cuboid iceberg calving process to a long fingernail that cracks off with a clean, straight edge on at least three sides. Also like a fingernail, the tabular iceberg is much wider than it is thick. This one is a mile across and, while it probably looks like a fun place for Antarctic scientists to blow off frozen steam playing mobile hockey, she warns that it’s unstable and moving away from the Larsen C ice shelf into the Weddell Sea.
Drawing of a NASA IceBridge plane
(NASA)
That explanation sounds believable despite the dubious comments on various websites that it’s was actually caused by aliens, secret experiments or bored scientists. Whatever the case, let’s hope funding continues for cryospheric (ice-related) research projects like NASA ICE and Operation IceBridge. It may not be disaster movie-worthy but it’s critical to predicting how many of us will be underwater in a few years.
Last week, I was on Dave Schrader’s Darkness Radio show. Although the show was on alien abductions, we also touched on the matter of the Black Eyed Children. Dave asked me about some of the stranger and creepier BEC accounts I have in my files – which amount to quite a few. We discussed several such cases, but there’s one which I didn’t touch on, and that is one of the weirdest of all.. It’s the account of a man named Martin, who lives just outside of Tecumseh, Oklahoma. Martin’s encounter with a pair of Black Eyed Children went down in March 2011. Fortunately, I was able to interview Martin personally just a few weeks after his experience. Martin was at home alone when he had just about the worst encounter was possible.
In terms of Martin’s encounter, it occurred two days after he returned home. As a truck-driver, he had been on the road for two weeks and was looking forward to a few days of relaxation and fun. He got neither. On his first night back, Martin planned on watching a bunch of shows he had recorded while he was away on the road. The evening began in completely normal fashion: he made himself a big sandwich, cracked open a cold beer and watched his shows. Normality was about to go out of the window. Around 8:30 p.m., there was that knock on the door, the kind of which so many witnesses to the BEC have now experienced, but surely wished they hadn’t. Martin didn’t even bother looking through the spy-hole: he assumed it was his immediate neighbor, Rex, who would take in any packages from the likes of UPS, Amazon and FedEx that might have been left on Martin’s doorstep while he was away. Sadly for Martin, as he opened the door, he instantly realized it was not Rex.
Martin got the shock of his life when he was confronted by a boy and a girl – both around eleven or twelve years of age and with large, black, eerie-looking eyes. The girl was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved black top, while the boy had the almost-ubiquitous black hoodie. Both looked sickly and scrawny and is if they needed a hearty meal in them. Little did Martin know that this was exactly what they were there for. Hardly a fan of the supernatural, Martin had never heard of the BEC phenomenon and could only stand and stare at their curious faces, assuming at first that this was some kind of joke. But, the Black-Eyed Children were certainly not laughing. They stood together, hand in hand, looking at Martin with expressions on their faces that were, paradoxically, lacking in emotion but which also gave off airs of highly charged malevolence.
Echoing Brian Bethel’s encounter back in the 1990s (which largely began the BEC phenomenon and debate) , Martin said that when the girl said they were homeless and needed something to eat, it all seemed very much like a ruse – as if they had spoken the words time and time again. It was like a carefully-crafted scheme on their part. Most disturbing of all, for a few moments Martin felt transfixed – almost hypnotized – by those large, black eyes. Indeed, he told me that he could not understand why he did not quickly shut the door at the sight of those terrible eyes. Martin could only say that it was if he was somehow being prevented from shutting the door on the pair. One might be justified in saying Martin had been placed in a state of full-blown mind-control.
The girl repeated: “We need to eat. May we come in?” Martin said that he recalls her words accurately, and he felt that the girl’s use of the term “may we?” (instead of “can we?”) sounded like “how people talked way back.” There is one missing portion from Martin’s story: he cannot recall how the pair got into his house. He recalls inviting them in – “it felt like I said it in a dream” – but, the next thing he remembers is seeing the pair standing in front of him, while he was sat on his living-room couch. The girl said just one word: “eat.”
At that point, Martin suddenly felt deathly ill. It was, he said, as if he “hadn’t eaten in days.” He explained that it was as if he himself was suddenly starving, but it was the children who needed to eat. The pair stared intently at Martin, who found himself getting weaker and weaker. And weaker still. “Crashing” might be a more ideal term to use: Martin found himself barely able to move. Not because he was being prevented from moving, but because physically-speaking he simply did not have the energy to even stand up. It was, Martin said, as if he was himself being eaten alive by the paranormal pair of ghoulish things in his midst.
After a few minutes, both the girl and the boy turned and left, still holding hands. Martin finally managed to crawl to his bedroom, where he lapsed into a deep sleep. He did not wake until well into the following afternoon. For the next three four or days, the overwhelming weakness – made worse by bouts of dizziness and a bad taste in his mouth – kept him in his bed. It was almost a week later before he finally felt fully back to normal. While Martin has no idea as to what the BEC were or are, he believes they were not human and, somehow, had drained him of energy.
UFO Probe Seen Flying Over Wild Pigs In Texas On Animal Cam, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Probe Seen Flying Over Wild Pigs In Texas On Animal Cam, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 1-1-2011, but reported today. Location of sighting: Texas, USA Source: Mufon #95803 Animal cams are awesome at catching fast glimpses into nature, but the fact that they also record in infrared makes it even more special, because the human eye cannot see in infrared without the technology. Here a donut shaped UFO is flying over a pig and the UFO clearly is round with a large hole inside of it. That donut shape does not fit any insect, bat, bird or animal known to man. Therefore it is a UFO. Small UFO probes often are used to come closer to the ground so that the chances of being seen are much smaller. Also they are sent to observe, record and learn about life on Earth...all life, not just us boring humans. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Lights seen over deer feeder shot beams down to the ground at some javelinas feeding.
The strange craft was seen moving over thew sky of Mexico City, and several people captured the sight on video.
As the UFO moves through the air, a few hundred metres off the ground, it emanates a blurry field which is commonly reported from alien enthusiasts.
Many believe this latest sighting is strong evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth and, had the camera quality been better, it “would be definitive proof of the existence of aliens”.
The video was originally captured by a YouTube user known as Carlos Sanchez, but was quickly picked up by conspiracy theorists around the internet.
Prominent UFO hunter Scott C Waring who believes it is a genuine sighting of an alien spaceship.
Mr Waring writes for his blog UFO Sightings Daily: “This dark craft came right out into the open and was seen when a worker came outside for his break.
“The UFO tilted some as it moved, which is what many UFOs do in order to control their direction.
“Just sad he had such a bad camera. Looks like he is using an old phone to record it.
UFO seen in clear daylight over Mexico is PROOF of aliens - shock claim
(Image: GETTY • YOUTUBE)
“Had it been an iPhone 7-8 this video would be definitive proof of the existence of aliens.
“I also notice that there is a blurry field around it, just as thousands of UFO reports also describe.”
Mexico is a hotspot for UFO sightings.
Earlier this year, a video showing a smoking crater next to a motorway lead to speculation it could be a UFO crash site.
The strange craft was seen moving over thew sky of Mexico City
(Image: YOUTUBE)
The huge 26 feet across burning pit was filmed by shocked onlookers as a thick mist rose into the air by the Torreón to Saltillo highway in the state of Coahuila in north east Mexico.
The pit was said to be as deep as it was wide and, according to reports, no evidence has been found as to what caused it.
Online theories have ranged from a crashed spaceship or a meteor falling to Earth.
One YouTube poster said: "Looks like a UFO landed and took off before anyone could see, leaving a crater.”
HERE’S WHAT EXPERTS THINK OF STEPHEN HAWKING’S POSTHUMOUS PREDICTIONS ABOUT AI, GENE HACKING, AND RELIGION
HERE’S WHAT EXPERTS THINK OF STEPHEN HAWKING’S POSTHUMOUS PREDICTIONS ABOUT AI, GENE HACKING, AND RELIGION
Hawking Claims
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away earlier this year, but his final book, “Brief Answers to the Big Questions,” only came out this week.
In it, Hawking makes a number of bold claims about the future of gene editing, artificial intelligence, and even religion. Here’s how experts evaluate his predictions.
Superhuman Overlords
Hawking raised eyebrows when he claimed that powerful people will hack their genes to become smarter, stronger, and longer-lived. Eventually, he writes in his new book, the rest of us will “die out, or become unimportant.”
Many geneticists already see this as inevitable. Some fear that people will use CRISPR to edit their genes before the technology is deemed safe, so they advocate new laws to protect non-augmented humans.
“We’re probably going to need new international oversight structures, so that we don’t realize these dystopian ‘Brave New World’ examples,” said George Daley, the dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, at the International Summit on Human Genome Editing in 2015.
Killer AI
During his lifetime, Hawking was vocal about his fear of powerful AI. He reiterates his reservations in this book, writing that ignoring the threat of super-powerful AI could be humanity’s “worst mistake ever.” It could destroy us with weapons “we cannot even understand,” he wrote.
But others play it down. “[There’s] no reason right now to be worried about self-conscious AI algorithms that set their own goals and go crazy,” Stanford machine learning lecturer Richard Socher told Fortune. And a poll of AI researchers found that most believe it will take at least 25 years to create an AI superintelligence — so at least we have a little time to prepare.
No Gods, No Masters
Hawking also came out swinging at religion in the book. “Belief in the afterlife is just wishful thinking,” he writes, adding that there’s “no possibility” of God.
Many scientists certainly agree with Hawking on this claim, though not all. A 2015 survey found that many researchers around the world are religious, but in most countries, scientists are by and large less religious than non-scientists.
The Next Battleground: What Do We Really Know About What Adversaries Do in Space?
The Next Battleground: What Do We Really Know About What Adversaries Do in Space?
By Sandra Erwin, SpaceNews Staff Writer
This article was first published in the SN Military.Space newsletter. If you would like to get our news and insights for national security space professionals every Tuesday, sign up here for your free subscription.
As the Pentagon moves to stand up a U.S. Space Command and Congress debates whether it makes sense to create a Space Force, a central focus is to defend satellites from orbital weapons that would seek to damage or destroy U.S. assets in space.
Washington policymakers are gripped by the prospect of enemies shooting missiles or lasers at U.S. systems. But that is only a small piece of the puzzle, says Jeffrey Gossel, senior intelligence engineer at the Space and Missile Analysis Group of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. [Trump's Space Force Plan Revealed by VP Mike Pence]
More attention should be paid to the larger space infrastructure that Russia and China are putting on orbit, Gossel argues. Many space systems are not weapons but still provide powerful capabilities for watching what the United States is doing and developing strategies to counter U.S. advantages.
"[A]s we think about space as a warfighting domain, it's not those weapons that are as important as what our enemies have on orbit," Gossel says during a recent Mitchell Institute event on Capitol Hill. His office is part of the intelligence community but supports the Defense Department. He anticipates that the future U.S. Space Command will be his largest customer.
"The sexy thing in Washington for years has been those offensive capabilities that our adversaries are building." Jeffrey Gossel, Space and Missile Analysis Group
His point is that if a military conflict extended into outer space, it's imperative the United States knows in precise detail the type of satellites and sensors that other countries have on orbit because those would be potential targets for the U.S. military.
'Know Everything About the Satellite'
The weapons "aren't the things that we are going to have to shoot down," Gossel says. "When we start to do military operations in space, the intelligence community has to spend more time looking at what enemies have on orbit in a forensic way, to understand everything about that satellite — the materials, the power source, every intricate little detail of the spacecraft, we need to know." [The Most Dangerous Space Weapons Concepts Ever]
"If we wanted to put a cyber effect, shoot a laser, you only want to cause a specific effect and you don't want anyone to know you did it, you need to know a lot about that satellite and sensors. From an intelligence perspective we have to concentrate more on those things, not on the guns they're shooting."
The U.S. government also should have a deeper understanding of what intelligence foreign powers are getting from space that they provide their military operators, such as signals intelligence, optical and radar imagery, Gossel says. "That's what's important. We want to keep them from having that data."
Gossel cautions that he was only speaking generically about space threats as the specifics are classified.
'What Can They See and Hear?'
"The order of battle for space is greatly increasing, it has tremendously increased over the last decade," he explains. Order of battle is military-speak for how many weapons platforms adversaries have at their disposal. What this means in space is that enemies might have co-orbital weapons to destroy satellites but of greater concern is their deployment of satellites that collect intelligence.
"We need to know what they can see and what they can hear," Gossel asserts.
Space was militarized decades ago but it wasn't until China tested a weapon that shot down its own satellite in 2007 that Gossel saw any reaction in D.C. That event began the conversation about the national security ramifications of other countries moving to challenge the United States is space. The Pentagon since then has increased spending on space systems and technologies to defend U.S. satellites. But Washington's focus on the use of weapons in space misses the larger picture. "We need to shift our thinking to what our adversaries have on orbit. Understanding that might be what we should spend our money on."
This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
Rocket Lab selects Wallops Flight Facility for US launch site
Rocket Lab selects Wallops Flight Facility for US launch site
by Staff Writers Wallops Island VA (SPX)
File image of Rocket Lab's current launch facility in New Zealand.
US orbital launch provider Rocket Lab has today confirmed it will build its first US launch pad for the Electron rocket at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, USA. The site will be Rocket Lab's second dedicated launch complex and builds on Rocket Lab's existing ability to launch up to 120 times annually from the world's only private launch site, Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1, in New Zealand.
Launch Complex 2 will be capable of supporting monthly orbital launches and is designed to serve US government and commercial missions. The site brings Rocket Lab's global launch availability across two launch complexes to more than 130 missions per year. The option to select from two launch sites adds an extra layer of flexibility for small satellite customers, offering an unmatched ability to rapidly deploy space-based assets with confidence and precision from a preferred location.
"Accessing space should be simple, seamless and tailored to our customers' missions - from idea to orbit. Launching from a second pad builds on Rocket Lab's ability to offer the small satellite industry unmatched schedule and launch location flexibility," said Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck.
"Having proven the Electron vehicle with a successful orbital launch this year, we're thrilled to expand on our ability to provide rapid, reliable and affordable access to orbit for small satellites.
"We've worked closely with the experienced and welcoming teams from Virginia Space and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops to design a pad and processes that will enable an agile and streamlined approach to small satellite launch on US soil," he added.
Rocket Lab will work with Virginia Space to construct dedicated pad infrastructure at the site, tailored to the Electron launch vehicle. In addition to the pad, Rocket Lab will develop a Launch Vehicle Integration and Assembly Facility in the Wallops Research Park to support the simultaneous integration of up to four Electron vehicles.
The facility will also contain a control room with connectivity to LC-2, as well as dedicated customer facilities. This new facility, combined with the purpose-built gantry located at LC-2, will provide significant and dedicated vehicle processing capability and flexibility to meet Rocket Lab's high launch cadence.
Through construction and day-to-day operations, Rocket Lab expects to create around 30 jobs immediately to directly support Launch Complex 2, with this number predicted to increase to approximately 100 as launch frequency increases. The development of Launch Complex 2 will also see Rocket Lab continue to expand Electron rocket production at the company's headquarters in Huntington Beach, California, to supply complete launch vehicles for government and commercial customers.
"We are honored to be Rocket Lab's selection for Launch Complex 2," stated Dale Nash, CEO and Executive Director of Virginia Space. "There is an incredible synergy between Virginia Space and Rocket Lab and we are proud to support their missions launching from U.S. soil. We'd like to thank Rocket Lab for their confidence in our team. Virginia Space and MARS employees are standing ready to do everything we can to ensure successful, safe and timely launch missions for Rocket Lab just as we do for every customer of the Spaceport."
Bill Wrobel, director of NASA Wallops, said, "Wallops has more than 70 years of experience successfully supporting missions using suborbital as well as small and medium-class orbital launch vehicles. We look forward, along with our partner Virginia Space and its Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, to supporting Rocket Lab's Electron missions and expanding commercial launch operations from Wallops."
Four spaceports were shortlisted to become Rocket Lab Launch Complex 2, including Cape Canaveral, Wallops Flight Facility, Pacific Spaceport Complex - Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base. Wallops Flight Facility made the final cut thanks to high flight frequency available from the site, as well as rapid construction timelines that will see Rocket Lab target the first Electron launch from US soil Q3 2019.
Rocket Lab continues to assess additional launch sites in the US and internationally to provide additional launch flexibility for small satellite customers. The company also maintains agreements with Cape Canaveral in Florida and Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska to conduct launches from existing pads as required.
It started with a long-ago conversation with astronomer Carl Sagan, which awoke an abiding interest in UFOs and the possibility of extraterrestrial life in Robert Zemeckis. That led in part to 1997’s “Contact,” which Zemeckis helmed, and, now, “Project Blue Book,” which he’s executive producing for A+E Studios.
The show bears more than a passing resemblance to “The X-Files,” from the tagline (“Over 12,000 UFO sightings. 1 government cover-up”) to the menacing presence of a shadowy figure in a hat and coat. Based on a real-life government operation called Project Blue Book, the series centers on the investigation by the U.S. Air Force into UFO sightings in the 1950s and ’60s. It stars Aidan Gillen as J. Allen Hynek, an astrophysics professor recruited to help with the investigation, and Michael Malarkey as the Air Force captain assigned to debunk the stories.
The first of 10 hourlong episodes of “Project Blue Book,” which bows this winter, was screened for press and other guests Tuesday at Mipcom.
The drama’s period detail is evident in the ’50s interiors and cars, a Flash Gordon comic book, a reference to the not-so-long-ago panic caused by Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds.” Inevitably, however, those involved insist on the show’s timeliness in today’s troubled, Trumpian, truth-challenged times.
“Project Blue Book was the original fake news,” said showrunner Sean Jablonski, calling it a government program created to discredit people’s sincere accounts of unexplained phenomena and to “give them alternative facts.”
“We didn’t just settle for case-of-the-week stories, but layered in the facts of a government cover-up that exposes the origin of fake news,” Zemeckis wrote in an e-mail read out at the screening. “Unfortunately, that feels as relevant today as it did back then.”
It’s clear that “Project Blue Book” is being shepherded by true believers, folks who have faith not just in the show but in the existence of life beyond Earth. Jablonski is in no doubt of that, recounting a solo trip he took to the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, in Peru, in the belief that aliens built it.
On stage with Jablonski in Cannes, Gillen (“The Wire”), Malarkey (The Vampire Diaries”) and Laura Mennell (“The Man in the High Castle”), who plays Hynek’s wife, Mimi, also professed themselves open to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. “I have no reason to be a non-believer,” Malarkey said, in a Q&A conducted by series executive producer Barry Jossen, the head of A+E Studios.
“When you look at what we know about our vast universe, it’s impossible not to hope for the existence of worlds (and life) beyond our own,” Zemeckis wrote in his e-mail.
The cast also includes Ksenia Solo (“Orphan Black”) as a woman who befriends Mimi Hynek and is quickly revealed to be not all she seems, and Neal McDonough (“Minority Report”) and Michael Harney (“Orange Is the New Black”) as a pair of cabalistic air force generals. Whether little green men appear in “Blue Book” remains to be seen. The show was created and written by David O’Leary.
“The series is based in fact,” Jablonski said. “When you scratch the surface, the conspiracy and truth of what actually happened give you a lot of story to tell.”
Renewed US interest could produce some fascinating hearings, but the focus should be on the quality not just the quantity of reported sightings
The terms UFO and ‘flying saucer’ are both wrongly, regarded as being synonymous with ‘extraterrestrial spacecraft’. Photograph: Jim West/Rex/Shutterstock
There’s renewed interest in the UFO phenomenon and it’s coming from an unexpected source: the United States Congress.
The Senate Armed Services Committee is looking into a 2004 incident where US Navy pilots flying with the USS Nimitz strike group encountered, chased and filmed fast-moving unidentified objects. Reliable sources say at least two of the military pilots involved have already been interviewed, and a radar operator was subsequently invited to get in touch.
In parallel, the House Armed Services Committee is taking an interest. Records from April show the committee received a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) briefing on the Pentagon’s UFO project, the cryptically-named AATIP. We know so little about AATIP that there’s even dispute over whether the acronym stands for Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program or Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program. The very existence of the project caused a sensation, because until the New York Times broke the story in December 2017, the US government claimed it had not investigated UFOs since the 1960s when sightings were looked at in a study called Project Blue Book.
As noted in the Guardian recently, data from two civilian UFO research organisations show that the number of reported sightings has fallen in recent years. However, there’s no single, global focal point for reports (the Ministry of Defence stopped investigating UFOs in 2009) and statistics will never tell the full story.
It would be better if the phenomenon were assessed and judged not on numbers alone, but by focusing on cases where we have compelling evidence: independently submitted reports from pilots on different flights; visual sightings corroborated by radar; photos and videos regarded as genuinely intriguing by intelligence community imagery analysts. Irrespective of the methodology we use to assess the phenomenon, how can we do so in an even-handed way when the subject has so much pop culture baggage?
A first step in reframing the debate might be changing the language. The term “UFO” has become as obsolete and baggage-laden as the now largely-defunct “flying saucer”. Both are widely, but wrongly, regarded as being synonymous with “extraterrestrial spacecraft”, when self-evidently all the phrase should mean is something in the sky that the observer cannot identify. When the question “do you believe in UFOs?” is misinterpreted as “do you think we’re being visited by aliens?” then we clearly have a problem.
We addressed this in the MoD in the 1990s by replacing “UFO” with “UAP”, for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It got us increased funding and made a few senior officials take the matter more seriously, because they felt we were looking at a science problem, not a science fiction mystery.
Years later, in 2011, I was one of the briefers at a private gathering in Washington DC, chaired by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta, who has a longstanding interest in the issue. It was reminiscent of an episode of The X-Files and there was even a former CIA director sitting at the back, playing no part in the discussion, but silently taking notes. I briefed attendees on the MoD’s use of the term “UAP” and the message clearly hit home.
During Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for which Podesta was the campaign chair, she occasionally discussed UAPs and in one interview on the Jimmy Kimmel show she corrected the host for using the term “UFO”. We have yet to learn what Donald Trump thinks about UAPs, but his enthusiasm for a Space Force has certainly created a few conspiracy theories.
When it comes to UAPs, truth really is stranger than fiction. It turns out that AATIP was largely the brainchild of the then Senate majority leader Harry Reid, and that much of the work was contracted out to Bigelow Aerospace, run by former budget hotel magnate (and believer in extraterrestrial visitation) Robert Bigelow. A 2009 letter from Harry Reid about AATIP reads like science fiction in places.
Now, some of the people formerly involved with the project – including the DIA official who ran it, Luis Elizondo – have joined a Public Benefit Corporation called To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, fronted by Tom DeLonge, the former vocalist/guitarist and founder of pop punk band Blink-182. Their mission statement talks about creating a consortium “to explore exotic science and technologies … that can change the world”.
If current US Congressional interest evolves into formal hearings, either specifically on AATIP, or on UAPs more generally, I hope they can get past debates about terminology, and avoid getting bogged down in statistical analyses. I have made clear my willingness to testify on the basis that my experience with the MoD might be relevant.
Focusing on the quality of reports and not simply the quantity should result in a far more meaningful assessment of the phenomenon. Irrespective of the outcome, these might turn out to be the most fascinating Congressional hearings in history.
•Nick Pope worked at the Ministry of Defence for 21 years. From 1991 to 1994 he was posted to a division where his duties included investigating UAP sightings to determine whether they had any defence significance.
Why We Might Miss Extraterrestrial Life Even If It's Staring Us in the Face
Why We Might Miss Extraterrestrial Life Even If It's Staring Us in the Face
By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor
See anything unusual in this aerial image?
Credit: Modified photo of an original NASA picture
What do you get when you combine a classic psychology experiment with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
A gorilla on Mars.
OK, that one's not going to kill on the comedy circuit. Here's what's going on: Researchers from the University of Cádiz in Spain found that most people who were asked to look for signs of human-made structures on alien terrain completely missed a little, waving gorilla figure inserted into one of the images.
"We think [of] ETI as another form of humans, but much more advanced," study leader Gabriel G. De la Torre, a neuropsychologist at the University of Cádiz, told Live Science in an email. "We try to understand the world as [if] it was done to fit our beliefs, framework and senses. [In] reality, [it] could be much more different."
The limits of imagination
The limits of human imagination do likely constrain the search for extraterrestrial life, said Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, which uses radio and optical observations to hunt for brainy extraterrestrials. But that observation is "not exactly a call to action," he said.
Inside the Occator crater of the dwarf planet Ceres appears a strange structure that looks like a square inside a triangle.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
"I do get emails that say, 'Oh, well, you guys are just not being broad-minded enough," Shostak said. "That's a pretty easy thing to say, but it doesn't advance the search much."
In the new paper, De la Torre and his co-author, Manuel Garcia at the University of Cádiz, argued that extraterrestrials may not communicate using radio or light waves — the main mediums humans are using to search for signals from "little green men." Aliens might instead communicate through dark matter, the researchers wrote. That's the mysterious form of matter that should exist in order to provide enough gravitational force to keep galaxies from flying part, but which is not directly observable, because it doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum. Aliens might even be dark matter, the researchers wrote. [7 Huge Misconceptions about Aliens]
In that sense, humans might be so focused on searching for aliens using the kind of technology familiar to us that we miss the communications all around us, the researchers wrote. To demonstrate human inattention, the researchers conducted an experiment inspired by a famous psychology protocol from 1999. In the original experiment, researchers asked participants to do a task (say, counting the number of passes in a pickup basketball game) while watching a scene in which the investigators had inserted something truly ridiculous (say, a guy in a gorilla suit strolling right through the middle of the game). The researchers found that hardly anyone noticed the gorilla.
The cosmic gorilla
To update these findings for the SETI age, the researchers asked 137 participants to scan aerial photos of interplanetary imagery and search for structures that appeared unnatural, built by humans (or aliens). In one image, the researchers inserted a small photo of a person in a gorilla suit waving.
Only 45 out of 137, or 32.8 percent, of the participants noticed the gorilla. The researchers also asked the participants to take some surveys to reveal whether they had a more intuitive cognitive style or a more analytical cognitive style. It might seem that the intuitive types would be less likely to scan the scene carefully, thus missing the gorilla, but that was the opposite of what the researchers found.
"Those with a more intuitive cognitive style detected the gorilla more compared with the more rational/analytical style," De la Torre said. It might be that the rational types were more focused on the task at hand, making them blind to unexpected phenomena like the gorilla.
Thus, De la Torre said, the current search for E.T. may be limited by humanity's preconceived notions.
Shostak agreed to some extent. If you'd been able to ask a trilobite 500 million years ago who it expected to run the Earth in another few hundred million years, it might have dreamed up a "really souped-up trilobite," Shostak said. The organism probably wouldn't have foreseen a couple of mass extinctions and the upheaval of all forms of life on Earth. Humans likely face that same sort of problem in imagining life on other planets, Shostak said.
On the other hand, Shostak said, SETI researchers have given the matter some thought. There are arguments, he said, that humans are actually a pretty good example of what an intelligent life-form might need to get by — opposable thumbs, stereovision — and thus looking for aliens who look like us isn't a bad strategy. There are also arguments that the most likely type of extraterrestrial intelligence won't be biological at all, but will be artificially intelligent machines created by biological, but less bright, creators, Shostak said.
The idea of dark matter as an alien being seems less likely, he said, given that intelligence requires some level of complexity. Dark matter is currently hypothesized to consist of some undescribed theoretical particle, possibly WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. A bunch of particles "isn't going to give you anything that's organized enough to get you intelligence," Shostak said.
For De la Torre, the lesson of the "cosmic gorilla" is that SETI researchers need to consult with psychologists and neuroscientists.
"Currently, all psychological work in this area has been majorly dedicated to look[ing] into the impact of contact [with aliens] in our society," he said, but psychology has more to offer. "If we want to find other intelligences, multidisciplinary work is needed, and psychologists are the experts for intelligence matters."
Extraterrestrial life may use purple pigments to harvest energy.
Credit: iStock/Getty Images Plus
Alien life might be purple.
That's the conclusion of a new research paper that suggests that the first life on Earth might have had a lavender hue. In the International Journal of Astrobiology, microbiologist Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and postdoctoral researcher Edward Schwieterman at the University of California, Riverside, argue that before green plants started harnessing the power of the sun for energy, tiny purple organisms figured out a way to do the same.
Alien life could be thriving in the same way, DasSarma said.
"Astronomers have discovered thousands of new extrasolar planets recently and are developing the capacity to see surface biosignatures" in the light reflected from these planets, he told Live Science. There are already ways to detect green life from space, he said, but scientists might need to start looking for purple, too. [7 Wild Theories on the Origin of Life]
Purple Earth
The idea that the early Earth was purple is not new, DasSarma and his colleagues advanced the theory in 2007. The thinking goes like this: Plants and photosynthesizing algae use chlorophyll to absorb energy from the sun, but they don't absorb green light. That's odd, because green light is energy-rich. Perhaps, DasSarma and his colleagues reasoned, something else was already using that part of the spectrum when chlorophyll photosynthesizers evolved.
That "something else" would be simple organisms that captured solar energy with a molecule called retinal. Retinal pigments absorb green light best. They're not as efficient as chlorophylls in capturing solar energy, but they are simpler, the researchers wrote in their new paper published Oct. 11.
Retinal light-harvesting is still widespread today among bacteria and the single-celled organisms called Archaea. These purple organisms have been discovered everywhere from the oceans to the Antarctic Dry Valley to the surfaces of leaves, Schwieterman told Live Science. Retinal pigments are also found in the visual system of more complex animals. The appearance of the pigments across many living organisms hints that they may have evolved very early on, in ancestors common to many branches of the tree of life, the researchers wrote. There is even some evidence that modern purple-pigmented salt-loving organisms called halophiles might be related to some of the earliest life on Earth, which thrived around methane vents in the ocean, Schwieterman said.
Purple aliens
Regardless of whether the first life on Earth was purple, it's clear that lavender life suits some organisms just fine, Schwieterman and DasSarma argue in their new paper. That means that alien life could be using the same strategy. And if alien life is using retinal pigments to capture energy, astrobiologists will find them only by looking for particular light signatures, they wrote.
Chlorophyll, Schwieterman said, absorbs mostly red and blue light. But the spectrum reflected from a plant-covered planet displays what astrobiologists call a "vegetation red edge." This "red edge" is a sudden change in the reflection of light at the near-infrared part of the spectrum, where plants suddenly stop absorbing red wavelengths and start reflecting them away.
Retinal-based photosynthesizers, on the other hand, have a "green edge," Schwieterman said. They absorb light up to the green portion of the spectrum, and then start reflecting longer wavelengths away.
Astrobiologists have long been intrigued by the possibility of detecting extraterrestrial life by detecting the "red edge," Schwieterman said, but they may need to consider searching for the "green edge," too.
"If these organisms were present in sufficient densities on an exoplanet, those reflection properties would be imprinted on that planet's reflected light spectrum," he said.
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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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