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
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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 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...
25-04-2019
Bright UFO caught on tape over Holtwood, Pennsylvania 21-Apr-2019
Bright UFO caught on tape over Holtwood, Pennsylvania 21-Apr-2019
This bright unidentified flying object was caught on tape over Holtwood, Pennsylvania on 21st April 2019.
Witness report:
Glowing orb that ascended very quickly, changed direction and shape from a glowing pulsating orb, to a dark grey reflective triangle. My boyfriend and I were having a small bonfire and were sitting facing south toward the river and noticed a strange fast moving red/orange orb coming up the horizon behind the trees, we got out our cell phone and recorded this orb and as it flew overhead. It pulsated a red, orange glow. it changed direction from south to west and seemed to change shape as it flew into the clouds. It also seemed to turn off its lights and then it was a dark grey black triangle that reflected the clouds and was semi-transparent. We recorded this, but its hard to see where it flew into the clouds.
US Government Insider Reveals Pentagon Has A Warehouse For Mysterious Metal Possibly From Crashed UFOs
US Government Insider Reveals Pentagon Has A Warehouse For Mysterious Metal Possibly From Crashed UFOs
A former military intelligence official has made a shocking claim regarding mysterious materials possibly from crashed alien spacecraft. Luis Elizondo said the American government has stored “metamaterials” perhaps from extraterrestrial spaceships in a specially modified warehouse in Las Vegas. Elizondo, who was a former head of the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) of the US Defense Intelligence Agency claimed that aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow run the warehouse, which is under armed guard and secured with concrete and barbed wire.
Luis Elizondo explained that the “metamaterials” are composites which don’t occur naturally. He said that we don’t have the technical capacity to reproduce such materials with precision.
Elizondo headed the American government investigation into UFOs that shut down in 2012. The Pentagon had spent multi-million dollars for the UFO investigation. The secret project amassed information on other aircraft which seemed to move extremely fast without having any visible form of propulsion.
Elizondo said that other craft appeared to hover without rotor blades. A video of an encounter between an oval-shaped object without exhaust, wings or tail and an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet was later released to illustrate such sightings investigated by the AATIP. Most of the investigations were contracted out to Bigelow Aerospace, whose founder once told in a TV interview that he believes aliens are real and that UFOs have visited Earth.
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE Water molecules in the moon’s vicinity suggest that a thin layer of water is buried in the moon’s soil. In this image taken from the International Space Station, the blue glow is from Earth’s atmosphere.
NASA
Meteor showers bring moon geysers. A lunar orbiter spotted extra water around the moon when the moon passed through streams of cosmic dust that can cause meteor showers on Earth.
The water was probably released from lunar soil by tiny meteorite impacts, planetary scientist Mehdi Benna of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues report April 15 in in Nature Geoscience. Those random impacts suggest water is buried all over the moon, rather than isolated in freezing dark craters — and that the moon has been wet for billions of years.
Samples of lunar soil brought back by the Apollo astronauts suggested that the moon is bone dry. But in the last decade or so, several remote missions have found water deposits on the moon, including signs of frozen surface water in regions of permanent shadow near the poles (SN: 10/24/09, p. 10).
“We knew there was water in the soil,” Benna says. What scientists didn’t know was how widespread that water was, or how long it had been there.
Benna and colleagues used observations from NASA’s LADEE spacecraft, which collected data from lunar orbit from November 2013 to April 2014 (SN Online: 4/18/14). LADEE’s spectrometers detected dozens of sharp increases in the abundance of water molecules in the moon’s exosphere, the tenuous atmosphere of gas molecules that clings to the moon. Twenty-nine of those measurements coincided with known streams of space dust.
When Earth passes through those streams, the dust burns up in the atmosphere, producing annual meteor showers like the Leonids and the Geminids. But because the moon has no true atmosphere, bits of dust from the same showers strike the moon’s surface directly, stirring up what lies beneath.
Benna and colleagues calculated that only meteorites heavier than about 0.15 grams could have released the water. That means the top eight centimeters or so of lunar soil are indeed dry — smaller impacts would have released water if any was there. Beneath that dry coating is a global layer of hydrated soil, with water ice clinging to dust grains.
But the moon is by no means soggy. Squeezing half a ton of lunar soil would yield barely a small bottle of water, Benna says. “It’s not a lot of water by any measure, but it’s still water.” And it’s too much water to have arrived at the moon recently, he says. The moon may have held on to at least some of this water since the time of its formation (SN: 4/15/17, p. 18).
Future studies could help figure out whether and how that water could be useful for human explorers.
The finding is “plausible and certainly provocative,” says planetary scientist Erik Asphaug of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It’s the kind of paper that is good to see published so we can debate it.”
Editor's note: This story was updated April 19, 2019, to clarify that LADEE collected data from lunar orbit from November 2013 to April 2014.
CHEMICAL RELIC The elusive helium hydride ion, thought to be the first type of molecule to form in the universe, has been found in the planetary nebula NGC 7027 (shown in infrared light in this Hubble image).
WILLIAM B. LATTER/SIRTF SCIENCE CENTER/CALTECH, NASA, ESA
Helium hydride ions, thought to be the first type of molecule to form in the universe, have finally been spotted in space.
These charged molecules, each made of a neutral helium atom and a positively charged hydrogen atom, first emerged within about 100,000 years after the Big Bang. Back then, the universe was composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, and helium hydride was the only molecule that these two elements could create when they collided.
Although researchers have seen helium hydride ions in the lab, these molecules have never been definitively detected in space. The discovery of helium hydride in a nearby planetary nebula ends a decades-long search for these seminal molecules and helps confirm our understanding of chemistry in the infant universe, researchers report online April 17 in Nature.
During three flights in May 2016, the airborne Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy observed a planetary nebula about 3,000 light-years away called NGC 7027. This shell of stellar material was blown off a sunlike star when its core collapsed into a white dwarf about 600 years ago. In the light emitted by the hot, dense cloud of gas, researchers detected helium hydride’s signature wavelength of infrared radiation.
The helium hydride ions seen in NGC 7027 were created in the planetary nebula, rather than being leftover from the early universe. But their existence confirms that helium hydride ions can exist outside the lab, which means that theoretical simulations of the primordial cosmos aren’t in serious need of revision.
Adam Perry, who studied helium hydride while at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, likens the new find to unearthing a fossil that fills a missing link in animal evolution. “Everybody knew [helium hydride] had to be out there,” says Perry, who wasn’t involved in the study. But “where before there wasn't any hard evidence, now there is.… People who do astrochemistry are going to be very excited about this.”
Studying the helium hydride ions in NGC 7027 may offer new insights into the chemical reactions that form these ions, says study coauthor Rolf Güsten, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.
Güsten and colleagues also hope to use the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in northern Chile to scour the distant, early universe for helium hydride ions born soon after the Big Bang.
Lights from an Unidentified Flying Object Appears in the Skies of Beijing, China
Lights from an Unidentified Flying Object Appears in the Skies of Beijing, China
Paranormal researcher Scott C Waring uncovered footage of mysterious UFO lights that appeared in the skies over China. These bright lights, possibly from multiple unidentified flying objects, hovered in the night skies, and not only appeared in the skies of Beijing, but also in other regions of the country. “The lights caught the attention of most of Beijing, but it was seen by people that were 100 km away!
That means the UFOs went to many locations, not just over Beijing. The light is lumpy and contained. That means its not a spotlight from the ground. A spotlight would spread the light evenly in all areas and cannot make lumps like this in the clouds. The lights suddenly appear as a group of spots, and then spreads into a plurality of spots, and moves quickly, sometimes ring-shaped, and sometimes resembles a pattern, and sometimes becomes another irregular pattern,” said Waring. Read more for the video and additional information.
“Interestingly, the shape of the UFO that appeared in China seems very similar to the unidentified flying object that appeared a few months back in Baji California. The clip from Baji California was uploaded to YouTube by Tyler Glockner who runs the YouTube channel ‘Secureteam10’, and the conspiracy theorist revealed that eyewitnesses had live-streamed the UFO sighting on Instagram,” reports IB Times.
Scientists think aliens could be living in other universes
Scientists think aliens could be living in other universes
Alien life could exist in other universes, according to a group of scientists studying a mysterious force known as dark energy.
Previous theories suggested our universe has the perfect amount of dark energy, which acts against gravity and is making the cosmos expand at an accelerated rate.
It was understood that any more would create such rapid expansion that stars and planets wouldn’t have time to form.
The multiverse theory, first put forward in the 80s, said there was a “luckily small” amount of the force in our universe.
But researchers at Durham University claim these celestial bodies would still have formed even if a universe had 100 times the dark energy that ours does.
They used giant computer simulations to suggest that, if other universes exist, they may be just as likely to harbor life.
An artist’s rendition of a multiverse
Jaime Salcido/SWNS.com
“The formation of stars in a universe is a battle between the attraction of gravity and the repulsion of dark energy,” said Professor Richard Bower of Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology.
“We have found in our simulations that universes with much more dark energy than ours can happily form stars. So why such a paltry amount of dark energy in our universe?”
“I think we should be looking for a new law of physics to explain this strange property of our universe and the Multiverse theory does little to rescue physicists’ discomfort.”
Their findings are published in two related papers in the journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The density of gas after 13.8 billion years of evolution, featuring a universe with no dark energy, left, our universe, center, and a universe with 10 times more dark energy than our own
Jaime Salcido/SWNS.com
And their simulations were created using the EAGLE (Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environments) project – one of the most realistic programs mapping the observed Universe.
The dark energy conundrum has plagued scientists for years, said Jaime Salcido, a postgraduate student of Durham University.
He added: “Our simulations show that even if there was much more dark energy or even very little in the universe then it would only have a minimal effect on star and planet formation.”
The widely accepted eternal inflation theory claims our universe came into existence with a brief burst which saw the universe expand at a rapid pace.
Some suggested this meant that, in some regions, the universe is still expanding and will continue to grow infinitely.
In doing so, it creates multiverses: an endless supply of universes much like our own, populated with Earth-like planets, societies and even individuals that resemble us.
POCKMARKED PLANET This enhanced-color image of Mercury, using data gleaned from NASA’s MESSENGER mission, reveals mineralogical differences in the rocks that make up Mercury’s crust. The mission, which ended in 2015, continues to yield new finds, including that Mercury has a giant solid inner core.
CARNEGIE INST. OF WASHINGTON, JHU-APL, NASA
The smallest planet in our solar system has a massive solid inner core.
In its final trip around Mercury before crash-landing in 2015, NASA’s MESSENGER mission zoomed in close to the planet, enabling scientists to make detailed measurements of its gravity, spin and internal structure. Those data, researchers report April 10 in Geophysical Research Letters, suggest Mercury has a solid inner core about2,000 kilometers in diameter, making up about half of Mercury’s entire core.
Scientists already knew that Mercury’s core was huge, taking up about 85 percent of the planet (SN: 4/21/12, p. 8). In 2007, radar observations made from Earth detected small oscillations in Mercury’s spin rate that suggested the core was at least partially liquid (SN: 5/5/07). Then MESSENGER data revealed that the planet has a weak magnetic field generated by circulation of molten metal in that liquid core (SN Online: 5/7/15). But it wasn’t clear if Mercury, like Earth, also has a solid inner core.
To study the planet’s interior structure, MESSENGER measured Mercury’s distribution of mass by tracking tiny shifts in the spacecraft’s orbiting speed caused by subtle variations in gravitational pull. Using those data, scientists were able to estimate what sort of interior composition would best explain how Mercury spins.
Big heart
Measurements of gravity anomalies within Mercury suggest that the planet’s solid inner core makes up about half of the total core. The entire core is about 85 percent of the planet.
NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
Of the rocky planets, only Earth and Mercury still have magnetic fields generated by their cores. Such fields can shield planets from being battered by charged particles constantly streaming from the sun.
But Mercury’s core is cooling and solidifying faster than Earth’s. Earth’s solid inner core currently makes up only about a third of the total core. So observing how the innermost planet’s interior evolves, and how its magnetic field adjusts, may give a peek into the future of our own planet’s magnetic field, the researchers say.
Cassini data now reveal that some of Titan’s lakes are surprisingly deep.
Infrared view of seas and lakes in Titan’s northern hemisphere, taken by Cassini in 2014. Sunlight can be seen glinting off the southern part of Titan’s largest sea, Kraken Mare.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho.
Saturn’s largest moonTitanis the only world in our solar system besides Earth known to have bodies of liquid on its surface. Scientists announceddefinitive evidencefor them in 2007, based on data from NASA’sCassinispacecraft. The large ones are known as maria (seas) and the small ones as lacus (lakes). It’s now known that Titan’s hydrologic cycleis surprisingly similar to Earth’s, with one big exception: the liquid on Titan is liquid methane/ethaneinstead of water, due to the extreme cold. The moon’s northern hemisphere, in particular, has dozens of smaller lakes near its pole, and now scientists have found that they are surprisingly deep and sit on the tops of hills and mesas. These observations come from data collected during the last close flyby of Titan during the Cassini mission, which ended in 2017.
The new peer-reviewed findings were published on April 15, 2019, in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Scientists had thought that the lakes would be an almost equal mixture of methane and ethane, like the larger seas. This is the case with the one sizable lake in the southern hemisphere called Ontario Lacus. But to their surprise, they found that the lakes in the northern hemisphere are composed almost entirely of methane. As lead author Marco Mastrogiuseppe, a Cassini radar scientist at Caltech, explained:
Every time we make discoveries on Titan, Titan becomes more and more mysterious. But these new measurements help give an answer to a few key questions. We can actually now better understand the hydrology of Titan.
Map of Titan’s seas and lakes in the northern hemisphere.
Image via JPL-Caltech/NASA/ASI/USGS.
But while some questions may be answered, other new ones are also raised. Why the difference between the lakes in the northern and southern hemispheres? Also, the hydrology on one side of the northern hemisphere appears to be very different from that on the other side. Why? On the eastern side, you find larger seas with low elevation, canyons and islands. But the western side is dominated by the smaller lakes perched on top of hills and mesas. Some of those lakes are more than 300 feet (100 meters) deep, a surprise given their small sizes. As noted by Cassini scientist and co-author Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University:
It is as if you looked down on the Earth’s North Pole and could see that North America had completely different geologic setting for bodies of liquid than Asia does.
Cenote Sagrado (Sacred Cenote) near Chichen Itza, one of the best known karst lakes (or sinkhole) in Yucatán. Karst lakes are thought to be similar to the deep methane lakes on Titan.
The findings show how Titan’s alien yet earthly-ish landscape is even more unusual than first thought. They show very deep lakes sitting atop tall mesas or plateaus, suggesting that they formed when the surrounding bedrock of ice and solid organics chemically dissolved and collapsed. These Titan lakes are reminiscent of karst lakes on Earth, which form when subterranean caves collapse. In the earthly counterparts, however, water dissolves limestone, gypsum or dolomite rock.
This is a great example of how – much like the hydrologic cycle – geologic processes on Titan can also mimic those on Earth, yet be uniquely Titanian at the same time. In many ways, Titan looks a lot like Earth, but the underlying mechanisms, and composition of materials, are fundamentally different on this world in the much-colder outer solar system.
Cassini also observed another kind of lake on Titan. Radar and infrared data revealed transient lakes where the level of liquids varies significantly. These results have been published in a separate paper in Nature Astronomy. According to Shannon MacKenzie, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, those changes may be seasonal:
One possibility is that these transient features could have been shallower bodies of liquid that over the course of the season evaporated and infiltrated into the subsurface.
Images from Cassini showing new small lakes appearing in Arrakis Planitia between 2004 and 2005. Such lakes seem to be transient, where the liquids fill the lakes before evaporating or seeping into the ground again.
Image via NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
Taken together, the results about both the deep lakes and transient lakes support the scenario where methane/ethane rain feeds the lakes, which then evaporate back into the atmosphere or drain into the subsurface, leaving reservoirs of liquid below the surface. It is a complete hydrologic cycle, but, in the colder environment than on Earth, one where methane and ethane can be liquid and water is in the form of rock-hard ice.
The presence of lakes and seas on Titan brings up another question. Might there possibly be any form of life there? Some scientists think there indeed could be at least microscopic organisms, despite the harsh conditions in contrast to Earth, that use liquid methane/ethane in a similar way that life here uses water. Such life would have to be evolved to exist in conditions unlike any on Earth, but it’s an intriguing possibility.
Bottom line: Data on Titan’s lakes, collected by the Cassini spacecraft (whose mission ended in 2017), continue to reveal insights into a hydrologic cycle that’s remarkably similar to Earth’s in some ways – but distinctly alien in others. A new finding is that lakes near Titan’s north pole are surprisingly deep and sit on the tops of hills and mesas.
See the far side of the moon like never before: China releases stunning new images captured by its Yutu 2 rover as the mission hunkers down for another long lunar night
See the far side of the moon like never before:China releases stunning new images captured by its Yutu 2 rover as the mission hunkers down for another long lunar night
China's moon mission has exceeded expectations, releasing new lunar images
Yutu 2 and its lander are hibernating as the look to enter their fifth lunar day
The mission looks to analyze layers of the moon's mantle never seen before
China's Chang’e 4 lander and Yutu 2 rover have captured new images on their successful mission to explore the far side of the moon as the duo looks to extend their study to a fifth lunar day.
On the moon, the cycle of day and night is nearly 30 Earth-days in total, with each lasting about two weeks long.
The new images captured from the rover, Yutu 2 and released this month, offer up more of the mission's journey after a first round of pictures was released after their arrival on the 115-mile wide Von Kármán Crater in January.
Objectives of the lander and rover mission -- the first-ever to target exploration of the moon's far side -- include analyzing chemical differences between the Earth-facing side of the moon and the mission's target area.
Scroll down for video
China's Chang’e 4 mission has been a smashing success with its lander and rover greatly exceeding their expected lifespan. The new images captured from the rover, Yutu 2 and released this month, offer up more of the mission's journey
As reported by the Planetary Society, no hard science regarding the Chang’e 4's mission has emerged yet, but scientists involved with the project said the surveyed area shows 'potential evidence of excavated deep mafic material, which could reveal the mineralogy of the lunar mantle.'
The far side of the moon, which is the hemisphere that always faces away from Earth, has yet to be explored by any such missions before and like its Earth-visible counterpart, the location experiences intervals of two weeks of sunlight and two weeks of darkness.
According to a report by Space.com, Chang’e 4's mission has already greatly exceeded expectations.
The spacecraft were only initially designed to last about three lunar days in total.
Both the lander and rover are currently in hibernation mode, resting during a lunar night, but on April 28, when another two-week day dawns on the far side of the moon, both would be going on their fifth lunar day, given they're still fully intact.
With their ample data, scientists hope to reveal facts about our early solar system. The far side of the moon, which is the hemisphere that always faces away from Earth, has yet to be explored by any such missions before
The mission's rover, Yutu 2, has outpaced its predecessor traveling an extra 60 meters so far
Because of the daytime's brutal temperatures which soar to 390 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius), the rover is also required to take intermittent 'naps' -- brief periods of hibernation -- until it's able to move again.
Even despite the hazards and obstacles of exploring the far side of the moon, the Yutu 2 has managed to travel just under 180 meters during its one-month stay.
With what data scientists already have already collected and whatever bonus material the rover is able to glean on potential endeavors later this month, researchers plan to analyze and then publish results in about a month, according to the Planetary Society.
In addition to satisfying humans' curiosity regarding the far side of the moon, the mission will also help to illuminate scientists understanding about the makeup of our early solar system.
Craters studied by the rover were created by an ancient impact where layers of the moon's mantle are exposed, where they can be studied to determine its contents and more.
WHY DID CHINA CHOOSE TO LAND IN THE VON KARMAN CRATER?
Chang'e-4 landed in the Von Karman crater in the South Pole-Aitken basin.
This is an enormous crater which resides at the very most southern tip of the moon.
China opted to study the far side of the moon and has in the process beat all other nations to the landmark moment.
The basin is so far the largest known impact basin in the solar system.
China's space agency hopes that by exploring the huge divot on the surface of the moon they may be able to shed some light on its history and geology by collecting rocks that have never been seen before.
Researchers hope the huge depth of the crater will allow them to study the moon's mantle, the layer underneath the surface, of the moon.
The crater is believed to be composed of various chemical compounds, including thorium, iron oxide, and titanium dioxide.
It is also hoped that by judging this 8-mile deep scar on the surface of the moon the scientists could find clues to piece together the origin of the lunar mantle.
There is also another logistical reason for the choice of landing site, the crater is mostly flat in the south of the basin.
This increased the likelihood of a successful landing.
China quietly released a new set of images provided by its Chang’e 4 lunar exploration mission. The rover, which became the first mission to ever land on the far side of the moon, shows some features of the lunar surface in unprecedented detail.
Image credits: CLEP/CNSA.
China’s mission has already gone as well as you could hope for — if not better. It became the first mission to perform a soft landing on the dark side of the moon, it carried geophysical studies of its landing surface, and it successfully grew potatoes and a few other plants on the moon — marking another impressive first.
The Yutu 2 rover has now traveled a total of 178.9 meters (587.9 feet), which far exceeds the record by its predecessor, Yutu 1, during the Chang’e 3 mission, which managed to travel 114 meters. Durings its latest travels, the rover also snapped a few photographs which it beamed back to Earth, and some of those images have now been released by China’s National Space Administration (CNSA).
The lunar surface, as seen by the Yutu 2 rover.
Image: CLEP/CNSA.
The Von Kármán crater, close to where the rover landed, is believed to contain an intriguing mixture of chemical elements, including thorium, iron oxide, and titanium dioxide, which could provide important clues about the origin and evolution of the lunar surface. Researchers hope that the mission will help answer questions about the crater’s surface features and test whether plants could grow in lunar soil.
The mission is also observing low-frequency radio light coming from the Sun or beyond that’s impossible to detect on Earth because there is so much radio noise interfering with it.
Early tracks from Yutu-2 after its descent from the Chang’e-4 lander, visible in the top-left.
Image: CLEP/CNSA.
More recent tracks.
Image: CLEP/CNSA.
The rover is currently in hibernation mode until April 28. It has already survived for four lunar days and nights, or about 29.5 days on Earth. It’s still going strong, preparing for its fifth lunar night — despite being designed to last for three lunar nights only. Everything that happens now is just a bonus on this already excellent mission. The rover is also turning intermittent naps when it is facing the sun directly, as temperatures soar to 200 degrees Celsius.
Much of the scientific data gathered hasn’t been relayed back to Earth yet. It will take several more weeks before it is all sent back, and a bit more time to analyze it after that. In the meantime, we can all enjoy these crisp images.
Many countries have tried to develop miniaturised nuclear reactors for space flight applications, but Russia’s by far the closest.
Elon Muskwants to travel toMarsusing SpaceX’s planned monolithic rocket booster, the Big Falcon Rocket. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world inRussia, Vladimir Putin is planning on getting to the Red Plant with a nuclear powered spaceship that looks like something out of James Cameron’s Avatar.
The Russian state sponsored space agency, Roscosmos, unveiled plans to build a spacecraft that would be powered by an onboard nuclear reactor and fly using nuclear thermal engines. This proposed vessel has been touted with the ability to sustain a crew in space without the need of harnessing solar energy, which has often been posed as a possible solution for interstellar travel. Dan Kotlyar, an assistant professor of nuclear radiological engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology says that “nuclear powered engines could bring about a new era of solar system exploration.”
“Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) systems offer the greatest versatility for near-term deep space missions such as NASA’s planned Mars and near Earth asteroid missions,” he explains. “Due to their superior energy density, these systems have nearly twice the efficiency of the best chemical engines paired with comparable thrust levels.”
Based on the brief video, it appears that the proposed vessel would power its life-support systems using a nuclear reactor and also make use of nuclear engines.
Simply put, nuclear engines may simply be better than the traditional chemical engines used by SpaceX rockets. They use a nuclear reactor to heat up a propellant, like liquid hydrogen before blasting it through a nozzle, and space agencies have been working on using one for decades.
NASA’s Project Rover program started in 1955 and lasted until 1973, which led to the development of 20 different reactors. Most recently the American space agency has revived the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) with help from BWX Technologies in an attempt to cut down future travel times between Earth and Mars.
Russia is no stranger to this research either. Aside from Tuesday’s announcement by Roscosmos’ nuclear propulsion team, the former Soviet Union was found to have been testing an engine similar to NERVA up until right before it fell in 1991.
“Nuclear thermal propulsion systems have a long and prolific history of research and development,” said Kotlyar. “Despite the major advancements made in the Rover program, much work is yet to be done to create a working nuclear thermal rocket for NASA’s current planned Mars missions.”
Space is, as you may have heard, is a sub-optimal environment for the human body. It can kill us instantly if we don’t protect ourselves, and can also wear us down slowly, even if we’re safely aboard the International Space Station (ISS). To live in the great unknown we need a constant supply of electrical energy to maintain the devices that keep us alive up there.
Aside from regular resupply missions, the ISS has acres of solar panels that soak up the Sun’s beams to produce 84 to 120 kilowatts of electrical power, which it stores in batteries. Roscosmos wants to replace all of that with a nuclear reactor, which might be possible but could, obviously, be dangerous.
Meanwhile NASA has already developed miniature nuclear reactors, named KRUSTY, that it envisions powering its eventual space outposts. Each is capable of providing 10 kilowatts of power, enough to run several average households. So roughly ten of these small reactors could produce the same energy as the ISS’s massive solar panels. That’s great, but safety is still a concern.
While the process of creating nuclear energy on Earth has become mostly safe, cramming a crew onto a spaceship that’s powered by radioactive materials is obviously untested. That said, Roscosmos’ render presents an alternative vision for long distance space travel that is far more plausible than the Avatar like aesthetic would have you believe.
The U.S. Navy is working on new guidelines for its personnel to report sightings and other encounters with “unidentified aircraft,” Politico reports.
It sounds like a major step toward taking UFO encounters more seriously: the Navy’s new process would create formalized guidelines for sailors and pilots alike to report and analyze each one of the encounters.
The Truth Is Out There
No, this is definitely not the Navy confirming the existence of extraterrestrials, as Politico points out. It’s just giving the rank and file a chance to have their encounters examined by military authorities.
“There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,” the Navy said in a statement to Politico. “For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.”
A Second Look
Rather than ignoring and dumping the data collected during sightings of UFOs and other “unexplained aerial phenomena,” as Pentagon officials put it, the sightings would be investigated and studied by personnel — though exactly who gets to review the data is unclear.
In 2017, the New York Times reported on a $22 million program by the Pentagon called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that allegedly was devoted to the investigation of UFOs. Perhaps the Navy’s upcoming guidelines could simply be an outcome of that.
Scientists have created simple machines made of biomaterials with the properties of living things. These so-called “living machines” have the properties of living things despite being human-engineered machines.
As a genetic material, DNA is responsible for all known life. But DNA is also a polymer. Tapping into the unique nature of the molecule, Cornell engineers have created simple machines constructed of biomaterials with properties of living things.
“We are introducing a brand-new, lifelike material concept powered by its very own artificial metabolism.We are not making something that’s alive, but we are creating materials that are much more lifelike than have ever been seen before,” said Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Using DASH, the Cornell engineers created a biomaterial that can autonomously emerge from its nanoscale building blocks and arrange itself – first into polymers and eventually mesoscale shapes, reports news.cornell.edu.
RT America’s Trinity Chavez reports on the breakthrough.
24-04-2019 om 21:31
geschreven door peter
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
A Famous UFO Case? Or, a Military Test Gone Wrong?
A Famous UFO Case? Or, a Military Test Gone Wrong?
On October 5, 2015, here at Mysterious Universe, Micah Hankswrote an article titled“The Cash-Landrum Incident: Was a Nuclear Aircraft Involved?” Micah’s article began as follows: “Of all the best-known and often reviewed UFO cases of the last few decades, many would contend that one of the most puzzling had been the Cash-Landrum incident, which occurred near Dayton, Texas on 29 December, 1980. The story, well known in UFO circles, involved two women: Betty Cash and Vicky Landrum, as well as Vicky’s grandson Colby, all of whom purportedly observed an unusual, very bright source of illumination over a country road on the night in question. After seemingly hovering above the highway for several minutes, the strange object was surrounded by a group of helicopters in tight formation, and removed from the area, according to the witnesses.”
As Micah’s feature demonstrated, there are good reasons to suspect that the cause of the still-controversial affair was not due to the presence of a UFO – as many people conclude (or who may want to believe). Rather, the vehicle may have been a prototype nuclear-powered vehicle built and flown by the U.S. military. Micah’s article focuses on a lot of thought-provoking data, all of which points in that specific direction. There is a good reason I mention all of this today: another source claimed to have been given information that also supported this particular down-to-earth theory. That source was the late Tom Adams, who spent a lot of time from the 1970s onward investigating matters relative to black helicopters and cattle mutilations. Adams’ connection to the December 1980 incident is not that well known, which is why I have decided to highlight it for you today.
It was while he was digging deep into stories of those aforementioned mutilations and strange helicopters that Adams came across an intrigue-filled story. On one occasion, Adams had the opportunity to speak with a man that Adams referred to as “Tony.” Yes, and before anyone quickly brings the matter up, I fully realize that relying on sources who use aliases is hardly something that can be said to be preferable or ideal. Sometimes, though, that is just how it goes. And particularly so when it’s the source who is calling all of the shots. That was exactly the case when it came to the matter of Tom Adams, Tony, and the 1980 Cash-Landrum incident. Tony – a military helicopter pilot – had spent time working at Fort Hood, Texas, and as a result had come across certain data on the infamous story.
According to the account told to Tom Adams by Tony, it all went down late one night, in December 1980. It was a night which Tony couldn’t fail to forget, as it was just a couple of days after Christmas 1980. Tony and his colleagues were quickly ordered to take to the skies and head out to Huffman, Texas. All of the crews were told to keep a careful look-out for what was described by Tony as an “unusual aircraft.” Rather significantly, the helicopter crews were also told to get as close to the craft as they possibly could, but without causing a disaster in the process. Incredibly, at one point the pilots were told that, if it came to it and there was no alternative, they should try and force the aircraft to the ground, using the weight of the helicopters to push it down. Which, surely, would have been an incredibly precarious situation for the men to find themselves in.
Tony continued with his story and told Tom Adams that as they closed in on Huffman, they couldn’t fail to see the strange thing in the sky. Tony stated that it was “throwing off sparks like a 4th of July sparkler.” For around seven to ten miles they “shadowed” the object, after which an order came through to abort and head back to base, which, Tony added, is precisely what they all did. Only a few days later, Tony was given the full story of what happened that night – from a colleague at Fort Hood. The UFO was nothing of the sort. It was a prototype, nuclear-powered vehicle that had malfunctioned and which was in danger of crashing to the ground. Fortunately, the glitch was eventually rectified and the craft continued on its original course – hence the reason why the helicopter pilots were told to abort.
There may still be those out there who yearn for the craft to have been an alien spacecraft. But, what’s more likely: a UFO from a faraway galaxy or an advanced craft of the military that malfunctioned at just about the worst time possible? My money is on the second scenario.
U.S. Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs
The Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft — but it also does not want to dismiss strange aerial sightings by credible military personnel.
U.S. Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs
The service says it has also 'provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety.'
WETENSCHAPWetenschappers hebben ontdekt dat de planeet Mercurius een gigantische vaste kern heeft. Dat blijkt uit een analyse van data die een ruimtetuig van de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA verzamelde, vlak voor het in 2015 op de planeet neerstortte.
Mercurius is de kleinste planeet van ons zonnestelsel en hij bevindt zich het dichtste bij de zon. De temperatuur schommelt er tussen 426 graden overdag en -173 graden ’s nachts. Mercurius draait trager om zijn as dan de Aarde, waardoor een dag er 58 aardse dagen duurt.
Wetenschappers weten al lang dat Mercurius net als de Aarde een metalen kern heeft en dat het buitenste deel daarvan vloeibaar is. Dat verklaart het magnetisch veld van de planeet. Van het binnenste deel werd alleen maar vermoed dat het vast was. Een nieuwe studie die gepubliceerd werd in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift Geophysical Research Letters, werpt daar nu nieuw licht op. En komt ook met bewijsmateriaal.
Dat bewijsmateriaal werd verzameld door de MESSENGER-sonde van de NASA. Die werd in 2004 gelanceerd richting Mercurius en stuurde in 2008 de eerste beelden van de planeet door. In 2011 kwam de sonde in een baan om Mercurius en in 2015 stortte ze gecontroleerd neer op de planeet. (lees hieronder verder)
APEen van de beelden van Mercurius die MESSENGER doorstuurde.
Tijdens de laatste omwentelingen kwam het ruimtetuig heel dicht bij de planeet en dat liet wetenschappers toe om gedetailleerde metingen te doen op het vlak van zwaartekracht, rotatie en interne structuur. Die toonden aan dat Mercurius wel degelijk een vaste kern heeft en dat die maar liefst 2.000 kilometer in diameter meet. Wat goed is voor ongeveer de helft van de totale kern. Ter vergelijking: de vaste kern van de Aarde meet ongeveer 2.400 kilometer, maar omdat onze planeet groter is dan Mercurius, gaat het bij ons maar om een derde van de totale kern.
Zwaartekracht
De interne structuur van Mercurius werd uiteindelijk in kaart gebracht door het meten van de distributie van massa van de planeet. Die gebeurde door kleine veranderingen in de omwentelingssnelheid van het ruimtetuig te meten, die veroorzaakt werden door minieme wijzigingen in de zwaartekracht. Aan de hand van die gegevens, werd bepaald welke interne structuur het specifieke draaien van Mercurius het beste kon verklaren.
De totale kern van Mercurius is overigens gigantisch. Het vaste en vloeibare deel samen maken ongeveer 85 procent uit van de volledige planeet. De kern van Mercurius koelt echter veel sneller af dan die van de Aarde. Observeren hoe de binnenkant van de planeet evolueert en het magnetisch veld wijzigt, kan wetenschappers een beeld geven van de toekomst van onze eigen planeet.
Unidentified sonic phenomena continue around the world with seemingly no explanation. Why is it that we pay much more attention to visual anomalous phenomena? Much of the study of the unexplained and mysterious centers around images and sightings, whether of Bigfoot or other cryptids, UFOs, or denizens of spirit realms or other dimensions. English speakers do tend to prioritize sight above the other senses, and many different phenomena can make similar sounds, so perhaps it’s natural that sight is most often the medium for the study of the anomalous.
Nevertheless, unidentified sonic phenomena, or USPs, are just prevalent. As MU readers know, I’m particularly interested in the mystery boom phenomenon, but anomalous acoustics of all kinds are an interest of mine. This week, strange sounds continue to frighten and baffle people worldwide as unexplained booms have been keeping residents of Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood awake at night. Interestingly, as has been the case in a small percentage of these booms, anomalous flashes of light have also been reported.
Some Slavic Village residents have captured the flashes and booms on home security cameras and posted them to social media. Cleveland resident Edward McDonald told News 5 Cleveland that while the booms haven’t harmed anyone or any property yet, he believes it’s only a matter of time until they do:
What I’ve heard is like a loud bang, like a boom. It shakes houses, it rattles windows. It hasn’t caused any destruction yet, or it hasn’t caused any property damage, but it’s definitely noticeable. We all know the powers of concussions, or concussion booms, and I really think that the vibration could cause some damage at some point.
The Cleveland City Council is reportedly looking into the incidents, but if this case is like any others, they’ll likely turn up very few answers. Cleveland wasn’t alone this week, though. An eerily similar boom was reported on Sunday, April 14 in the Grand’Anse area on the western coast of Haiti. Local geologists ruled out seismic or volcanic activity and local authorities remain stumped. The mystery left in the wake of the boom is reportedly “sowing anxiety and some panic in the population” and without an explanation, rumors are reportedly running wild among locals.
Meanwhile, residents of the town of Damhal Hanji Pora in the Indian state of state of Jammu and Kashmir reported a “mysterious blast-like sound” on Friday, April 19. Police rejected the idea that the boom was caused by a grenade or other munitions, but given the proximity to Pakistan and recent tensions there, there’s no telling what could have occurred.
As with all reported incidents of mysterious booms, I’m left to wonder: are these related in any way, or are they all isolated, separate incidents?
Glowing UFO Over Tiny Town Of 97 Residents On April 21, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Glowing UFO Over Tiny Town Of 97 Residents On April 21, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: April 21, 2019
Location of sighting: Holtwood, Pennsylvania, USA
Source: MUFON #99891
Here is a UFO sighting from a city with a population of 97. Its been long believed that UFOs appear in areas that are less populated in order to not cause a panic. This UFO was lit up like a flare, but moved very fast as seen in the video. Now I really wish I had a longer video of this, but only received a short clip. This could be a Chinese lantern, but its the wrong time of the year for Lantern Festival. Also this object is the wrong shape. A lantern is taller than wide, this appears to be the opposite. This object appears to move very fast ruling out Chinese lantern, since they move slow with the wind. It has no wings so its not a plane. Eyewitness says it turned into a triangle, and I'm thinking USAF TR3B secret triangle craft. This case remains a mystery.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Glowing orb that ascended very quickly, changed direction and shape from a glowing pulsating orb, to a dark grey reflective triangle.
A photograph of a meteor streaking through Earth’s atmosphere. This meteor likely originated from the tail of a comet orbiting around the sun, but other meteors may come from beyond the solar system. Credit: Daniel Pludowski Getty Images
By most standards, space is exceedingly empty, containing on average just one proton per four cubic meters of volume. In this cosmic ocean, so incomprehensibly desolate and vast, entire galaxies are akin to scattered spots of sea foam—not to mention the stars, planets and other lesser objects that fade to insignificance against the void. For random clumps of matter adrift in the deep to somehow find each other seems to border on the miraculous.
Yet find each other they do, and in surprising numbers. Stars and planets routinely hurl smaller objects into interstellar space as an inescapable consequence of orbital mechanics. And the recent discovery of ‘Oumuamua—a mysterious and first-of-its-kind interstellar object spied by chance when it passed close by our sun last year—confirms as much. Statistical extrapolations suggest that a quadrillion trillion similar objects may lurk as yet unseen in the dark spaces between the stars of the Milky Way, so many that there should always be one such far-flung passerby flying through the notional sphere bounded by Earth’s orbit around our star. With an estimated size of roughly half a kilometer, ‘Oumuamua in some respects represents the tip of the interstellar iceberg; just as grains of sand greatly outnumber large rocks on a beach, for every ‘Oumuamua-sized body wandering the galaxy there should be many, many more objects even smaller. Scientists already know of many microscopic interstellar immigrants—cosmic rays and micron-sized flecks of stardust that occasionally strike spacecraft—but other than ‘Oumuamua, nothing larger has ever definitively been found.
Now two researchers—Avi Loeb, chair of astronomy at Harvard University, and Harvard undergraduate Amir Siraj—say that has changed, arguing that a modest meteor observed in January 2014 was actually an outcast from another star. They detail their result in a preprint submitted for peer-reviewed publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. If confirmed, the finding could help open a new frontier in the detection and study of interstellar meteors.
A HYPERBOLIC CLAIM
“Previous approaches to this problem were like looking for your keys under a lamppost, where our sun is the lamp illuminating its surroundings and passing interstellar objects are the keys,” Loeb explains. “That’s a good technique—that’s how ‘Oumuamua was found—but it really limits you, particularly in trying to figure out an object’s composition.”
For their study, Loeb and Siraj used a different method, looking for evidence of interstellar objects in more than three decades of data from the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), a NASA-run global catalog of meteors detected by networks of U.S. government sensors.
Because there should be many more interstellar objects at smaller sizes, Loeb says, “there is a good chance those will appear to us as meteors, since the chances of their intersecting the Earth are higher.” Monitoring a meteor’s bright trail as it burns up in our planet’s atmosphere can reveal not only the object’s size and composition but also its trajectory and velocity with respect to the Earth and the sun. If a meteor’s inferred incoming speed exceeds about 42 kilometers per second—the solar system’s escape velocity in Earth’s vicinity—its trajectory could be considered “hyperbolic,” meaning it could have been an “unbound” interstellar passerby moving too fast to be captured by the sun’s gravity.
Only one event in the CNEOS database met Loeb and Siraj’s conservative criteria: a fireball off the coast of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014. According to the pair’s analysis of the CNEOS data, the meteor was half a meter in size and massed nearly 500 kilograms, entering the Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 44 kilometers per second before exploding high above the Pacific Ocean. Tellingly, the meteor’s trail showed it had not impacted Earth head-on, as one might expect of a fast-moving but native object in a retrograde orbit around our star. Instead it appeared to have swooped in from behind, overtaking our planet as the Earth moved around the sun—suggesting its actual velocity with respect to our solar system had been in blistering excess of 60 kilometers per second. Reconstructing the object’s most probable path to Earth, Loeb and Siraj found no previous close encounters with Jupiter or other large bodies that could have boosted its speed.
The case for the meteor being a rock from another star seemed almost too good to be true, particularly since CNEOS data is best interpreted with caution.The catalog’s primary sources are classified Earth-observing satellites operated by the U.S. military, which can record the brightness, orientation and duration of fireballs entering our planet’s atmosphere. For reasons of national security, the government refuses to release information about potential sources of uncertainty in the satellites’ secretive measurements.
“At first I didn’t believe it,” Siraj says. For a week, he and Loeb repeatedly checked their analysis of the CNEOS data, always arriving at the same conclusion: the meteor must have had an interstellar origin. Ultimately they chose to test their methods on a different, much more well-studied event—the 20-meter meteor that exploded over and wreaked havoc on the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013. Using video recordings of the Chelyabinsk fireball, “we derived its orbit using our methods, and it was a very close match [to the CNEOS data],” Siraj says. “When I saw that, I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is real.’”
AN INTERSTELLAR ORIGIN OF LIFE?
The meteor’s estimated extreme speed was not only much higher than that of objects orbiting the sun, but also well above what would be typical of other nearby systems swirling through the Milky Way’s thin, star-studded disk. That, Loeb says, means its putative interstellar origins are decidedly exotic. “Either it came from a star in the galaxy’s thick disk [a small and diffuse subset of speedy stars that surround the thin disk like a halo],” he says, “or it came from the galaxy’s thin disk, from inner regions of a planetary system where objects orbit at higher speeds.”
The pair’s analysis also suggests interstellar objects of this scale strike the Earth at least once per decade—meaning perhaps almost half a billion have rained down upon our planet throughout its 4.5-billion-year history. Stars near our own should eject anywhere between 0.2 and 20 Earth masses of such objects over the course of their lives, Loeb and Siraj estimate—and at any time, on the order of a million should be somewhere within the Earth's orbit around the sun.
Such possibilities carry profound implications. “Some of these objects could potentially transfer life between planetary systems,” Loeb says, referring to a broad theory known as panspermia (ancient Greek for “all seeds”) that posits life first began in outer space and can readily migrate between planets. In principle, alien microbes sheltered within rocks blasted into space by a giant impact on some life-bearing world might survive an interstellar voyage and a fiery entry into a planet’s atmosphere. Some researchers have posited this may even explain life’s early emergence on Earth, which the fossil record suggests occurred with shocking rapidity more than four billion years ago, practically as soon as our planet became cool enough to harbor liquid water. “If this meteor is indeed interstellar, it shows a proof of concept,” Loeb says. “Sure, it burned up, but bigger, rarer ones won’t. And we don’t need an impact every decade to seed the early Earth.”
Even if Loeb and Siraj’s meteor had managed to reach Earth’s surface, however, other experts in the arcane topic of panspermia suggest it would not have brought anything living with it. “More likely, this object is not from a habitable (much less inhabited) body, but rather is a piece of a frozen, comet-like body,” says Benjamin Weiss, a planetary scientist and meteorite expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More fundamentally, Weiss says, the claim that this particular space rock was interstellar is problematic. “The meteor catalog that [Loeb and Siraj] used does not report uncertainties on the incoming velocity,” he notes. “These uncertainties need to be quantified before this meteor can be accepted as interstellar.”
UNKNOWN UNCERTAINTIES
That is also the view of Paul Chodas, the CNEOS catalog’s manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We at CNEOS simply post the fireball data that is reported to us; we have no information on the uncertainties,” he says.
In March of this year, Chodas says, he and other CNEOS staffers flagged 2014’s Papua New Guinea meteor as potentially interstellar based on their own calculations of its orbit—but did not publish that result due to concerns about the data’s quality. Loeb and Siraj’s “quite extraordinary” and “highly speculative” claim, he says, “is based on just a few numbers that are likely highly uncertain.” (In their paper, Loeb and Siraj cite previous work reporting that the CNEOS catalog’s typical uncertainty for the velocity of a meter-sized meteor is less than a kilometer per second—an insignificant offset in the enormous measured speed of their candidate interstellar fireball.)
Asked about uncertainties in the CNEOS fireball catalog, Lindley Johnson, NASA’s “planetary defense officer,” notes that its entries represent the use of data “in a way it was never, ever originally intended.” Although initially conceived as a simple list of fireball times, locations and energy levels, more than a decade ago the catalog also began incorporating estimates of speed and directionality for particularly data-rich events, in hopes that researchers could use those projections to track down meteorite debris fields from large fireballs that occurred over land. Soon, particularly bold analysts were using those projections to look back in time, piecing together the potential orbital histories of meteors to link them and any meteorites they produced to certain families of asteroids. That was “already stretching the credence in the data beyond anything really scientifically valid,” Johnson says. “Now [Loeb and Siraj] want to speculate based on such tenuous data that some could be interstellar objects? That really stretches the credibility past the breaking point for me.”
Peter Brown, a planetary astronomer and leading meteor expert at Canada’s Western University, says that even though the CNEOS catalog is on average of very high quality, the validity of any single data point—particularly for smaller meteors—remains questionable. “Statistically, I think the catalog’s derived orbits and velocities and trajectories are fine,” he says. “But we simply don’t know which ones are good and which ones are bad.” Furthermore, Brown says, of the thousands of small fireballs previously detected by other, independent surveys using ground-based cameras and radar stations, not one has clearly exhibited a hyperbolic trajectory. “If a tenth or a twentieth of a percent of the population was hyperbolic as Loeb and Siraj claim, you’d expect to have a fair number of hyperbolics in the data from ground-based networks—but we don’t see that.”
Even so, Brown adds, “it is a fantastic thing that others are coming from different disciplines and applying their own approaches to this rich data set…. Interstellar meteorites must be hitting Earth’s atmosphere, and fireballs are the natural way to look for them. We just have to find them convincingly, in ways that can’t be dismissed as measurement uncertainties.”
This, naturally, is part of Loeb and Siraj’s grand plan. The next step in the quest for interstellar meteors, they say, is to ensure that potentially hyperbolic fireballs can be not only detected but also characterized. Observed with the right equipment, a fireball’s light can be broken up into a multicolored spectrum which acts as a “barcode” to reveal the object’s chemical composition—a critical clue as to whether or not it formed around our sun.
“Every few years we should have one of these hyperbolic meteors,” Loeb says. “If we just ensure observers are flagging fireballs with excess velocities, we should be able to set up spectroscopic surveys to get each one’s spectrum as it burns up in the atmosphere and indeed demonstrate an origin beyond our solar system. Surely this is something worth investing in!”
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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.
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