The Biggest Volcano on Jupiter's Moon Io Is Super Active. But Does It Run Like Clockwork?

An image based on data gathered by NASA's Voyager 1 mission shows Loki Patera in the lower right.

(Image: © NASA/JPL/USGS)

De Kleer and her colleagues started by pinning down the details of Io's orbit, which takes about 1.77 Earth days. That's too fast for scientists to develop a nuanced understanding of the orbit's impacts using Earth-based telescopes, which can only observe when Io is in their line of sight. 

But there are other, much slower cycles — on the scale of hundreds of days — that are embedded within that orbit, as other moons pull at Io. Those cycles could also influence the tidal heating that the moon experiences.

"It's been this interesting search for patterns in the volcanic activity; tidal heating should produce volcanism that follows specific patterns," de Kleer said. "So you should have volcanoes that are occurring at specific places on the surface and not at other places, and you might expect them to show specific patterns in time also."

To try to make sense of the volcano, the study authors gathered all the observations they could find of Loki over the past three decades. For much of that timeline, scientists' data was sporadic at best, but in 2013, de Kleer and her colleagues made a concerted effort to maximize observations of Loki.

The result is the most detailed look scientists have ever had of the volcano's activity. "It's the dataset which is the most impressive thing," Julie Rathbun, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute who wasn't involved in the new research but who also studies Loki, told Space.com. "It's really hard to get all the data we want from the ground."

The other factor that de Kleer and her colleagues focused on, the details of Io's orbit around Jupiter, was less challenging to study. But it's not the sort of factor volcanologists might turn to first if they've been inspired primarily by volcanoes closer to home, which aren't strongly affected by any tidal heating.

"A lot of the geology is based on terrestrial geology and there's not a lot of things on Earth that are driven by tides, so it's not something I think people, especially when studying volcanoes, are used to looking for," Rathbun said. "When studying planets and moons, tides and periodicity are among the most obvious things to measure, they're the easiest things to measure."

• Related: Voyager at 40: 40 Photos from NASA's Epic 'Grand Tour' Mission

De Kleer and her colleagues were inspired by cycles scientists have noticed in plumes streaming off one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, which seem to brighten and dim in conjunction with that moon's orbit.

They found two cycles in Loki's activity that might be influenced by tidal heating: one lasting 454 days and the other 480 days. Both of those numbers are close to cycles in which Io's orbit is tweaked by the influences of its neighbors.

And realistically, that sort of cycle might make more sense in a volcano than a cycle tied directly to an orbital period as fast as Io's. "Those are the timescales that a volcano can actually evolve on," de Kleer said. She and her colleagues think one potential explanation for what's happening at Loki is that the plumbing of the volcano can't respond to tidal heating at the speed of the 1.77-day orbital cycle, leaving only slower cycles to affect the volcano.

Understanding how Loki works isn't just about understanding one massive planet's one weirdo moon. Earth and Io are the only worlds in our solar system where it's easy to study volcanoes, and Earth's aren't strongly influenced by tidal heating, but scientists believe that phenomenon is a vitally important one in the bigger picture of planetary science, in our solar system and beyond.

"This kind of global-scale tidally driven geophysics is just not something that you have on Earth," de Kleer said. "[Io] is kind of this alien world where we have these processes that you're not able to study on Earth, and if we can study them on Io we can broaden our idea of geophysics more generally so that it's less Earth-centric and encompasses more worlds."

De Kleer and her colleagues are hoping to continue regularly checking on Loki in order to sort out how Io's orbital cycles are governing its activity. They calculated out when the volcano could rumble based on each timeline, and within a few years, they're hoping to gather enough data to pin down a better understanding of Loki's dynamics.

"It's going to be a lot of fun when we get close to the predicted times that the brightenings should occur," de Kleer said. "We can watch and we notice right away in the images when Loki starts to brighten, and that's always fun."

• The research is described in a paper published May 8 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 
•  Photos: Mars Volcano Views Revealed by Spacecraft 
•  Raikoke Volcano's Eruption Seen from Space (Photos) 
•  Weird Volcanoes Are Erupting Across the Solar System 

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

04-09-2019 om 01:17 geschreven door peter  

Methane on Mars Isn't Being Released by Wind Erosion

By Mike Wall 

But the origins of the gas remain unclear.

This diagram shows possible ways by which methane might incorporate into Mars' atmosphere (sources) and disappear from the atmosphere (sinks).

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech/SAM-GSFC/Univ. of Michigan)

One small piece of the Mars methane mystery may have just been solved.

NASA's Curiosity rover has spotted multiple surges of methane in Mars' air over the past few years — most recently in June, when levels of the gas inside the Red Planet's Gale Crater spiked to 21 parts per billion per unit volume (ppbv). 

That's far higher than background methane levels on Gale's floor, which Curiosity has determined range seasonally from 0.24 ppbv to 0.65 ppbv.

• Related: The Search for Life on Mars: A Photo Timeline

Scientists don't know what's producing this methane, or where exactly it's coming from. But they're keen to find out, because the gas is a possible sign of life. More than 90% of the methane in Earth's air, for example, was produced by microbes and other organisms.

A recent study may help researchers narrow the hunt. Scientists estimated the methane content of typical Red Planet rocks by analyzing Mars meteorites and native basalt and sedimentary rocks here on Earth — stand-ins for their Martian counterparts. 

The team then calculated how much of this methane could be liberated by scouring winds, the dominant form of erosion on modern Mars. (The Red Planet hasn't hosted stable bodies of surface water for more than 3 billion years.)

The researchers determined that, for wind erosion to produce detectable levels of methane in the Martian air, the scoured rocks would have to contain as much methane as the most hydrocarbon-rich shale here on Earth. That's a very unlikely scenario, study team members said.

"What's important about this [finding] is that it strengthens the argument that the methane must be coming from a different source," co-author Jon Telling, a geochemist at Newcastle University in England, said in a statement. "Whether or not that's biological, we still don't know."

Indeed, methane can be produced abiotically as well — by reactions involving hot water and certain types of rock, for example. And it's unclear if the methane detected by Curiosity (and Europe's Mars Express orbiter, which confirmed one of the surges the rover found) is modern or ancient. However it was originally generated, the gas could have been trapped underground for billions of years before bubbling up to the surface.

The cause of the methane spikes is "still an open question," study lead author Emmal Safi, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences at Newcastle University, said in the same statement. 

"Our paper is just a little part of a much bigger story," she added. "Ultimately, what we're trying to discover is if there's the possibility of life existing on planets other than our own, either living now or maybe life in the past that is now preserved as fossils or chemical signatures."

• The recent paper was published in June in the journal Scientific Reports.

• Mars' Atmosphere: Composition, Climate & Weather
• 7 Biggest Mysteries of Mars
• Ancient Mars Could Have Supported Life (Photos)

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

04-09-2019 om 00:58 geschreven door peter  

Were Ancient Martians Murdered by Nuclear Bomb-Dropping Aliens? An Investigation

IMAGES ALTERED BY AUTHOR. IMAGES: NASA & DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

For that, let's take a look at an excerpt from Did Spacemen Colonize the Earth?, a book published by Robin Collyns in 1976. Earlier in the following passage, Collyns argues that there certainly were nuclear explosions on Mars.

"It is difficult to imagine a nuclear explosion on Mars that was not deliberately caused," Collyns writes. "It is very likely that the explosion was made for some constructional purpose. Thus, the [nuclear observations] can serve as one of the proofs in the favor of existence of rational life on mars."

Pseudoscience and wild conjecture are fun, but John Brandenburg, a plasma physicist who got his degree from UC Davis and who has seemingly had a relatively normal, distinguished career for a scientist, has staked his reputation on his theory that Martian life was, perhaps purposefully, destroyed with nukes.

"Was Mars murdered?" he muses in a book about the theory.

In an oddly disconcerting interview with "Supreme Master Television," a thoroughly bizarre station run by the Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association cult, Brandenburg notes that Mars had two ancient humanoid civilizations, called Cydonia and Utopia, which had a level of technology similar to that of the ancient Egyptians.

What happened to those Martians? Nukes, he says.

"Two great disasters happened on Mars," he told Supreme Master TV, pointing to Utopia on a map. "One here, and then an asteroid impact happened here, and Cydonia was right in between them. That's puzzling. Why would so many bad things happen in one area of mars that just so happened to have archaeology on it?"

That was back in 2011. Since then, Brandenburg has decided that both disasters were nukes, and possibly "natural" nuclear explosions that could have been caused by some cosmic weirdness like an asteroid hitting radioactive material or something like that. Today, however, he has upped the ante.

This weekend, he's going to present new research at a meeting of the American Physical Society that he says proves that there were indeed nuclear explosions on Mars and that they are consistent with nuclear bomb "airbursts," meaning that there's no possible way these were natural. He said in a statement emailed to me that the evidence he's found is "consistent with mixed fusion-fission explosions."

It's worth noting ​that the other sessions at the meeting appear to have well-regarded university researchers from all around the world presenting experimental particle physics results and things of that nature, so I have to say that Brandenburg's research (which certainly does not appear to be peer-reviewed) appearing alongside that is pretty weird.

Here's his case, set to be published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astrophysics, a journal that just published a study about the Big Bang being a hologram:

"The high concentration of Xenon-129 atmosphere, the evidence from Krypton-80 and the detected pattern of excess abundance of Uranium and Thorium on Mars surface, relative to Mars meteorites, first seen by the Russians and now confirmed by the Mars Odyssey Spacecraft Gamma Ray Spectrometer, mean that the surface of Mars was apparently the site of massive radiological events, which created large amounts of signature isotopes and covered the surface with a thin layer of radioactive debris enriched in certain elements relative to its subsurface rocks. This pattern of phenomenon can be explained as due to two large anomalous nuclear explosions on Mars in the past."

So, there's the theory. Reading that, it's possible, until you get to the last line, to think that hey, here's a scientist who thinks something weird happened on Mars—the idea of there being a naturally occurring nuclear explosion on a planet that has radioactive elements on it hasn't been completely ruled out by NASA, after all.

But then, well, he is presenting published, quasi-scientific research suggesting that these were anomalous and not natural. If that's not clear enough, maybe the description and title of his upcoming book Death on Mars: The Discovery of a Planetary Nuclear Massacre will drive it home.

Or we can just read the conclusion to his paper, a preprint version of which he shared with me.

"Given the large amount of nuclear isotopes in Mars atmosphere resembling those from hydrogen bomb tests on Earth, Mars may present an example of civilization wiped out by a nuclear attack from space," he wrote.

"It is possible the Fermi Paradox means that our interstellar neighborhood contains forces hostile to young, noisy, civilizations such as ourselves," he added. "Such hostile forces could range from things as alien as AI (Artificial Intelligence) 'with a grudge' against flesh and blood, as in the movie Terminator, all the way to things as sadly familiar to us as a mindless humanoid bureaucrat like Governor Tarkin in Star Wars, eager to destroy planet Alderann as an example to other worlds."

It is of course worth noting that no high profile scientists have given any credence at all to this theory.

To gauge whether Brandenburg's thoughts have gained any traction with conspiracy theorists, I hunted around for their reactions to his earlier work. Here's what I came across:

Arkcode.com:

"Having seen the evidence presented by Dr. Brandenburg, I feel certain that we need to actively plan for a possible defense against whoever perpetrated the assault on Mars. In fact, as U.S. Space Command has access to all the data that he (and this family) have, as well as all the other pertinent data that exists out there, I'd be amazed to learn that our preparations have not been underway for a very long time." ​

Ross Holcomb, Mysterious Universe comment:

"There are other possibilities as well. Consider a very high tech civilization where a few folks mis-applied high energy technology and it got out of hand, causing a sever explosion and catastrophe a couple of million years ago. Perhaps a similar thing occurred on earth about 13,000 ya resulting in a cataclysmic event sinking Atlantis and energetically causing the Bermuda Triangle (and other anomalies) to activate. It may not have been "nuclear" and may not have been used in warfare."

Mercurio, Above Top Secret Forums:

"I think if it was a weapon, it was something much more powerful than nuclear bombs. Something more advanced than what we have now."

Shorty, Above Top Secret Forums:

"I believe that after a nuclear war broke out on Mars. The surviving Martian race emigrated to the Earth, building the Pyramids and Sphinx to represent the features on mars so that when we were intelligent enough we might discover that there was once a thriving powerful E.T race on mars."

So, there you have it. Were ancient Martians blown up by other aliens? Almost certainly not, but if we are similarly destroyed, at least one dude will be able to say "told you so."

{https://www.vice.com/en_us }

04-09-2019 om 00:26 geschreven door peter  

MORGAN MCFALL-JOHNSEN, BUSINESS INSIDER

The life of an asteroid is lonely. The rocks spend eons drifting through the cold vacuum of space.

But on Wednesday, the asteroid Ryugu welcomed a special visitor: Japan's Hayabusa-2 probe successfully landed on the asteroid's surface at 21:06 ET (01:06 UTC on Thursday).

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched Hayabusa-2 into space in December 2014. Its mission: explore and collect samples from Ryugu, a primitive asteroid half-a-mile in diameter that orbits the sun at a distance up to 131 million miles (211 million kilometers).

The probe reached its destination in June 2018, then got to work making observations, measuring the asteroid's gravity, and rehearsing to touch down.

It blasted the asteroid with a copper plate and a box of explosives in April in order to loosen rocks and expose material under the surface, then successfully landed on Ryugu last night to gather up the rock and soil debris.

The spacecraft captured the images below as it left the asteroid's surface.

"First photo was taken at 10:06:32 JST (on-board time) and you can see the gravel flying upwards. Second shot was at 10:08:53 where the darker region near the centre is due to touchdown," JAXA tweeted.

(JAXA)

Ancient rock samples

Asteroids are made of rock and metal, and they take all kinds of quirky shapes, ranging in size from pebbles to 600-mile megaliths. Most of them hang out in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, though Ryugu's orbit sometimes takes it between Mars and Earth.

Some asteroids date back to the dawn of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, when materials leftover from the formation of planets coalesced into these chunks of rock. In that sense, asteroids can serve as time capsules: What scientists find in those primitive rocks could tell us a lot about the solar system's history.

Ryugu is a C-type asteroid, which means it's rich with organic carbon molecules, water, and possibly amino acids. Amino acids form the building blocks for protein and were essential to the evolution of life on Earth. Some theories posit that an asteroid first brought amino acids here, gifting our planet with the seeds of life, though that's still debated.

About three-quarters of our solar system's asteroids are C-type. Hayabusa-2 aims to be the first mission to bring samples from such an asteroid back to Earth.

The probe initially landed on Ryugu in February and collected shallow samples from just below the surface, but mission managers decided to gather some deeper rock samples as well, since that material hasn't been exposed to harsh weathering from space.

To accomplish that, the probe had to lift back off the asteroid, then blast a 10-meter crater into the surface in order to access to the rock beneath.

So in April, Hayabusa-2 released and detonated a box of explosives in space that shot a copper plate into the asteroid.

Wednesday's landing then made a splash in all that freed-up material.

(JAXA/Twitter)

"These images were taken before and after touchdown by the small monitor camera (CAM-H). The first is 4 seconds before touchdown, the second is at touchdown itself and the third is 4 seconds after touchdown. In the third image, you can see the amount of rocks that rise," JAXA tweeted.

After it touched down, Hayabusa-2 then collected a new set of samples and left Ryugu's surface. At the end of this year, it will begin the 5.5 million-mile (9 million-kilometer) journey home.

So far, everything is on schedule.

NASA is on a similar mission

NASA is also studying a far-off asteroid.

The agency's OSIRIS-REx mission reached a much smaller C-type asteroid, Bennu, in August 2018. But the probe didn't land on Bennu's surface; instead, it's been orbiting at a record-breakingly close distance.

The plan is for OSIRIS-REx to approach Bennu's surface in July 2020, but the spacecraft will only make contact for about five seconds. During that quick instant, it will blow nitrogen gas to stir up dust and pebbles and collect the samples. If all goes according to plan, it will return that material to Earth in 2023.

The asteroid's surface has turned out to be rougher than expected, however, and debris flying off the space rock can pose a threat to the orbiting spacecraft. So NASA is still choosing its sampling site.

But Bennu has already made a significant finding: In December, before it entered orbit around Bennu, the probe discovered that the asteroid harbored ingredients for water (oxygen and hydrogen atoms bonded together).

Though Bennu is too small to host liquid water, it's possible that water could have once existed on its parent asteroid, which Bennu broke away from between 700 million and 2 billion years ago.

Though NASA's asteroid-exploration mission will collect a larger quantity of sample material than Japan's, the JAXA team hopes that comparing the samples from two different sites on the same asteroid will yield novel information about how long-term space exposure changes asteroids over time.

Both Bennu and Ryugu could also teach scientists a lot about the history of the solar system and potentially – if they contain organic materials – about the origins of life on Earth.

• This article was originally published by Business Insider.

{ https://www.sciencealert.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 23:57 geschreven door peter  

Why We Need to Get Back to Venus

By Paul K. Byrne. 

On June 5-6, 2012, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory collected images of one of the rarest predictable solar events: the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun.

(Image: © NASA/SDO)

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Just next door, cosmologically speaking, is a planet almost exactly like Earth. It's about the same size, is made of about the same stuff and formed around the same star.

To an alien astronomer light years away, observing the solar system through a telescope, it would be virtually indistinguishable from our own planet. But to know the surface conditions of Venus – the temperature of a self-cleaning oven, and an atmosphere saturated with carbon dioxide with sulfuric acid clouds – is to know that it's anything but Earth-like.

So how is it that two planets so similar in position, formation and composition can end up so different? That's a question that preoccupies an ever-growing number of planetary scientists, and motivates numerous proposed Venus exploration efforts. If scientists can understand why Venus turned out the way it did, we'll have a better understanding of whether an Earth-like planet is the rule – or the exception.

I'm a planetary scientist, and I'm fascinated by how other worlds came to be. I'm particularly interested in Venus, because it offers us a glimpse of a world that once might not have been so different from our own.

A once-blue Venus?

The current scientific view of Venus holds that, at some point in the past, the planet had much more water than its bone-dry atmosphere suggests today – perhaps even oceans. But as the Sun grew hotter and brighter (a natural consequence of aging), surface temperatures rose on Venus, eventually vaporizing any oceans and seas.

With ever more water vapor in the atmosphere, the planet entered a runaway greenhouse condition from which it couldn't recover. Whether Earth-style plate tectonics (where the outer layer of the planet is broken into large, mobile pieces) ever operated on Venus is unknown. Water is critical for plate tectonics to operate, and a runaway greenhouse effect would effectively shut down that process had it operated there.

But the ending of plate tectonics wouldn't have spelled the end of geological activity: The planet's considerable internal heat continued to produce magma, which poured out as voluminous lava flows and resurfaced most of the planet. Indeed, the average surface age of Venus is around 700 million years – very old, certainly, but much younger than the multi-billion-year-old surfaces of Mars, Mercury or the Moon.

The exploration of Planet 2

The Venus-as-a-wet-world view is just a hypothesis: Planetary scientists don't know what caused Venus to differ so much from Earth, nor even if the two planets really did start off with the same conditions. Humans know less about Venus than we do about the other inner solar system planets, largely because the planet poses several unique challenges to its exploration.

For example, radar is needed to pierce the opaque, sulfuric acid clouds and see the surface. That's a lot trickier than the readily visible surfaces of the Moon or Mercury. And the high surface temperature – 470 degrees Celsius (880 degrees Fahrenheit) – means that conventional electronics don't last more than a few hours. That's a far cry from Mars, where rovers can operate for more than a decade. In part because of the heat, acidity and obscured surface, then, Venus hasn't enjoyed a sustained program of exploration over the past couple of decades.

That said, there have been two dedicated Venus missions in the 21st century: the European Space Agency's Venus Express, which operated from 2006 to 2014, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki spacecraft currently in orbit .

Humans haven't always ignored Venus. It was once the darling of planetary exploration: between the 1960s and 1980s, some 35 missions were dispatched to the second planet. The NASA Mariner 2 mission was the first spacecraft to successfully carry out a planetary encounter when it flew past Venus in 1962. The first images returned from the surface of another world were sent from the Soviet Venera 9 lander after it touched down in 1975. And the Venera 13 landerwas the first spacecraft to return sounds from the surface of another world. But the last mission NASA launched to Venus was Magellan in 1989. That spacecraft imaged almost the entire surface with radar before its planned demise in the planet's atmosphere in 1994.

(Image credit: NASA)

Back to Venus?

In the last few years, several NASA Venus missions have been proposed. The most recent planetary mission that NASA chose is a nuclear-powered craft called Dragonfly, destined for Saturn's moon Titan. However, one proposal to measure the composition of the Venus surface was selected for further technology development.

Other missions being considered include one by the ESA to map the surface at high resolution, and a Russian plan to build on its legacy as the only country to successfully put a lander on Venus' surface.

Some 30 years after NASA set course for our hellish neighbor, the future of Venus exploration looks promising. But a single mission – a radar orbiter or even a long-lived lander – won't solve all the outstanding mysteries.

Rather, a sustained program of exploration is needed to bring our knowledge of Venus to where we understand it as well as Mars or the Moon. That will take time and money, but I believe it's worth it. If we can understand why and when Venus came to be the way it is, we'll have a better grasp of how an Earth-size world can evolve when it's close to its star. And, under an ever-brightening Sun, Venus may even help us understand the fate of Earth itself.

Paul K. Byrne, North Carolina State University

• Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.  

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03-09-2019 om 23:32 geschreven door peter  

On Icy Moons, Alien Life May Go with the Flow of Ocean Currents

By Meghan Bartels

An artist's depiction of NASA's Cassini spacecraft flying through plumes shooting out of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)

One of the key determinants of which worlds can host life may lie in the motion of their oceans.

Right now, calculating that motion is a challenge. After all, scientists can't just dip their toes in the water. But new research pulls together information about four of the most intriguing ocean worlds to inform models of what their subsurface oceans might be doing.

"These oceans are really interesting in and of themselves," Krista Soderlund, an expert on planetary fluid dynamics at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the new research, told Space.com. "You often are first drawn to a satellite by what it looks like on its surface, but I think that what is going on beneath the surface is just as exciting and interesting."

• Related: Photos: Enceladus, Saturn's Cold, Bright Moon

And according to her new calculations, there is indeed plenty going on beneath the surface of the solar system's icy moons. Soderlund focused on Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede and on Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan.

In each case, she tried to understand how factors like the world's rotation rate, the thickness of its ice shell and the density of its seawater might affect how much water moves around the hidden oceans.

Her calculations suggest that the oceans on Enceladus and perhaps Titan could host currents in alternating bands and particularly strong heat flow near the poles. Europa, on the other hand, because its spin is less of a factor, seemed to sport the most noticeable heat flow near its equator. (Scientists don't know enough about Ganymede to quite settle on a specific ocean current model.)

Predicting such activity inside icy moons is a promising indicator for those who wonder whether such oceans could be home to life. "When we think about ocean dynamics, it's really important for habitability," Alyssa Rhoden, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute focused on ice shells, told Space.com. Rhoden wasn't involved in the new research but is co-leading a new network for ocean worlds research. "It gives us a sense of how much that swirling and whirling is going on and how you get nutrients from one place to another place, how you move energy from one place to another place."

More swirling and whirling means better odds that the ingredients of life can actually collide. But despite the work Soderlund has put into trying to understand these hidden oceans, the result is still an echo of what could be happening on these worlds.

It's the universal challenge of modeling as a scientific approach: a model will never be quite as intricate or comprehensive as reality. "All of our models are wrong, they're all wrong," Rhoden said. "Because we can't actually model everything."

(Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

But getting more data about these moons and their hidden oceans will fine-tune these models, Rhoden said, and that doesn't necessarily require directly sampling the oceans — although needless to say, scientists would love to do that.

Long before such feats are possible, a different mission, scientists can turn to NASA's Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), both scheduled to launch in the 2020s.

Soderlund is on the team behind one of Europa Clipper's instruments, the Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-Surface device, or REASON. Because an ocean's dynamics affect the ice shell above it, REASON data should help scientists vet some of their hypotheses about Europa's ocean activity, she said.

If her prediction that heat flow is strongest in Europa's ocean at the equator is correct, for example, the moon's ice shell should be thinner there. It's an approach that turns the massive annoyance of an ice sheet blocking a direct view of your research subject into a tool and recognizes the ways these strange oceans must be connected to their surroundings — just as is true here on Earth.

"The fact that we're predicting they have strong ocean currents in itself is pretty exciting, since then it's not just a really passive body of water, it actually has some really cool, intriguing and fun characteristics," Soderlund said. "It's kind of like our own Earth's ocean in that respect, where there's just a lot going on."

• The research was described in a paper published on July 29 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 
•  Photos: Europa, Mysterious Icy Moon of Jupiter 
•  Mesmerizing Satellite Video Captures Magical View of Earth 
•  Europa’s Buried Ocean Could Rise to the Surface (Video) 
• Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 23:16 geschreven door peter  

Video – 3D bioprinter patches up wounds using a patient’s own skin cells

While the advent of 3D printers is commonly thought of as a revolution for manufacturing, it could have huge benefits for medicine as well. To help patch up large wounds that might normally require a skin graft, researchers at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) have developed a new bioprinter that can print dual layers of a patient’s own skin directly into a wound.

The idea of 3D printing skin has been in development for a few years. In 2014, a prototype machine was unveiled that could print large sheets of human skin that could then be cut to size and grafted onto a patient. The tech evolved over the years into more detailed machines and eventually a handheld device that works like a tape dispenser for skin.

The new machine looks like a cross between those last two. It’s much larger than the handheld device, but it’s still relatively portable in a hospital setting. The machine can be wheeled to a bedside, and a patient lies underneath the printer nozzle while it goes to work.

Like earlier devices, the new printer uses an “ink” made up of a patient’s own cells, to minimize the risk of rejection. First a small biopsy of healthy skin is taken, and from that two types of skin cells can be isolated: fibroblasts, the cells that help build the structure to heal wounds, and keratinocytes, which are the main cells found in the outermost layer of skin.

Larger amounts of these cells are grown from the biopsy sample, then mixed into a hydrogel to form the bioprinter ink. And here’s where it differs from previous bioprinters – rather than just applying the new skin over the injury, the new machine first uses a 3D laser scanner to build a picture of the topology of the wound. Using that image, the device then fills in the deepest parts with the fibroblasts, before layering keratinocytes over the top.

That technique mimics the natural structure of skin cells, allowing the injury to heal faster. The team demonstrated that it works using mouse models, observing that new skin began to form outward from the center of the wound. Notably, it only worked when the ink was made using the patient’s own cells – in other experiments the tissue was rejected by the body.

“If you deliver the patient’s own cells, they do actively contribute to wound healing by organizing up front to start the healing process much faster,” says James Yoo, co-author of the paper. “While there are other types of wound healing products available to treat wounds and help them close, those products don’t actually contribute directly to the creation of skin.”

The researchers say that the next steps involve conducting clinical trials in humans. Eventually, the new device could be put to work treating burn victims, patients with diabetic ulcers and other large wounds that have trouble healing on their own.

• The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Source: Wake Forest School of Medicine

{ https://gaf.news/ }

03-09-2019 om 21:33 geschreven door peter  

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

03-09-2019 om 21:24 geschreven door peter  

Elon Musk Predicts Asteroid Will Hit Earth, ‘we Currently Have no Defence’

At one point it will travel more than the width of the full Moon within a minute and it will get as bright as stars.

By IANS

{ https://www.india.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 21:14 geschreven door peter  

2 miljard jaar geleden stierf tot 99 procent van alle leven op aarde - HLN.be

Joeri Vlemings

Bron: PNAS, Newsweek, Fox

Het internationaal team van wetenschappers onderzocht gesteenten in Hudson Bay in Canada die miljarden jaren geleden zouden zijn gevormd. Ze keken naar bariet, een mineraal dat informatie bevat over hoeveel zuurstof er op dat moment in de atmosfeer was. Zo ontdekten ze dat er 2,05 miljard jaar geleden een zware terugval van leven was. Die viel samen met het einde van de periode van oxidatie (GOE of Great Oxygenation Event), waarbij er eerst een enorme toename van zuurstof was 2,4 miljard jaar geleden, gevolgd door een dramatische dip van het zuurstofniveau.

“Meer dan 100 tot 200 miljoen jaar vóór dit uitstervingsevent was er heel veel leven op de planeet, maar na dit evenement viel een groot deel daarvan weg”, zei co-auteur Peter Crockford aan Newsweek. “Maar in plaats van een herstel, zoals bij recentere massa-uitstervingen, bleef de hoeveelheid leven op de planeet of de grootte van de biosfeer klein gedurende het volgende miljard jaar van de geschiedenis van de aarde - ongeveer van twee miljard tot een miljard jaar geleden.” 

Crockford schat dat twee miljard jaar geleden tussen de 80 en 99,5 procent van het leven op onze planeet stierf. Ter vergelijking: bij de massa-uitsterving van de dinosauriërs verdween ongeveer driekwart van het leven op aarde, terwijl de Great Dying-gebeurtenis of Perm-Trias-massa-extinctie - de grootste bekende massa-uitsterving ooit - de ondergang betekende van ongeveer 70 procent van alle aardse leven en 96 procent van het zeeleven.

Crockford vindt overigens het woord ‘uitsterven’ niet geschikt voor het bewuste evenement, “omdat we waarschijnlijk nooit zullen weten welke soorten uitsterven, als dat al het geval was”. Op een blog over het artikel schreef hij: “Maar het lijkt er wel op dat er sowieso een dramatische vermindering van het leven op de planeet was”.

Volgens Crockford kunnen de bevindingen inzicht geven in hoe de aarde in de toekomst zal veranderen. Hij vermoedt ook dat er nog heel wat massa-extincties geweest zijn die we nu nog niet kennen.

selectie videos peter2011

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

03-09-2019 om 20:58 geschreven door peter  

Bijna-botsing met internetsatelliet bewijst: het wordt wel érg druk in de ruimte - HLN.be

George van Hal 

Bron: De Volkskrant

Wetenschappers van ESA voerden de correctie met de hand uit. “De manoeuvre vond een halve omloop voor de potentiële botsing plaats”, schreef ESA op Twitter. “Dit was de eerste keer dat we een botsingscorrectie moesten uitvoeren om niet op een ‘megasterrenbeeld’ te botsen.”

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

03-09-2019 om 20:48 geschreven door peter  

{ https://futurism.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 20:36 geschreven door peter  

Asteroid warning: Space rock comparable to dinosaur killer is heading Earth’s way

A MASSIVE asteroid comparable to the massive space rock which brought the dinosaurs’ reign on Earth to an end is hurtling towards Earth, and scientists have confirmed it is “potentially hazardous”.

03-09-2019 om 19:01 geschreven door peter  

Asteroid Alert: NASA, ESA To Team Up To Save Humans By Crashing Spaceship Into THIS Massive Space Rock

These days a large number of asteroids are hovering all around the Earth and we might get hit too sooner or later. However, in a bid to save our planet and humans as well, NASA is stepping-up plans to deliberately crash a spaceship into an asteroid when it joins forces with the European Space Agency (ESA) next week.

Asteroids approach towards the Earth due to the gravitational forces that affect them. Asteroids are small, rocky objects that orbit the Sun and these space rocks can bring tsunamis, shock waves and flattening winds that could be catastrophic. It is said that Earth will reach to its end one day and one of the possible reason for this could be an asteroid. No one knows what our future will be. These days a large number of asteroids are hovering all around the Earth and we might get hit too sooner or later. However, in a bid to save our planet and humans as well, NASA is stepping-up plans to deliberately crash a spaceship into an asteroid when it joins forces with the European Space Agency (ESA) next week.  

According to a report published by Daily Star, scientists from NASA and ESA have planned to test whether it is possible to deflect the orbit of potentially-deadly asteroids. It is worth mentioning here that the mission will launch in 2022 and involves two spacecraft, one to smash into the space rock and the other to measure the results of the collision. 

• Also Read: In Pics: 4 Asteroids That Will Come Extremely Close To Earth in September 
• Also Read: ALERT! Destructive Asteroid With ‘100 Per Cent Chance Of Impact’ Coming Towards Earth

Experts will meet in Italy to fine-tune the plan. So far, it involves crashing NASA spacecraft DART — or Double Asteroid Impact Test — into the asteroid. Then ESA's Hera will survey DART's crash site and analyse the direction of the asteroid's new path, Daily Star reported. 

Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May explained how the mission would be conducted using the might of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and other asteroid specialists. 

“HERA is going to show us no one has ever seen before. This ESA mission will be humanities first-ever spacecraft to visit a double asteroid, Didymos. “This asteroid is typical of the thousands that pose an impact risk to our planet.” express.co.uk quoted Brian May as saying.  

• Also Read: Asteroid Terror: Four Deadly Space Rocks To Hover Around Earth THIS September 

“Imagine a mountain in the sky with another rock about the size of the great pyramid swinging around it, that is Didymos. Just the seemingly tiny moon would be big enough to destroy a city if it were to collide with the Earth. But we are going to find out if it is possible to deflect it,” Brian May added.  

He further said, “HERA is led by a multinational team of scientists and engineers. Right now all we have is many years and theories but HERA will revolutionise our understanding of asteroids and how to protect ourselves from them. Then ESA comes in, HERA will map the impact crater left by DART and measure the mass of the asteroid.”  

“Knowing this mass is key to determining what is inside and knowing for certain whether we would be able to deflect it. Next come our briefcase-sized CubeSats, if you think of HERA like an aeroplane, cubists will operate more like drones,” Brian concluded.  

• Also Read: Are We Safe From An Asteroid Armageddon? Find Out Here 

According to a report published by spacetelescope.org, there are more than 7 lakh asteroids that have been found in space. Asteroids are mainly found in an area called the ‘main belt’, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

{ https://www.newsnation.in/ }

03-09-2019 om 18:51 geschreven door peter  

FX creating series based on ‘Bridgewater Triangle,’ an alleged hotbed of paranormal activity

By Steve Annear Globe Staff,

Some residents of what’s been called “America’s Bermuda Triangle” have poked fun at the mention of paranormal activity or monster sightings in their South Shore communities.

Others have gone on record and sworn by what they’ve witnessed or encountered, be it strange lights in the sky, hairy creatures in the swamp, or a spirit in disheveled clothes lingering on the side of the road and waiting to hitch a ride.

While people’s opinions vary about the unexplained phenomena, on this they seem to agree: News that a major network could be making a series based on the legends of “The Bridgewater Triangle” — an approximately 200-square-mile region of Southeastern Massachusetts that has long been linked to the supernatural and macabre — is exciting, to say the least.

In an exclusive last week, Deadline.com reported that FX has acquired a short story titled “The Bridgewater Triangle” and plans to develop it into a television show.

Details are as thin as a spectral being for now. But Noah Hawley, the force behind the television series “Fargo,” and his company 26 Keys Productions, are reportedly executive producing what’s being described as an “apocalyptic horror thriller.”

The show would center on three siblings who must unite and confront a confluence of paranormal events, Deadline.com reported.

A spokesperson for FX confirmed in an e-mail to the Globe that the information in the Deadline story is correct but said the network has “no further information at this time.”

“The Bridgewater Triangle” refers to an area bordered by the points of Abington, Freetown, and Rehoboth. More than a dozen other municipalities fall within its mystical bounds.

The name for the uncanny zone was first coined by famed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman more than 40 years ago and is a play on the mysterious section of the Atlantic Ocean where boats and airplanes have reportedly vanished, known as the Bermuda Triangle.

Coleman, founder and director of the International Cryptozoology Museum, in Portland, Maine, said while going to school full time in the 1970s, he began investigating “creature reports” from the area.

He later mapped out where the strange activities had been reported. Eventually, he connected the dots and realized all of the alleged sightings — UFOs, birdlike creatures, large snakes, man-beasts — were entrapped by the space.

“It was very obviously a triangle,” Coleman said. “I was just putting all of the pieces of data together, and that’s why I came up with the word ‘Bridgewater Triangle,’ just to give a handle to people that want to read about it, or wanted to talk about it.”

The name later appeared more officially in his 1983 book, “Mysterious America.”

The Hockomock Swamp, part of a network of wetlands, creeks, rivers, and ponds that span thousands of acres, is perhaps the most infamous part of the triangle.

According to Globe archives, the Wampanoag tribe gave the spot, which falls within Bridgewater, Easton, Norton, Raynham, Taunton, and West Bridgewater, its name, meaning “place where spirits dwell.”

The habitat has been called the “beating heart” of the triangle and is rich with history. According to the Massachusetts Historical Commission, “the archaeological sites in the vicinity of this wetland complex are known to span a period of 9,000 years.”

Stories about Hockomock’s “inhabitants” have thrived for generations and include sightings of “vicious, giant dogs with red eyes seen ravenously sinking their fangs into the throats of ponies; a flying creature that resembled a pterodactyl, the dinosaur that could fly; Native-American ghosts paddling canoes; and glowing somethings hovering above the trees,” the Globe reported in a 2005 story about the swamp.

Reports of a Bigfoot-like creature wandering the thickets and brambles have also been a constant theme throughout the years.

The announcement that a show will probably cast a spotlight on the Bridgewater Triangle has people who live within it — as well as those who have spent time researching or exploring it — looking forward to seeing how its myths and legends could come alive on the small screen.

“I’ve certainly heard about the FX show,” Marilee Kenney Hunt, Bridgewater’s town clerk, said in an e-mail to the Globe, “and shared the news with family members across the country.”

In a private Facebook group called “Bridgewater Residents,” which boasts 18,000 members, people expressed interest in being part of the project if filming takes place in the state.

“If ANYONE sees a casting call for this, PLEASE let me know,” one person wrote on the page recently.

Another said, “Put me in coach.”

When a Globe reporter posted in the group, asking whether there’s talk in town about the series, more than 100 comments followed, with a handful of people offering to tell their own stories.

Filmmaker Aaron Cadieux, who wrote and codirected a 2013 documentary with local actor Manny Famolarecalled “The Bridgewater Triangle,” said he’s hopeful about the series.

“This will raise the national profile of the Bridgewater Triangle,” he said in a telephone interview. “We were surprised, but very pleasantly surprised [by the news].”

While the duo’s 90-minute film has no direct affiliation with the story FX apparently acquired, Cadieux offered up their expertise on the subject matter, if needed.

“We would be happy to talk to them or consult with them in any way that we can. It’s just exciting,” he said. “Selfishly, I hope people will find their way to our documentary.”

Coleman, the cryptozoologist, said he hasn’t been in contact with FX either, but he’d also be willing to talk about his ties to the region and the title he coined.

“That would be fun,” he said. “It’s something that if they do a good job writing it or acting in it, I’d watch it — because I came up with the name.”

---

• Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannear.

[Boston Globe]

03-09-2019 om 17:23 geschreven door peter  

03-09-2019 om 17:09 geschreven door peter  

Marine in the Secret Space Program Speaks Out

From Gaia “Randy Cramer’s life experiences are either incredible or absurd. He reports that he spent 20 years as a Marine in the U.S. Secret Space Program (SSP). His tour of duty took him first to an elaborate, secret, fully-equipped base on the moon.

Then, he went to Mars where he spent 17 years at a military base. After a major loss of human lives during a battle between the military forces and native people of Mars, he was deployed back to the moon where he spent his final three years as a military pilot.

He tells his story with vivid and captivating detail. Randy Cramer: Space Traveler and Mars Colonist Randy Cramer, who initially told his story under the pseudonym “Captain Kaye,” says he was only four years old when he began training for the SSP through a program called Project Moon Shadow.

He was one of approximately 300 girls and boys who were “covertly drafted” to participate in the program. Girls comprised only 20 percent of the group, a male/female ratio that remained consistent during his entire 20 years with the SSP. Cramer recalls that during his childhood, he would be taken from his bed at night.

Even though he would be gone for days or even weeks, he would be returned to his bed and travel back in time to when he was taken. He would wake up as though no time had passed, feeling like he had just had a really, really long dream.”

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 16:53 geschreven door peter  

2019 Crop Circle Gallery

Climb aboard for an unflinching ride thru the uncharted landscape of the Kali Yuga & the Great Shift of the Ages.

The 2019 crop circle season began a bit differently, with a splash of formations in France that got everyone’s attention.  For most of June it looked like a runaway for the number of  French formations, but the traditional English locales caught up by mid-July. 

July 1st – England

July 1 – Switzerland

July 3 – England

July 8 – England

July 16 – England

July 16 – France

July 20 – England

July 23 – England

July 28 – England

July 28 – Wiltshire, England

August 4 – England

August 11 – England

August 20 – England

August 24 – England

µ

~Crop Circle Researchers~

Crop Circle Connector

Temporary Temples

Lucy Pringle

Visible Signs

These tireless Researchers/Investigators are doing a massive job which deserves our support as much as our attention.  Just imagine if they  could no longer afford the camera drones and other required equipment to bring us these amazing images & videos.  The days of cameras on poles are gone forever, and the new equipment sure isn’t cheap.  Please support these people.

Subscribe to their sites, purchase their yearbooks & videos, make donations.

They’re Doing it for Us!

• 2018 Crop Circle Gallery
• 2017 Crop Circle Gallery
• 2016 Crop Circle Gallery
• 2015 Crop Circle Gallery
• 2014 crop circle gallery
• 2013 Crop Circles: part-2
• 2013 Crop Circles: mid-season gallery

Source: 

• https://augureye.blogspot.com/2019/09/2019-crop-circle-gallery.html

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 16:48 geschreven door peter  

Planet X Warning Really Revealed On Russian TV? Revisited

Of course there is great debate about Planet X. Even Graham Hancock has said a roaming planet has come thru before. But one thing I see all the time in comments is that this was announced on Russian TV. So I decided to revisit this to see what interesting comments we could find from our commenters.

Russia has Been warning us ever since 2012, they don’t hide it. Share… this video must be shared with max number of people! make your part now, please share it! Because the Government Cover-up!

• Important: Before you JUDGE, watch the whole video. NIBIRU PLANET-X EMINENT APPROACH! MUST SEE!! URGENT VIDEO PUBLIC UTILITY! GOV COVER UP!

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 16:29 geschreven door peter  

A sky-watcher using his telescope captures an unknown object as it passes the moon.

It looks like it is a fleet of UFOs, a large Mothership followed by several smaller UFOs. The video captured last month, August 2019, shows the fleet of UFOs passing the moon until they disappear behind the moon.

  

2019

2014

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 16:16 geschreven door peter