Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
30-12-2019
Space Weather: Nightside Barrier Gently Brakes ‘Bursty’ Plasma Bubbles
Space Weather: Nightside Barrier Gently Brakes ‘Bursty’ Plasma Bubbles
An image from a magnetohydrodynamic simulation by the Gamera project at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory shows bursty flows (in red and brown) in the plasma sheet. Rice University space plasma physicists developed algorithms to measure the buoyancy waves that appear in thin filaments of magnetic flux on Earth’s nightside.
Credit: K. Sorathia/JHUAPL
The solar wind that pummels the Earth’s dayside magnetosphere causes turbulence, like air over a wing. Physicists at Rice University have developed new methods to characterize how that influences space weather on the nightside.
It’s rarely quiet up there. The solar wind streams around the Earth and cruises off into the night, but closer to the planet, parcels of plasma get caught in the turbulence and sink back toward Earth. That turbulence causes big ripples in the plasma.
A magnetohydrodynamic simulation by the Gamera project at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory shows bursty bulk flows (in red and brown) in the plasma sheet approaching Earth on the nightside. Rice University space plasma physicists have developed algorithms to measure the buoyancy waves that appear in thin filaments of magnetic flux on the nightside.
Courtesy of Gamera/JHUAP
With the help of several spacecraft and computational tools developed over the past decade, Rice scientists led by space plasma physicist Frank Toffoletto can now assess the ripples, called buoyancy waves, caused by the turbulence.
These waves, or oscillations, have been observed in the thin layer of magnetic flux along the base of the plasma sheet that tails away from the planet’s nightside. The Rice theory is the first to quantify their motion.
The theory adds another element to the Rice Convection Model, an established, decades-in-the-making algorithm that helps scientists calculate how the inner and middle magnetosphere will react to events like solar storms that threaten satellites, communications and power grids on Earth.
The new paper in JGR Space Physics by Toffoletto, emeritus professor Richard Wolf and former graduate student Aaron Schutza starts by describing the bubbles — “bursty bulk flows” predicted by Wolf and Rice alumnus Duane Pontius in 1990 — that fall back toward Earth through the plasma tail.
An image from a magnetohydrodynamic simulation by the Gamera project at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory shows bursty flows (in red and brown) in the plasma sheet. Rice University space plasma physicists developed algorithms to measure the buoyancy waves that appear in thin filaments of magnetic flux on Earth’s nightside.
Credit: K. Sorathia/JHUAPL
Functionally, they’re the reverse of buoyant air bubbles that bob up and down in the atmosphere because of gravity, but the plasma bubbles respond to magnetic fields instead. The plasma bubbles lose most of their momentum by the time they touch down at the theoretical, filamentlike boundary between the inner plasma sheet and the protective plasmasphere.
That sets the braking boundary into a gentle oscillation, which lasts mere minutes before stabilizing again. Toffoletto compared the motion to a plucked guitar string that quickly returns to equilibrium.
“The fancy name for this is the eigenmode,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out the low-frequency eigenmodes of the magnetosphere. They haven’t been studied very much, though they appear to be associated with dynamic disruptions to the magnetosphere.”
A simulation by Rice University space plasma physicist Frank Toffoletto shows buoyancy wave oscillations in a magnetic field, due to bursty bulk flows drawn toward Earth on the nightside.
Courtesy of Frank Toffoletto7
Toffoletto said the Rice team has in recent years discovered through simulations that the magnetosphere doesn’t always respond in a linear fashion to the steady driving force of the solar wind.
“You get all kinds of wave modes in the system,” he said, explaining that bursty bulk flows are one such mode. “Every time one of these things come flying in, when they hit the inner region, they basically reach their equilibrium point and oscillate with a certain frequency. Finding that frequency is what this paper is all about.”
As measured by the THEMIS spacecraft, the periods of these waves are a few minutes and the amplitudes are often bigger than the Earth.
“Understanding the natural frequency of the system and how it behaves can tell us a lot about the physical properties of plasma on the nightside, its transport and how it might be related to the aurora,” he said. “A lot of these phenomena show up in the ionosphere as auroral structures, and we don’t understand where these structures come from.”
Toffoletto said the models suggest buoyant waves may play a role in the formation of the ring current that consists of charged particles that flow around Earth as well as magnetospheric substorms, all of which are connected to the aurora.
He said that no more than a decade ago, many magnetosphere simulations “would look very uniform, kind of boring.” The Rice group is collaborating with the Applied Physics Laboratory to include the Rice Convection Model in a newly developed global magnetosphere code called “Gamera,” named after the fictional Japanese monster.
“Now, with such higher-resolution models and much better numerical methods, these structures are starting to show up in the simulations,” Toffoletto said. “This paper is one little piece of the puzzle we’re putting together of how the system behaves. All this plays a big role in understanding how space weather works and how that in turn impacts technology, satellites and ground-based systems.”
The Rice Convection Model itself was refreshed this month in a paper led by recent Rice alumnus Jian Yang, now an associate professor of Earth and space sciences at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China.
The new study was supported by a NASA Heliophysics Supporting Research grant.
Over 100 Stars Vanish From the Sky, Providing Yet More Evidence of Alien Civilizations Harvesting Stars to generate Antimatter Fuel That Can Power FTL Drives
Over 100 Stars Vanish From the Sky, Providing Yet More Evidence of Alien Civilizations Harvesting Stars to generate Antimatter Fuel That Can Power FTL Drives
As part of my “Oblivion Agenda” lecture series, I described how non-Earth civilizations harvest entire stars to generate antimatter fuel that powers FTL (Faster Than Light) warp drives. FTL travel is necessary to traverse the galaxy, given the enormous distances involved (even at 1000 times the speed of light, it would take 120 years to travel from one end of our Milky Way galaxy to the other).
Now, mainstream science news is writing about a bombshell discovery: Over 100 stars have vanished from the night sky in just the last 50 years. They’re literally gone. As I’ve explained in my lectures, this is because our galaxy no doubt hosts “star eaters” — advanced alien civilizations that consume entire stars to create antimatter fuel. This idea is beginning to achieve mainstream status, by the way. As CNET.com now reports:
“Unless a star directly collapses into a black hole, there is no known physical process by which it could physically vanish,” explains a new study published in the Astronomical Journal and led by Beatriz Villarroel of Stockholm University and Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. “The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations.”
The project team believes their search for vanishing stars could be useful in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by identifying “hot spots” in space where an unexpectedly large number of stars seem to be missing.
“Zooming in on the (hot spots) in our SETI (or technosignature) searches, we can identify the most probable locations to host extra-terrestrial intelligence,” they write.
The idea here is that a very advanced alien civilization may be able to construct a hypothetical megastructure called a Dyson sphere that completely encompasses a star in order to capture a large portion of its energy.
Here’s the image of vanishing stars. The left panel was taken in the 1950s. The right panel is from 2019. Notice how the large star in the center of the rectangle has vanished?
Importantly, these stars vanished many thousands of years ago, depending on their distance from Earth. Through normal space, light travels at a known constant speed (when gravity is not distorting space, see below), and we know the distance of these stars thanks to parallax measurements from Earth. Thus, we can easily determine how long ago these stars vanished, given that their light takes a certain amount of time to each us.
This vanishing of stars has no explanation in mainstream astronomy, but it is explained by the existence of “star eaters” — alien civilizations that consume entire stars to power the FTL warp drives on their ships. Stars can be harvested into antimatter fuel which can then be used to project gravity distortion fields that accelerate ships to speed that far exceed the speed of light.
This is exactly what I’ve described in my Oblivion Agenda lectures, which are available at OblivionAgenda.com. I also gave a live lecture on this topic to thousands of people in Branson, Missouri, which was recorded and is available on this DVD set from GenSix Productions.
Steve Quayle himself, founder of GenSix, said this live talk was the best live presentation he’s ever seen. I continue to receive feedback from people saying it changed their entire view of reality.
Yes, the speed of light can be radically altered by bending the space through which light travels
Naturally, people who think they know a little something about physics will immediately scream, “But the speed of light cannot be exceeded! It is an absolute limit!”
That’s not true at all. The speed of light is limited according to the spacetime “grid” through which light is passing, so if that grid is stretched via projected gravity fields, then light itself can more quickly traverse that grid. In other words, if you bend spacetime by a factor of 10, stretching it out to where the “grid” of space is now ten times more elongated, then light can appear to travel at ten times the “speed of light” to an outside observer, even though within the grid itself, the speed of light is still constant compared to the grid.
Put another way, the speed of light varies according to the distortion of space by gravity, which is why the observed speed of light by scientists all around the world is not a constant. Small variations in the speed of light have been routinely observed literally thousands of times by dozens of different labs around the world. These speed variations are due to gravity waves washing over our planet, causing variations in the curvature of space itself (which is how gravity works, of course).
Listen to my short podcast on this topic here:
In fact, variations in the observed speed of light are so common that the scientific community had to cheat to fix the speed of light to a constant. They did this through circular logic, by defining the speed of light as a component of how long it takes light to travel one meter, while defining one meter as the distance traversed by light in a given amount of time. These definitions are circular, which is why the speed of light is a “constant,” even when it isn’t in reality. (This is just one way the scientific community deceives the world with fake science and fake math. It’s more common than you might suppose…)
I don’t have the space here to do a full science paper on this for those who are still stuck in Newtonian physics, but the simple explanation is that gravity not only bends light, but gravity bends the space through which light travels. If you didn’t know that gravity bends the space through which light travels, then you aren’t even up to speed on the most basic astrophysics principles used by mainstream university lab all around the world. Yes, gravity bends light indirectly, by bending the space through which light travels, and that explains why large masses such as stars, black holes and planets, create a “lensing effect,” bending the light of stars that travels near those masses as the light makes its way to Earth. This is why stars appear to shift around the perimeter of the sun as observed during a total eclipse.
So the key to traveling faster than the speed of light is found in bending space, not accelerating in standard space. You can never accelerate to the speed of light in standard space, because there isn’t enough energy in the universe to achieve that goal. But you can, if you have the tech, bend space itself by projecting strong gravity fields that distort spacetime. An entire ship can then be propelled to speeds in excess of 1000 times the speed of light by traversing this space distortion, which can be projected as a spheric bubble around a spacecraft.
Projecting gravity fields, as you might suspect, requires enormous amounts of energy. The kind of energy that would have to be harvested from entire stars.
From my Oblivion Agenda slides, I explain why FTL technology is commonplace in the cosmos:
This slide explains how NASA-linked scientists are well aware that FTL travel can be achieved by projecting gravity fields using high density fuel such as antimatter:
This isn’t science fiction, by the way. It’s a serious subject that’s being studied by serious scientists connected with NASA as a form of future space flight. It turns out you actually can travel faster than light by bending space using antimatter, which means you aren’t violating the absolute speed limit of light, even as you are moving from point A to point B at a velocity that would appear to be faster than light to a stationary observer.
This is the subject of study of a NASA-linked project called “Project Eagleworks,” and here’s a video of Harold “Sonny” White from Eagleworks laboratories, explaining his ongoing research into this exotic “advanced propulsion” technology:
As I mention on OblivionAgenda.com, alien spacecraft can appear to “teleport” by applying a 100 x C (100 times the speed of light) spacetime warp bubble for one microsecond (one millionth of a second), which would propel a craft 30 km faster than the blink of a human eye. Importantly, the occupants of the craft would feel nothing.
Harold White is the same scientist, by the way, who has calculated that warp bubbles which achieve 10 x C (ten times the speed of light) could be achieved using the energy found in 200 kg of antimatter fuel.See his research summary document here, which explains:
Additionally, the lab is implementing a warp field interferometer that will be able to measure spacetime disturbances down to 150nm. Recent work published by White [1] [2] [3] suggests that it may be possible to engineer spacetime creating conditions similar to what drives the expansion of the cosmos. Although the expected magnitude of the effect would be tiny, it may be a “Chicago pile” moment for this area of physics.
There are many fascinating areas of research to consider in all this, and I’ve lectured about many of them at OblivionAgenda.com. For example, I’ve proposed that gravity wave detectors could be placed on the moon and used to detect visitations from alien craft which are using projected warp bubbles, since any disturbance in the gravity warping of spacetime ripples out at the speed of light and can be detected by ordinary sensors. This is how Earth can easily detect when non-Earth civilizations are using warp bubble drives anywhere near our solar system. (My guess is that NASA already has these sensors on the moon and is already well aware of all this.)
Additionally, I’ve proposed ideas on harvesting pulsars and magnetars to produce antimatter fuel which would be necessary to power warp bubble projection systems. This also explains the economics of the cosmos and why pulsars and similar collapsed stars are so valuable as the “cosmic oil wells” for intragalactic travel.
Why alien civilizations need to consume entire stars to power their cosmic conquest
Notice that in the passage above, I was talking about “star eater” operations, where entire stars (pulsars, magnetars, etc.) are consumed in the production of antimatter fuel to power spacecraft at speeds vastly exceeding the speed of light.
Here’s the slide from my presentation that talks about intergalactic travel and why the vast distances are so great that even traveling at 1000 times the speed of light would take 25 years just to reach the nearest neighbor galaxy:
This is why traveling from one galaxy to another in any practical way would require travel speeds of 10,000 or even 100,000 times the speed of light. Projecting such strong gravity distortions would require the energy of entire stars, perhaps requiring one star to be consumed for a single trip to a neighboring galaxy at 100,000 times the speed of light.
This may explain why the stars are vanishing at an alarming rate. In fact, it’s the best explanation for why stars are vanishing from the night sky. Alien civilizations are literally consuming them as energy sources, or what I call “cosmic oil wells” in my Oblivion Agenda presentation.
Antimatter is spontaneously generated in storm clouds in the atmosphere, by the way. Positrons (positively-charged electrons, which are one form of antimatter) can also originate with the decay of potassium-40, which is found inside our own bodies. (Yes, your body is generating very small amounts of antimatter, too.)
When synthesizing antimatter — and this is crucial to understand — it currently requires 1 billion times more energy to make antimatter than can be released by it, using Earth technology. Imagine charging a battery, but having to expend one billion times more watts of power than the battery can ever release. That’s the inefficiency currently found in antimatter generation. If alien civilizations can improve the efficiency of this process by a million times, it would still require one thousand times more energy to make antimatter than is released by it.
In other words, synthesizing antimatter requires enormous amounts of energy — the scale of energy that must be harvested from stars.
Once this antimatter is created, it can be physically stored in “fuel cells” which are transported and distributed to the spacecraft that consume them to project gravity fields that distort spacetime (and thereby achieved FTL travel).
The amount of energy required to distort spacetime is not linear
Now, a person who doesn’t understand the nature of reality might think that distorting spacetime by a factor of 100 would require only ten times more energy than distorting spacetime by a factor of 10. However, the energy expenditures are not linear.
Although we don’t yet know the exact shape of the energy expenditure curve, I’m going to take an educated guess and propose that the amount of energy required to distort spacetime has a squared relationship with the severity of the distortion. In other words, distorting the spacetime field by a factor of 100 would require 100 times the energy as distorting it by a factor of 10. That’s because 10 squared is 100.
And if you needed to travel at 1000 times the speed of light, that would require ten thousand times more energy than traveling at 10 times the speed of light.
I explain all this in more detail in my Counterthink lecture shown here:
This energy must be constantly expended for the full duration of the journey in order to maintain the gravity distortion around the ship. The moment the energy expenditure stops, the “shape” of spacetime collapses back to normal space, and your travel speed collapses back to normal velocities.
This same relationship, by the way, is found throughout physics, such as the inverse square rule of radiation exposure vs. distance from the source. Nature loves squared relationships.
This should not be an odd idea, given that even here on Earth, flying airplanes at very fast speeds — such as supersonic speeds — requires far more energy than flying at subsonic speeds. In fact, the current speeds achieved by commercial airliners such as Boeing jets is determined entirely by fuel efficiency, not maximum achievable speeds. Yes, engineers at Boeing can build planes that fly at Mach 2, for example, but the fuel expenditures are more than ten times greater than the fuel expended at 450 mph, which is roughly the current commercial air travel speed used across the industry.
If you want to go fast, in other words, it’s going to cost you dearly. And the same is true on a cosmic scale, too. Traveling at just the speed of light itself, by the way, is no doubt considered “slow” by cosmic travel standards. Even 100 times the speed of light is painstakingly slow, given the extreme distances between stars even in our own galaxy. Don’t forget that Earth is 27,000 light years away from the center of our own galaxy. That’s 270 years in a spacecraft if you’re traveling at 100 times the speed of light, and you haven’t even left your home galaxy yet.
Stars are fuel stations for any civilization willing to destroy them along its path of travel
Advanced alien civilizations could travel at perhaps 1000 or 10,000 times the speed of light as long as they could consume stars along the way, transforming entire stars into antimatter energy to power their warp bubble drives (gravity projection systems).
Naturally, this also means destroying the entire local star system in the process, causing orbiting planets to descend into freezing cold lifelessness.
But think about it: If humans had the ability to turn entire stars into energy, do you really think any sense of morality or ethics would stop humanity from destroying anything in its path of conquest and riches? Human greed tells you everything you need to know about this issue. Conquering alien civilizations have zero respect for other life forms, and they will destroy anything required to achieve their goals of territory expansion and resource capture.
What, did you think greed was only limited to humans? Just thank God humanity hasn’t yet figured out how to eat stars, or we might just eat our own in order to prop of the stock price of the latest Elon Musk delusion.
Here’s Episode 5 of the Oblivion Agenda lecture series. It covers more discussions on FTL travel and why it’s commonplace in the cosmos:
We now have physical evidence that aliens are consuming stars in our own galaxy
The upshot of all this is that we now have physical evidence that aliens are consuming entire stars in our own galaxy. Of course, the establishment astrophysics community is forced to downplay any possibility of little green men. Via CNET:
“But we are clear that none of these events have shown any direct signs of being ETI,” says co-author Martin López Corredoira in a statement. “We believe that they are natural, if somewhat extreme, astrophysical sources.”
In other words, Corredoira is saying that stars are vanishing for reasons that astrophysicists can’t yet explain. Yet we already have an explanation that makes perfect sense: They’re being harvested as energy sources by alien civilizations that are using the energy to power FTL travel as part of their conquest, colonization and strategic dominance of the real estate of our galaxy.
Given the average lifetime of a star — billions of years — it is statistically impossible for 100 prominent stars to vanish from our night sky in just 50 years. And those are merely the stars they’ve noticed. At this rate, we’re talking about 2 stars per Earth year, and the real number is likely much higher… perhaps 20 stars per year.
Has anybody wondered whether our own sun might be the next start to be harvested by a dominant civilization that sees us as little more than “stupid apes” who inhabit a planet that we’ve already half destroyed?
Get informed and upgrade your knowledge about cosmic reality. Watch my lectures at OblivionAgenda.com.
This photo was taken my the Mars Spirit rover on its 106th day on Mars. The object I found is a structure that has been made recently. The smoothness and lines of it all indicate that something is living in this small structure right now. Yes, I said small. The creatures that reside here are about 1-2cm tall. The structure itself is about 24cm tall by 35 cm wide. The life forms might only be insect like or a small animal, but nevertheless its made by a life form. Much how termites create standing and spiral mounds. Scott C. Waring
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Possible UFO Fleet Scanning Grid Patterns Across The US To Find Something. UFO Sighting News.
Possible UFO Fleet Scanning Grid Patterns Across The US To Find Something. UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: December 1-30, 2019 Location of sighting: Colorado + Nebraska, USA Many are calling these objects drones, but its also possible its not a drone fleet but a UFO fleet. You see Colorado is famous for its glowing white round balls of light flying from the mountains during the day and night. If this is an alien fleet, that would explain why its seen all over the USA, not just one location. I mean UFOs can change speeds fast and could easily travel from Colorado To Nebraska in a few seconds. And since I have not found any raw footage of a drone fleet anywhere...I rule that out. Nothing could do that in such a widespread area unless it has alien technology in it. Lots of reports and not one photo or video of a drone fleet. Thats odd. The sheriff states that the drones were seen flying in a grid patter, following a square shaped area path, scanning it, then moving on to the next grid. Often seeing 17 or more at once, they have appeared every night from 7pm to 10 pm, yet not a single video of them exists. Clearly the flying objects were searching for something, something below the ground, something of importance. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
This video is one of the best computation of UFO movements on the Moon recorded by sky-watcher BruceSeesall.
In the video, Bruce reads part of transcripts of astronauts Neil and Buzz while supposedly on the surface of the moon as we watch some of his findings, like the several UFO movements, structures on the moon and some surface shots that are very revealing.
Did astronauts see anything on the Moon like UFO's? I think Bruce has already given the answer by showing his own proof of UFOs on the lunar surface.
30-12-2019 om 15:44
geschreven door peter
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NASA's 'Treasure Map' of Water Ice on Mars Shows Where Humans Should Land
NASA's 'Treasure Map' of Water Ice on Mars Shows Where Humans Should Land
The annotated area in this animation of the Red Planet is where NASA spacecraft have found near-surface water ice that would be easy for astronauts to dig up.
NASA's wish to follow the water on Mars just got a helping hand.
Scientists have released a new global map showing water ice that is as little as 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) below the Red Planet's surface.
With data in hand, the research team located at least one promising landing spot for future astronaut missions: a big zone in the northern hemisphere's Arcadia Planitia. This area has a lot of water ice close to the surface and is in the ideal location for a human Mars mission, because it is in a temperate, midlatitude region with plenty of sunlight, the research team wrote in a new study describing the findings.
This map shows where the underground water ice is located on Mars. Cool colors represent water ice that is closer to the surface than the areas in warm colors, and black zones indicate areas where a visiting spacecraft would sink into fine dust on the surface. The area outlined in white represents the ideal region to send astronauts for them to dig up water ice.(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)
"You wouldn't need a backhoe to dig up this ice. You could use a shovel," lead author Sylvain Piqueux, who studies planetary surfaces at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement. "We're continuing to collect data on buried ice on Mars, zeroing in on the best places for astronauts to land."
Further study of the "treasure map" could unlock more landing locations, too, according to NASA. Water is a precious resource for future astronaut missions to Mars, where the space agency wants to land in the 2030s. The hope is that, instead of hauling all of the water astronauts will need from Earth to the Red Planet, astronauts could get their drinking water and the components of water (oxygen and hydrogen) for rocket fuel from Mars itself.
The new map is based on data from two long-running spacecraft: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey. Each spacecraft used heat-sensitive instruments to find the ice, because buried ice changes the temperature of the surface. To be sure that it was ice they were seeing, the scientists cross-referenced their work with other data — like ice seen in radar instruments and Mars Odyssey's gamma-ray spectrometer, which is optimized for spotting water ice deposits.
The surface of Mars is a desert; water is scarce. That's because liquid water evaporates quickly in the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet. There have been reports of briny water flowing on crater walls, but some scientists say those streams are more likely dry dust flows. Notably, there is plenty of water ice locked up in the Martian polar caps. But this wouldn't be a viable solution for a lengthy mission because it would get too cold and dark at the poles for a good part of the year.
Could mysterious flashing lights among the stars be signals of extraterrestrial life?
Astrophysicists aren’t ruling it out. In a new paper, they’ve theorized that a number of inexplicable flickering lights observed over the decades may be “interstellar communication lasers,” used to send messages from one end of outer space to the other.
They say the blinking lights are most likely derived from “natural, if somewhat extreme astrophysical sources,” adding that the finding could change the study of astrophysics forever.
“The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations,” the authors write in their report, recently published in the Astronomical Journal.
Researchers pulled publicly accessible images, such as old military records, dating back to the 1950s. By comparing historical observations with current surveys of the sky, they were able to pinpoint instances of stars seemingly disappearing from the Milky Way. They call these vanished objects “red transients.”
“Finding an actually vanishing star — or a star that appears out of nowhere! — would be a precious discovery and certainly would include new astrophysics beyond the one we know of today,” says lead author Beatriz Villarroel, in a Stockholm University press statement.
As scientists understand the death of a star, their light dwindles to become a white dwarf, or they die in a sudden explosion called a supernova. But signs of a point of light in these images vanishing altogether may also tell of a new, as-yet undocumented astrophysical phenomenon, or, potentially, extraterrestrial activity.
Some have theoretically predicted the existence of “failed supernovae,” or when a massive star implodes into a black hole, but without an outward explosion. Those, still, would be very rare, scientists say.
A more sci-fi explanation for the strange lights could be that they’re lasers meant for communication via extraterrestrial structures built by some advanced alien civilizations — what scientists call Dyson spheres, that can harness the energy in stars.
Still, neither theory is proven through any observable evidence.
The project, called Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) is ongoing as just 15 percent of unexplained objects in their source images have been thoroughly investigated. So far, Villarroel and her team have noted 100 disappearing stars, adding they are “very excited” about the current discovery.
As they continue to research, they hope to involve other astronomy enthusiasts and stargazers to help parse the remaining 150,000 examples of these unexplained lights.
“We hope to get help from the community to look through the images as a part of a citizen science project,” says study researcher Lars Mattsson. “We are looking at ways to do that right now and that will be something we will be able to talk more about at a later date.”
A new study of the atmospheres of known giant exoplanets suggests that water – an essential ingredient for life – may be common on other worlds in our Milky Way galaxy. At the same, there may be less of it than astronomers once expected.
Artist’s concept of a gas giant exoplanet orbiting close to its star. The new study suggests water vapor is common on such worlds, but maybe in lesser amounts than thought.
Water – needed for life as we know it – has turned out to be common in our solar system. Besides Earth, of course, there are moons in the outer solar system with oceans beneath their icy surfaces. Ice can be found almost everywhere in our neighborhood of space, even on the moon and Mercury! But what about in other solar systems? A new study, led by researchers from the University of Cambridge, suggests that water may be at the same time both plentiful and scarce, depending on the type of planets involved.
The new findings were announced by Cambridge on December 11, 2019, and the peer-reviewed paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on the same day.
The researchers studied atmospheric data from 19 known exoplanets to learn more about their chemical and thermal properties. These planets ranged from mini-Neptunes (nearly 10 Earth masses) to super-Jupiters (over 600 Earth masses). Temperatures on these worlds range from 20 degrees Celsius (about 70 degrees Fahrenheit) to over 2,000 degrees Celsius (3,600 F). These planets are similar to the gas and ice giants in our solar system, but they orbit a variety of different types of stars. Study leader Nikku Madhusudhan, of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, said:
We are seeing the first signs of chemical patterns in extra-terrestrial worlds, and we’re seeing just how diverse they can be in terms of their chemical compositions.
Based on what we know about the giant planets in our own solar system, these kinds of exoplanets were predicted to have similar high abundances of certain elements such as hydrogen, oxygen and water. So what did they find?
The results showed that 14 of the planets had an abundance of water vapor, as well as an abundance of sodium and potassium in six planets each. This suggests that there is a depletion of oxygen relative to the other elements and that the planets may have evolved with little accretion of ice. As Madhusudhan noted:
It is incredible to see such low water abundances in the atmospheres of a broad range of planets orbiting a variety of stars.
Comparison of exoplanet Kepler-186f with Earth (artist’s concept). Some of these Earth-sized rocky worlds should also be able to have liquid water on their surfaces, although that research was not part of this particular study, which focused on giant gas and ice planets.
Image via NASA Ames/ SETI Institute/ JPL-Caltech/ Ars Technica.
This means that exoplanets can be more diverse than previously thought in terms of atmospheric composition and water content, which challenges several theoretical models of planet formation. Different chemical elements can no longer just be assumed to be equally abundant in planetary atmospheres.
It’s not easy measuring how much water there is in the atmospheres of planets so far away, but it can even be challenging for planets much closer to home. Jupiter is a prime example of this. According to Luis Welbanks, lead author of the study:
Measuring the abundances of these chemicals in exoplanetary atmospheres is something extraordinary, considering that we have not been able to do the same for giant planets in our solar system yet, including Jupiter, our nearest gas giant neighbor.
Since Jupiter is so cold, any water vapor in its atmosphere would be condensed, making it difficult to measure. If the water abundance in Jupiter were found to be plentiful as predicted, it would imply that it formed in a different way to the exoplanets we looked at in the current study.
Determining the amount of water vapor in the atmospheres of the giant planets even in our own solar system can be challenging. This is Jupiter as seen by the Juno spacecraft on April 1, 2018.
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI/ MSSS/ Gerald Eichstad/ Sean Doran/ Newsweek.
As already mentioned, the sample size of planets in the study is quite small, so researchers want to expand on it in the future. Madhusudhan commented:
We look forward to increasing the size of our planet sample in future studies. Inevitably, we expect to find outliers to the current trends as well as measurements of other chemicals.
It should also be noted that this current study did not include smaller rocky super-Earth or Earth-sized planets, which are now known to be quite common in our galaxy. Those are the kinds of worlds where the amount of water would have the most consequence in terms of the potential habitability of a planet.
As Madhusudhan said:
Given that water is a key ingredient to our notion of habitability on Earth, it is important to know how much water can be found in planetary systems beyond our own.
While this study may be limited regarding the types of exoplanets known to exist, it provides an important insight into how much water could be expected to be discovered among a large population of such worlds. This will help scientists better understand how these planets formed, and perhaps provide clues as to how many potentially habitable planets there may be as well, when combined with additional future studies of rocky worlds more similar to Earth.
Bottom line:A new study from the University of Cambridge shows that water vapor is common in the atmospheres of at least some larger exoplanets, but in lesser amounts than expected.
SAN FRANCISCO — If there are creatures swimming in the buried oceans of the outer solar system, they're probably not related to us, new research suggests.
Some scientists believe that life has hopped from world to world around the solar system, aboard chunks of rock blasted into space by comet or asteroid impacts. Indeed, there's a school of thought that the life teeming here on Earth is actually native to Mars, which likely boasted habitable conditions earlier than our own planet did. (This rock-riding idea is known as "lithopanspermia," a subset of the broader panspermia notion, which envisions spread by whatever means, either natural or guided by an intelligent hand.)
But what are the odds that such putative pioneers could colonize the habitable real estate much farther out — specifically, the Jupiter moon Europa and the Saturn satellite Enceladus, both of which harbor big oceans of salty liquid water beneath their ice shells?
Purdue University geophysicist Jay Melosh tackled this question and presented the results last week during a talk here at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Melosh used computer models to follow the fates of 100,000 simulated Mars particles launched off the Red Planet by an impact. He modeled three different ejection speeds: 1, 3, and 5 kilometers per second (about 2,240 mph, 6,710 mph and and 11,180 mph, respectively).
In the simulations, a tiny percentage of the particles ended up hitting Enceladus over the course of 4.5 billion years — just 0.0000002% to 0.0000004% of the number that impacted Earth. The numbers were about 100 times higher for Europa; that moon got 0.00004% to 0.00007% of Earth's particle share.
We know that about 1 ton of Mars rocks that are fist-size or larger rain down on Earth every year. Using that figure, Melosh calculated that Europa gets about 0.4 grams of Mars material per year, and Enceladus receives just 2-4 milligrams. These are averages, he stressed; the moons' Mars mass almost certainly comes from very infrequent arrivals of decent-sized rocks, not a steady flow of small stuff.
The numbers are similar if the source of the rocks is Earth rather than Mars, Melosh said.
These results might seem to bode well for life's spread; after all, it might take just one impact of a microbe-bearing rock to turn Europa or Enceladus from habitable to inhabited. But there are more factors to consider, and they tamp down the optimism.
For example, Melosh found that the median transit time for a Mars meteorite that ends up hitting Enceladus is 2 billion years. Microbes are tough, but that's a long time to endure the harsh conditions of deep space. And the simulations indicated that these incoming Mars rocks would hit Enceladus at between 5 and 31 km/s (11,180 mph to 69,350 mph). The lower end of that range might be survivable, but it's hard to imagine anything living through those more extreme impacts, Melosh said.
"So, the bottom line: If life should be found in the oceans of Europa or Enceladus, it is very likely that it’s indigenous rather than seeded from Earth, Mars or (especially) another solar system," Melosh said during his AGU talk. (His calculations peg the probability of an exoplanet meteorite impacting Earth over the past 4.5 billion years at just 0.01%. The chances are much lower for Europa and Enceladus, he said.)
That's exciting news, if viewed from a certain perspective. Europa and Enceladus — and other potentially habitable worlds in the outer solar system, such as Saturn's huge moon Titan — may well have remained uncontaminated for eons, providing ample opportunity for native life-forms to take root and evolve. So, our solar system may boast many different types of life, rather than one widespread one. (Of course, seeing how Earth-like life would evolve over billions of years in a frigid, buried ocean would be pretty exciting, too.)
And if we discover just one such "second genesis" in our solar system, we would know that life is no miracle and must be common throughout the cosmos.
We may be on the verge of answering some of these profound questions. For example, NASA is developing a mission called Europa Clipper, which will characterize the satellite's ocean and scout out potential touchdown sites for a future life-hunting lander mission, among other tasks. Clipper is scheduled to launch in the early to mid-2020s, but the lander's future is murky; though Congress has ordered NASA to develop the surface mission, it's unclear if the funding will come through to make that happen.
Another NASA mission, called Dragonfly, will launch in 2026 to study Titan's complex chemistry. This robotic rotorcraft could potentially spot signs of life in the big moon's air, if any are there to be found. And over the longer haul, researchers are looking into ways to get a robot through the ice shells of Europa and Enceladus and into their possibly life-supporting oceans. No such mission is on the books, but one could get off the ground in the 2030s if we're lucky.
There will be serious astrobiological action closer to home soon, too. NASA plans to launch a life-hunting rover to Mars next summer, as do the European Space Agency and Russia, which are working together via a program called ExoMars. Both of these wheeled robots will focus on finding signs of ancient, not currently existing, Red Planet organisms. (Of course, chances are decent that Martians, if they exist, are related to us.)
Exoplanets are part of the picture as well. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which is due to launch in 2021, will be able to sniff the atmospheres of nearby alien worlds for potential biosignatures, as will three giant ground-based observatories scheduled to come online in the middle to late 2020s — the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook.
Researchers found a brand new mineral tucked in a tiny meteorite. It's never been seen in nature before
Researchers found a brand new mineral tucked in a tiny meteorite. It's never been seen in nature before
By Scottie Andrew, CNN
The Wedderburn meteorite contains edscottite, which occurs in iron smelting. But it has never occurred in nature until now, when researchers sliced the meteorite open and found it hidden there.
(CNN)Between 2015 and 2019, researchers discovered 31 new carbon minerals, most of them vividly colorful. Edscottite is one of the least flashy new finds, but it's also the one that's set geologists abuzz.
Edscottite is one of the phases iron goes through when it's cooling down from a high temperature, as it's smelted into steel. But the edscottite discovered in a tiny meteorite and officially named this year is the first to occur in nature.
The Wedderburn meteorite's been sitting in Museums Victoria in Australia since it was found nearby in 1951, and researchers have sliced it open to search its contents just as long.
"We have discovered 500,000 to 600,000 minerals in the lab, but fewer than 6,000 that nature's done itself," Stuart Mills, Museums Victoria's senior curator of geosciences, told Melbourne newspaper The Age.
It's named for Ed R.D. Scott, a cosmochemist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and pioneering meteorite researcher. He first identified the unique iron carbide in 1971 while studying the meteorite, but technology hadn't advanced far enough for him to characterize its structure.
It might have formed in space
Researchers Chi Ma of Caltech and Alan Rubin at UCLA examined a slab of the meteorite and were surprised to find edscottite under an electron microscope.
Just how it formed is still unclear. Geoffrey Bonning, a planetary scientist at the Australian National University who was not involved with the study, speculated to The Age that it was blasted out of the core of another planet.
The hypothetical planet, he said, formed when asteroids clumped into one big planet. The planet heated up during its formation, and hot metal dripped into its core.
"This meteorite had an abundance of carbon in it. And as it slowly cooled down, the iron and carbon came together and formed this mineral," Mills said.
Eventually, the planet might've been struck by another astronomical body and destroyed, flinging the debris across the solar system.
The debris, Bonning posited, became the Wedderburn meteorite. The edscottite might've been created when all that metal heated up in the former planet.
Christmas Eve has come and gone and NORAD has stopped tracking a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer. However, no one in a position of authority can explain why the North American Aerospace Defense Command, with headquarters in Colorado Springs, isn’t tracking those mysterious giant drones which continue to fly nightly over a remote area of northeastern Colorado. Well, perhaps there’s someone in Nebraska who’s concerned enough to investigate because new reports say the drones have crossed the border into the Cornhusker State. What is more mysterious (or nefarious) – the giant drones or the seeming lack of government and military concern?
“I had reports of anywhere from 6 to 12. One person believed it to more than 12, close to 30. It seemed like several of them were flying together, in 3 or 4 pairs.”
Sheriff Jon Stivers of Washington Country in the northeast corner of Colorado told Fox News Denver of the reports he’s been getting about the giant (6-foot wingspan) drones flying in formation in his area of jurisdiction. The 30-drone sighting appears to be the largest formation yet – the previous reports from Phillips County topped out at 17. So, the size of the nighttime (7 pm to 10 pm regularly) drone formations is growing … and now they’ve spread across the northeastern border into Nebraska.
“Britton said he has spoken with a sheriff’s deputy in neighboring Deuel County, Neb., who has been chasing drones in his state the past few days. The Deuel County sheriff could not be reached Friday to comment.”
The Denver Post says Sedgwick County Sheriff Carlton Britton (Sedgwick is the most northeastern county of Colorado) heard that his counterpart across the way in Deuel County is also getting drone reports. However, there seems to be no media coverage of them in Nebraska and no indication that any government, military or other officials of authority are looking into them.
These strange drones have been flying their suspicious nighttime missions for over a week now. Why the silence? The FAA, Air Force, DEA, U.S. Army Forces Command and other authorities maintain they’re not involved. Meanwhile, legal experts continue to maintain that the nighttime drone flights are perfectly legal. No one seems to have followed them – giving the excuse that it’s dark and they’re flying with lights off. No one has taken any photos, even at dusk, for the same reason. While the sheriffs continue to warn that shooting one down is illegal and dangerous, conspiracy theorists are calling for some kind of action – legal or not.
Everyone seems to feel the same way as Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Nestor, who told The Denver Post:
“I would love for someone to break it wide open. I don’t know what it is, but I would like it not to be in my county.”
Not in my backyard. Let someone else do it. When it comes to the mysterious drones of Colorado and now Nebraska, the prevailing mood of the 2010’s is crossing the border into the 2020’s.
We’ll continue to keep watch on this developing story.
VFRMAP.COM
This is basically the area where the sightings are occurring. It's largely uncontrolled airspace with a very sparse population.
VFRMAP.COM
Here you can see the relationship of the area of activity in relation to Denver and nearby Nebraska.
UFO Researcher Set Up And Arrested He Claims, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Researcher Set Up And Arrested He Claims, UFO Sighting News.
Todays a sad day for UFO researchers. I heard that Tyler from Secureteam10 Youtube channel was recently arrested on domestic violence, probation and assault charges. The channel has over two million subscribers and once brought in over a quarter million US dollars per year. Tyler uploaded a video titled, "I've been set up," causing two million subscribers to get notifications of the video, but he soon took it down. However other Youtubers copied the video and put on their own channels to share with the UFO community. Over a dozen other channels uploaded his video and included other things such as his mug shot, legal charges and such.
Tyler has been a bit mysterious this year, often disappearing from Youtube leaving his channel hanging for up to 6-8 weeks without a single video uploaded. But this time...its very odd. He says he was set up, arrested and beaten behind bars. That its all because of his Youtube channel and that he was told to keep quiet about it. His followers have begun to complain and leave, thinking he cares little for them.
I do know that UFO researchers do get followed, do get threatening emails and messages. Some UFO researchers have even been killed in the last few years to keep them from revealing more evidence. Its a dangerous field to be in and one I do not recommend. He was a world famous UFO researcher once and suddenly crashed. Hopefully he will not give up. Everyone makes mistakes and we don't truly know the circumstances or the pressures he was under at the time. He's got a good channel with over 1000 videos he made, most getting hundreds of thousands and even millions of views. Scott C. Waring
NASA Confirms and Accepts The Existence of UFOs on Earth Throughout History
NASA Confirms and Accepts The Existence of UFOs on Earth Throughout History
At last, NASA confirms the existence of UFOs throughout the history of humanity. The statement has been released in a document published on its official website.
The author of the document says that ancient observers of mysterious objects spotted in the sky could not assign it to natural causes. Moreover, he says that at least some of the strange phenomena witnessed in the sky by our ancestors were very similar to the UFOs that appear nowadays.
Witnesses, thousands of years ago, made use of a military language – at least in the terms that we understand it today – in order to deal with those incidents.
As you know, military terminology reflects the most advanced technology of a specific time, so when we talk about “military language” referring to the time of our ancestors we need to contextualize the term and apply it to that specific historical period.
This terminology is also used in our days to speak about UFOs in an attempt to rationalize the phenomenon and describe it in the most accurate way.
The author of the document lists numerous “military objects” spotted by ancient witnesses.
If you want to have a look at them, or if you want to know more about the subject, please read the full report “Unidentified flying objects in classical antiquity” posted by NASA here:
NASA’s InSight lander has been collecting data from Mars since the end of November 2018. The NASA probe was designed to investigate the inner workings of the Red Planet by creating a 3D map of its interior and by measuring the planet’s seismicity. But the scientists analysing the treasure trove of information collected by InSight have uncovered an unusual set of data. The researchers found a series of magnetic pulses occurring every day around midnight, local time on Mars.
The Mars probe comes equipped with a sensitive magnetometer instrument to pick up variations in the planet’s and the lander’s magnetic field.
The instrument detected “long pulsation trains” lasting as long as two hours, with wave periods of just one minute.
The findings were presented in a paper at the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.
The paper reads: “During nighttime conditions near midnight local time, long pulsation trains are occasionally detected in the magnetic field.
NASA news: The InSight lander on Mars is studying the planet's interior
(Image: NASA)
NASA news: The lander has been exploring Mars since November 2018
(Image: NASA)
The researchers believe all of the measurements have strong implications for future exploration efforts.
They wrote: “The strong magnetisation seen in the surface rocks indicates that much can be learned about the dynamics of the crust from magnetometers carried on rovers.
“We strongly encourage a cross-disciplinary approach to studying the surface of Mars.
“Mars magnetisation could revolutionise our understanding of the emplacement of the crust of Mars in much the same way as the magnetic surveys of the Earth’s oceans have revolutionised our understanding of terrestrial tectonics.
NASA mystery: Strange magnetic pulses at midnight baffle scientists studying Mars
NASA mystery: Strange magnetic pulses at midnight baffle scientists studying Mars
NASA’s InSight lander has been collecting data from Mars since the end of November 2018. The NASA probe was designed to investigate the inner workings of the Red Planet by creating a 3D map of its interior and by measuring the planet’s seismicity. But the scientists analysing the treasure trove of information collected by InSight have uncovered an unusual set of data. The researchers found a series of magnetic pulses occurring every day around midnight, local time on Mars.
The Mars probe comes equipped with a sensitive magnetometer instrument to pick up variations in the planet’s and the lander’s magnetic field.
The instrument detected “long pulsation trains” lasting as long as two hours, with wave periods of just one minute.
The findings were presented in a paper at the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.
The paper reads: “During nighttime conditions near midnight local time, long pulsation trains are occasionally detected in the magnetic field.
The researchers believe all of the measurements have strong implications for future exploration efforts.
They wrote: “The strong magnetisation seen in the surface rocks indicates that much can be learned about the dynamics of the crust from magnetometers carried on rovers.
“We strongly encourage a cross-disciplinary approach to studying the surface of Mars.
“Mars magnetisation could revolutionise our understanding of the emplacement of the crust of Mars in much the same way as the magnetic surveys of the Earth’s oceans have revolutionised our understanding of terrestrial tectonics.
Astronaut Christina Koch sets new record for longest single space flight by a woman
Astronaut Christina Koch sets new record for longest single space flight by a woman
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
Astronaut Christina Koch, launched to the International Space Station on March 15, marks her 289th day in space Saturday, breaking retired astronaut Peggy Whitson'sworld record for the longest single space flight by a woman.
Along the way, Koch has participated in four spacewalks, joining astronaut Jessica Meir for history's first all-female excursion in October. She plans to venture back outside twice more in January, again teaming up with Meir, to complete the installation of new solar array batteries for the station's solar power system.
Astronaut Christina Koch floating outside the International Space Station on October 18, 2019 during the first all-female walk in space.NASA
When Koch returns to Earth February 6, her time in space will stand at 328 days, just 12 days shy of retired astronaut Mark Kelly's U.S. record, set in 2016. The all-time single flight record — 438 days — was set by cosmonaut Valery Polyakov in 1995. Whitson still holds the U.S. record for total time in space — nearly 666 days — over five flights.
"It's a huge honor," Koch said early Friday in an interview with "CBS This Morning." "Peggy is a heroine of mine who's also been kind enough to mentor me through the years. You know ... it's not so much how many days you're up here, but what you do with each of those days. That reminds me to bring my best every single day."
Koch holds a master's in electrical engineering, is a veteran of multiple research tours in Antarctica and Greenland, and helped design instruments at the Goddard Space Flight Center for NASA science probes in orbit around Earth and Jupiter. She and Meir were selected for NASA's astronaut corps in 2013, joining a class made up of four men and four women.
"It's a wonderful time for human spaceflight because I think we finally recognize that it's not worth going unless we go together, that it's important to not turn away any innovative idea, that everyone has a role and everyone has a place at the table as we move forward," Koch said.
Space station astronaut Christina Koch chats about her record-setting mission with "CBS This Morning."NASA TV
"If we're going to go for all humanity and to support humanity's love for exploration, then we have to do it with all humanity. And I think we're seeing that as our plans unfold for going back to the moon, seeing the first woman walk on the moon in 2024, and just recognizing that we have to go together if we're going to go, and we're going to do it right."
Koch became the 14th woman to walk in space last March 29 when she and Nick Hague worked to install a second set of solar array batteries. She originally was expected to venture outside with astronaut Anne McClain for the first all-female spacewalk, but Hague took McClain's place because of a spacesuit sizing issue.
The all-female spacewalk finally happened on October 18 when Koch and Meir, the 15th woman walk in space, ventured outside to replace a faulty battery charge-discharge unit. It was the first EVA by two women in the 54 years since the late Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov carried out history's first spacewalk in 1965.
Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space during an excursion with a male cosmonaut in 1984. NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan followed suit later that year, joining astronaut David Leestma for a shuttle spacewalk.
"My class was ... the first class that's half female and half male, and we were never held to any different standards or expectations," Koch told "CBS This Morning." "Highlighting the fact that it was the first all female EVA, spacewalk, is important because seeing those milestones be broken sort of tells people where we're at and where we think that the importance lies.
"I think it's inspiring because future space explorers do need to see people that remind them of themselves to kind of bring that inspiration home. I know that was certainly true for me and my background. So to have the opportunity to do that for future space explorers is a real honor."
Jessica Meir, left, and Christina Koch pose in the space station's airlock holding the power tools they used in the first all-female spacewalk.NASA
Asked about her most memorable moments in space, Koch said she enjoyed looking down on Michigan and North Carolina where she grew up, "but I would say the most awe-inspiring thing that I've ever seen is the Northern Lights or Southern Lights from above on a planetary scale."
"I've had the opportunity working in Antarctica and the Arctic to see them from below and the beautiful, shimmering lights taking over the whole sky," she said. "But to look down on the Earth and see the entire shape of the aurora as they form near the poles was truly an amazing sight and just literally took my breath away."
Koch said she hopes setting a new single-flight endurance record will serve as a milestone to motivate others while pushing the boundaries of science because "that's important for our future exploration ... going to Mars and also returning to the moon and going there to stay."
"But overall, I'd have to say that my number one hope for this milestone is that the record is exceeded again as soon as possible," she said. "Because that means that we're continuing to push the boundaries."
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Saturday, Dec. 28, is Koch's 289th day in space, not her 288th.
A summary of decades of research on a rather 'out-there' idea involving viruses from space has recently been published, and it's raising questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth. This may sound weird and strange but its serious.
It's easy to throw around words like crackpot, rogue, and maverick in describing the scientific fringe, but every now and then a paper like this comes along, leaving us blinking owlishly, unsure of where to even begin. A total of 33 names are listed as authors on this review, which was published by Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. The journal is peer reviewed and fairly well cited. So it's not exactly small, or a niche pay-for-publish source. Science writer Stephen Fleischfresser goes into depth on the background of two of the better known scientists involved: Edward Steele and Chandra Wickramasinghe. It's well worth a read. For a tl;dr version, Steele is an immunologist who already has a fringe reputation for his views on evolution that relies on acquiring gene changes determined by the influence of the environment rather than random mutations, in what he calls meta-Lamarckism. Wickramasinghe, on the other hand, has had a somewhat less controversial career, recognised for empirically confirming Sir Fred Hoyle's hypothesis describing the production of complex carbon molecules on interstellar dust. Wickramasinghe and Hoyle also happened to be responsible for another space biology thesis. Only this one is based on more than just the origins of organic chemistry. The Hoyle Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology makes the rather simple claim that the direction of evolution has been significantly affected by biochemistry that didn't start on our planet. In Wickramasinghe's own words, "Comets are the carriers and distributors of life in the cosmos and life on Earth arose and developed as a result of cometary inputs." Those inputs, Wickramasinghe argues, aren't limited to a generous sprinkling of space-baked amino acids, either.
Rather, they include viruses that insert themselves into organisms, pushing their evolution into whole new directions. The report, titled "Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?", pulls on existing research to conclude that a rain of extra-terrestrial retroviruses played a key role in the diversification of life in our oceans roughly half a billion years ago. "Thus retroviruses and other viruses hypothesised to be liberated in cometary debris trails both can potentially add new DNA sequences to terrestrial genomes and drive further mutagenic change within somatic and germline genomes," the authors write. Let that sink in for a moment. And take a deep breath before continuing, because that was the tame part. It was during this period that a group of molluscs known as cephalopods first stretched out their tentacles from beneath their shells, branching into a stunning array of sizes and shapes in what seemed like a remarkably short time frame. The genetics of these organisms, which today include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, are as weird as the animals themselves, due in part to their ability to their ability to edit their DNA on the fly. The authors of the paper make the rather audacious claim that these genetic oddities might be a sign of life from space. Not of space viruses this time, but the arrival of whole genomes frozen in stasis before thawing out in our tepid waters. "Thus the possibility that cryopreserved squid and/or octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted," they write. In his review of the paper, medical researcher Keith Baverstock from the University of Eastern Finland, concedes that there's a lot of evidence that plausibly aligns with the H-W thesis, such as the curious timeline of the appearance of viruses. But that's just not how science advances. "I believe this paper justifies scepticism of the scientific value of stand alone theories of the origin of life," Baverstock argues. "The weight of plausible, but non-definitive, evidence, great though that might be, is not the point." While the idea is as novel and exciting as it is provocative, nothing in the summary helps us better understand the history of life on Earth any better than existing conjectures, adding little of value to our model of evolution. Still, with solid caveats in place, maybe science can cope with a generous dose of crazy every now and then.
Journal editor Denis Noble concedes that 'further research is needed', which is a bit of an understatement. But given the developments regarding space-based organic chemistry in recent years, there's room for discussion. "As space chemistry and biology grows in importance it is appropriate for a journal devoted to the interface between physics and biology to encourage the debates," says Noble. "In the future, the ideas will surely become testable." Just in case those tests confirm speculations, we recommend being well prepared for the return of our cephalopod overlords. Who knows when they'll want those eggs back?
Open a tightly-sealed bottle that’s been hiding in the back of the office refrigerator for a year and the first thing you probably notice is the smell, followed by some weird stuff growing inside. Open a tightly-sealed container that’s been hiding underground for 2 billion years and a bad smell will come as no surprise. But stuff growing inside? That’s the hope of a group of researchers who put a drop of water taken from a sealed pocket in a 2-mile-deep gold mine in South Africa under an electron microscope and saw something that could be … that looks suspiciously like … life! If it is, a lot of other people are interested in it – especially NASA, which thinks this is the same way it will find life on Mars. Will anyone really notice or care if they also find gold on Mars?
“The recent discovery of near saturated brines 3 km below land surface in the South African gold mine, Moab Khotsong (26.98 S, 26.78 E), presents an opportunity to characterize microbial life in potentially ancient brines hosted within the 3.1-2.9 Ga Witswatersrand Supergroup.”
In a presentation at the recent Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union entitled “B11K-2202 – Abiotic (Prebiotic?) Organic Chemistry in a Potentially Ancient Hypersaline Brine: New Insights on the Limits of Microbial Life Inhabiting 3.1 km Deep Fracture Fluid in South Africa,” Princeton University graduate student Devan Nisson unveiled the results of the geophysical equivalent of opening a bottle hidden for a year in the back of your refrigerator. In this case, the ‘refrigerator’ is the Moab Khotsong gold and uranium mine, located in the northern part of South Africa, which claims to have the world’s deepest mine shaft at 3,000 meters (9,800 ft). From those depths, Nisson and her fellow researchers probed deeper with boreholes and eventually hit pockets of pressurized water. Samples were taken back to Princeton, where Inside Science reports that the electron microscope showed something unexpected:
“When they examined the material under a scanning electron microscope, they saw rodlike shapes that appeared to be bacteria or similar-looking microbes called archaea. One of the cells was pinched in the middle, apparently in the process of dividing.”
Did Nisson run out of the lab like Dr. Frankenstein yelling “It’s alive!”? Not yet. She admits that the shapes could be minerals and plans DNA testing to determine if they’re animal, vegetable or mineral. The tests will also verify whether the water has been untapped for 2 billion years or if it was contaminated recently by fissures from mining. What they do know already is that a pocket at that depth contains water that is about seven times saltier than seawater and reaches temperatures of up to 129 degrees Fahrenheit – really hot and salty but still capable of supporting life. It also contains small organic acids and nitrate and sulfate ions that could feed microbes and provide energy.
That’s the same environment NASA expects to find when deep boreholes are drilled into Mars on future missions – hence its interest in what Devan Nisson found when she dug deep into the depths of Moab Khotsong and opened a 2 billion-year-old bottle of salty water. Is it life, life-lite, life-like, like Mars … or just a really deep rabbit hole? We’ll soon find out.
There has been a long debate on whether brains can be fossilized and that question may finally have an answer. Scientists claim to have discovered incredibly well preserved fossilized brains in 500-million-year-old bug-like creatures.
The inky stains were found in fossils from an arthropod called Alalcomenaeus that lived during the Cambrian period – between approximately 543 million and 490 million years ago. The bug-like creature’s exoskeleton was well preserved in addition to the soft tissue from the brain and nerves. In their study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B (and can be read in full here), researchers described finding two Alalcomenaeus fossils in which the brains were still preserved.
Co-author of the study, Javier Ortega-Hernández, who is an invertebrate paleobiologist at Harvard University and curator of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, explained, “What we are dealing with in the fossil record are exceptional circumstances. This is not common — this is super, super rare.”
Alalcomenaeus had a nervous system similar to scorpions.
Paleontologists previously found one Alalcomenaeus fossil which was believed to have had preserved nervous tissue; however, there was much controversy over the discovery. But now with two more specimens, it’s pretty convincing proof that nervous tissue in arthropod fossils from the Cambrian period can indeed be fossilized. In fact, all three specimens were discovered buried in similar deposits which allowed the brain tissue to fossilize.
The two Alalcomenaeus fossils were found in the Great Basin in Utah. Ortega-Hernández and his co-authors described the fossils as having symmetrical stains that were found along its mid-line that looked like the nervous system that’s found in modern arthropods like spiders, scorpions, and horseshoe crabs. Additionally, the stains contained carbon which is an important element found in nervous tissue. “The nervous system and the gut kind of cross each other, which is really funky but common in arthropods nowadays,” Ortega-Hernández told Live Science. Pictures can be seen here.
But not everyone is convinced that they in fact found a fossilized brain. Jianni Liu, who is a professor at the Early Life Institute in the Department of Geology at Northwest University in Xi’an, China, wrote an email to Live Science and argued that the inky stains found in the fossils could have been a “slightly random effect of the decay process” instead of being brain tissue.
Liu and her colleagues studied around 800 fossilized specimens and discovered that almost 10% of them had inky stains around the head. They found that while nervous tissue decays quite rapidly, bacteria from the gut can persist and “produce these so-called biofilms as radiating [stains] which look a bit like parts of a nervous system,” they wrote in a 2018 study.
Nicholas Strausfeld, who is a regents professor in the department of neuroscience at the University of Arizona, explained that when the creatures are buried underneath strong pressure, the remains become flattened out. And since there is a lot of fat found in nervous tissue, it repels water and “have some resistance against decay”.
There is still a lot of work and studying that needs to be done in regards to brain and nervous tissue fossilizing, but these are definitely interesting developments.
Watch NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover go for a test drive in preparation for landing on Martian soil
Watch NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover go for a test drive in preparation for landing on Martian soil
NASA engineers witnessed their newest Mars rover take its first steps in preparation for its next mission that will search for fossilized remains of ancient life on the red planet.
The test took place inside the Spacecraft Assembly Facility clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Engineers clad in white bunny suits—special cleanroom attire worn in order to keep the rover’s delicate instruments very, very clean—watched the yet-to-be-named rover inch forward as part of the crucial pre-flight test, which lasted just over 10-hours.
“Mars 2020 has earned its driver’s license,” Rich Rieber, the lead mobility systems engineer for Mars 2020, said in a news release. “The test unambiguously proved that the rover can operate under its own weight and demonstrated many of the autonomous-navigation functions for the first time. This is a major milestone for Mars 2020.”
During the test, NASA engineers noticed no problems, as the six-wheeled rover successfully performed all its required tasks: it rolled forward and backward and even pirouetted. According to NASA, the rover’s systems, all working in concert, enabled it to steer, turn and drive with ease.
The testing of the vehicle’s autonomous navigation system went well. Since these systems performed perfectly under Earth’s gravity, engineers expect them to perform just as well under Mars’ gravity, which is only 38% of what we experience on Earth.
The test went so well that NASA says the “next time the Mars 2020 rover drives, it will be rolling over Martian soil.” The Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to launch in July 2020, followed by a landing in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021.
“A rover needs to rove, and Mars 2020 did that,” John McNamee, project manager for Mars 2020, said in a statement. “We can’t wait to put some red Martian dirt under its wheels.”
During its initial test drive, the rover crept forward in small, 3-feet ( 1-meter) increments, enabling the engineers to properly assess its movement and steering abilities. The rover also drove over small ramps designed to simulate uneven Martian terrain.
Engineers were also able to collect data from the vehicle’s Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX)—an instrument that uses radar waves to scan the ground below the rover. Depending on the terrain, once on Mars, RIMFAX will penetrate the ground, probing the red planet’s subsurface to depths of more than 30-feet (or 10-meters).
Engineers have outfitted the Mars 2020 rover with more durable wheels. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity, the Mars 2020 rover’s predecessor currently roaming around on Mars, is predominantly commanded by people back on Earth. However, the rover does have the ability to autonomously choose where to fire its laser spectrometer. As part of its onboard science arsenal, the instrument—called ChemCam—is designed to analyze the chemical composition of nearby rocks and soil.
Mars 2020, on the other hand, will be more independent than any of its predecessors. Equipped with advanced auto-navigation software, the rover will drive with the help of a dedicated onboard computer operating on data collected from the vehicle’s high-resolution, wide-field color cameras.
NASA engineers estimate that the rover will travel an average of 650 feet (200 meters) per day. For comparison, Curiosity’s current distance record for a single day is 702 feet (214 meters), although that’s not typical. The Mars 2020 rover will also be sporting more durable wheels. Curiosity’s wheels are visibly worn after seven years on the Martian surface; engineers hope Mars 2020’s wheels will hold up better.
NASA’s Mars2020 rover will explore Jezero Crater in search of life. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Once on Mars, the rover will land at Jezero Crater—a former lake bed, rich in mineral deposits known for preserving microfossils here on Earth. In this crater, the rover will search for any signs that life may have once existed on Mars.
While acting as a remote scientist, the rover will unlock clues about the planet’s climate and geology as well as collect samples that will be returned to Earth sometime in the future.
Following the loss of the Opportunity rover, Curiosity has been the sole robot roaming the Martian surface. That will change in 2021, but they won’t be the only ones.
They will be joined by another: The European Space Agency is teaming up with Russia to send their version of the Mars 2020 rover. The Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover will arrive on Mars at a soon-to-be-announced location, in 2021.
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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.
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