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...
05-01-2020
NASA's Sun-Kissing Parker Solar Probe Is Lifting the Veil on Our Closest Star
NASA's Sun-Kissing Parker Solar Probe Is Lifting the Veil on Our Closest Star
The sun is starting to give up some of its most closely guarded secrets.
The first science results are in from NASA's Parker Solar Probe (PSP), which has flown faster and closer to the sun than any other human-made object in history.
The initial PSP returns, which are reported in four papers published online today (Dec. 4) in the journal Nature, begin to lift the veil on Earth's star, which has remained surprisingly mysterious despite forever being the brightest light in our sky.
"These four papers show that, by going into an unexplored region of the solar system, the PSP has already made great discoveries," Daniel Verscharen, a researcher at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, wrote in an accompanying "News and Views" piece in the same issue of Nature. Verscharen was not involved in any of the new studies.
Kissing the sun
The PSP launched in August 2018, on a $1.5 billion mission to help researchers better understand the inner workings of the sun.
Mission scientists are particularly interested in solving two long-standing puzzles: how the stream of particles flowing continuously from the sun, known as the solar wind, is accelerated to its tremendous velocities; and why the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is so much hotter than its surface. (Corona temperatures can top 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.1 million degrees Celsius. The solar surface is downright temperate by comparison, at 11,000 F, or 6,000 C.)
The PSP is tackling these questions by brazenly barreling into the corona itself. Once every five months or so, the probe zooms through the sun's sizzling atmosphere, getting unprecedented up-close looks at our star.
These closest approaches, or perihelion passages, have taken the PSP within 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) of the solar surface to date. Before this mission, the closest a probe had ever gotten to the sun was 26.55 million miles (42.73 million km) — a feat pulled off in 1976 by the Helios 2 craft, a joint effort of the United States and the former West Germany.
Helios 2 also set the record for the fastest speed relative to the sun, at 153,454 mph (246,960 km/h). This mark was broken by NASA's Juno Jupiter orbiter, which reached 165,000 mph (265,000 km/h) during its arrival at the gas giant in July 2016. But the PSP is now the speed king: During the spacecraft's first perihelion pass, on Nov. 6, 2018, the sun's powerful gravity accelerated the PSP to a top speed of 213,243 mph (343,181 km/h).
Conditions in the corona are extreme, of course, so the PSP is equipped with some heavy-duty armor: a 4.5-inch-thick (11.4 centimeters) carbon-composite shield, which protects the craft and its four science instruments from intense heat and radiation.
Those instruments are the Fields Experiment (Fields), which is measuring electric and magnetic fields and waves, among other things; the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun (ISoIS), which is characterizing the electrons, protons and heavy ions that are accelerated to high speeds in the sun's atmosphere and beyond; the Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR), a set of telescopes imaging the corona and environs; and the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) investigation, which is studying the most abundant constituents in the solar wind (electrons, protons and helium ions).
The four new papers report what these instruments observed during the PSP's first two perihelion passes, which occurred in November 2018 and April 2019.
One of the studies, for example, found that Fields is starting to get the goods on the "slow" solar wind, a component of the stream that never exceeds about 1.1 million mph (1.8 million km/h). "Slow" is a relative term here; the "fast" solar wind zips along at about twice that velocity.
Scientists already knew that the fast solar wind originates in large coronal "holes" — patches where the outer atmosphere is considerably cooler and thinner than normal — near the sun's poles. And the data from Fields suggest that the slow wind is coming from coronal holes as well, but from smaller ones near the solar equator.
Fields also observed surprising reversals in the solar magnetic field flowing past the spacecraft: The field sometimes flipped its orientation 180 degrees and then, within seconds or minutes, flipped back again.
"These switchbacks are probably associated with some kind of plasma jets," study lead author and Fields principal investigator Stuart Bale, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. "My own feeling is that these switchbacks, or jets, are central to the solar wind heating problem."
Data from SWEAP, meanwhile, indicate that such reversals are "travelling S-shaped bends in the field lines coming from the sun," as Verscharen put it, and that the flips are boosting the speed of the solar wind.
Findings from ISoIS help flesh out this emerging picture. The instrument's data show that it takes energetic solar particles longer than previously expected to reach the PSP, perhaps because they're traveling along the surprisingly S-shaped field lines.
ISoIS has also detected multiple particle bursts that aren't dramatic enough to be noticed by instruments here on Earth.
"It's amazing — even at solar minimum conditions, the sun produces many more tiny energetic particle events than we ever thought," David McComas of Princeton University, ISoIS principal investigator and lead author of one of the new studies, said in a statement. (Solar activity waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle, and our star is currently in a relatively inactive phase.)
"These measurements will help us unravel the sources, acceleration, and transport of solar energetic particles and ultimately better protect satellites and astronauts in the future," McComas added.
And WISPR is giving scientists a clearer picture of the sun, the corona and the complex, roiling region immediately surrounding our star. WISPR's images help put the information collected by the other instruments into proper context and also yield insights in their own right.
For example, the fourth new study reports, WISPR photos provide some evidence for a dust-free zone near the sun, which has been postulated but not yet directly detected. "The detailed images from the PSP also show spatial variations in the solar wind that are consistent with variations in the sun's magnetic field on its surface, and reveal small blobs of plasma that are ejected from the sun and form part of the young solar wind," Verscharen wrote.
The solar-wind answer is a partial one at the moment, and it's still unclear how exactly the corona is heated so dramatically (though the new results provide some intriguing clues). But the PSP team has plenty of time to fill in the blanks, for these newly published results are just the beginning. The spacecraft is designed to continue studying the sun through 2025, and its perihelion passages will keep getting closer and closer, thanks to trajectory-sculpting flybys of Venus.
The PSP's final science orbit, for example, will take it within just 3.83 million miles (6.16 million km) of the solar surface and feature top speeds of about 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h).
And these future close approaches will become more frequent, because the PSP's path around the sun will shrink. The probe's orbital period is currently about 150 Earth days but will be 88 days by mission's end.
The length of that mission will allow the PSP team to study the sun at diverse stages of its 11-year activity cycle. So, the sun-kissing spacecraft should gather reams of interesting data that keep researchers busy for a long time to come.
"It is expected that PSP data will guide our understanding of the sun and the solar wind for many years," Verscharen wrote. "New models and theories will be motivated by the spacecraft’s discoveries, and this knowledge will be transferable to other stars and astrophysical plasmas throughout the universe."
This story was updated at 2 p.m. EST to include a statement from David McComas.
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.
Detail from one of the coffins of Gua, chief physician of Djehutyhotep, governor of Bersha. The paintings recall drawings from the Book of Two Ways.
Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
It’s always exciting when some kind of human civilizational first is discovered or unearthed by experts, as evidenced by the thrill generated by a recent discovery of cave paintings, thought to be the earliest example of pictorial storytelling, which were uncovered Indonesia. Now, a new study covered this week by the New York Timesreports that the oldest copy of the first illustrated book has been found in Egypt by researchers working under the direction of University of Leuven Egyptologist Harco Willems.
Called the Book of Two Ways, the extraordinary narrative told in the tome is about what happens to the soul after death. It’s been dated to be approximately 4,000 years old and at least 4 decades older than any of the other known copies, of which there are approximately two dozen. The text was discovered in a village on the eastern side of the Nile river after Willems’ decision in 2012 to reopen and study the contents of a burial shaft once looted and long abandoned. A detailed report of the findings were published in The Journal of Egyptian Archeology’s September edition.
The fragments of the text were discovered within a tomb, atop the coffin of a woman named Ankh. The cemetery in which the tomb was found is a necropolis and quarry called Deir el-Bersha. Ancient Egyptians have always been famously known for their extensive preoccupations with the afterlife, as evidenced by the text The Book of the Dead, which provides readers with incantations and instructions about how to successfully navigate an underworld ruled by the god Osiris and ultimately become a god themselves.
Conversely, Willems told the Times that The Book of Two Ways provides extensively lush and almost cheat code-like details that seek to further illustrate the very specific trials that departed souls will be encountering in the afterlife. Two Ways is apparently filled with descriptions of demons, the names of nefarious gatekeepers and the identifying monikers of important floorboards so that the dead may find easier passage on their perilous journeys. Furthermore, the illustrations within The Book of Two Ways also describe the two options that dead souls have for traversing the Underworld: by land or by water. There’s something enduringly optimistic about the Ancient Egyptian consensus on eternity—if one prepares sufficiently for every possible trial, immortal resurrection is achievable. If only life was as clearly navigable!
We’ve known for some time that Venus has vast lava plains, fields of small lava domes, and large shield volcanoes. But does it still have active volcanoes? A new study involving lava flows on Venus suggests that, yes, it does.
New research confirms that volcanoes might be erupting on Venus even now. This image shows Idunn Mons, a volcanic peak on Venus, long suspected of being active. The colored overlay shows heat patterns derived from surface brightness data collected via ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft from May 2006 to the end of 2007.
Earth is one of several worlds in our solar system known to have active volcanoes. Now, a new study from Universities Space Research Association (USRA) confirms that – as has been conjectured before – cloud-covered Venus appears to be volcanically active as well.
It’s been known since the early 1990s that Venus has many volcanic features. NASA’s Magellan spacecraft found extensive lava flows beneath the perpetually cloudy atmosphere of Venus, but how old are they? That’s the unanswered question.
Thus, as yet, there’s still no smoking gun to prove that any Venus volcanoes are still active.
USRA announced its intriguing new findings on January 3, 2019. They come not from Venus, but from an earthly laboratory. The peer-reviewed paper was published the same day in Science Advances.
The new evidence stems from spacecraft data on lava flows on the surface of Venus, some of which, the researchers now estimate, may be no more than a few years old. The Venus Express orbiter – launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2005 – continuously sent back science data from its polar orbit around Venus until 2014. It studied lava flows on Venus by measuring the amount of infrared light emitted from Venus’ surface during nighttime.
The data obtained were good enough to distinguish between fresher and older/altered lava flows, but the actual ages of the flows still weren’t well understood.
Justin Filiberto is the study’s lead author and a USRA staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. To learn more about the ages of lava flows on Venus, he and his colleagues simulated conditions in the intensely hot and corrosive atmosphere of Venus in a laboratory. They wanted to see how different minerals might react and change over time, under these conditions, on Venus’ surface.
It turned out that olivine – abundant in basalt rock, which makes up about 90% of Venus’ surface – reacted very rapidly. Within only weeks, it became oxidized, that is, coated with two iron oxide minerals, magnetite and hematite. From the paper:
We obtained VNIR [visible to near-infrared] reflectance spectra of natural olivine that was altered and oxidized in the laboratory. We show that olivine becomes coated, within days, with alteration products, primarily hematite … Our results indicate that lava flows lacking VNIR features due to hematite are no more than several years old.
Maat Mons, a 5-mile-high (8-km-high) volcano on Venus, with lava flows. This perspective view is based on radar images from the Magellan spacecraft, which orbited Venus in the 1990s.
Absolute confirmation of active volcanoes on Venus would be a major discovery. After all, Venus is the world next-inward in orbit around the sun. It’s very similar to Earth in size and density. If it doesn’t have active volcanoes, and Earth does, the question would be, why not?
But if it does have active volcanoes, then this discovery is extremely significant in studies of all the terrestrial rocky planets – not just Venus and Earth, but also Mercury and Mars – in our solar system. Filiberto commented in a statement:
If Venus is indeed active today, it would make a great place to visit to better understand the interiors of planets. For example, we could study how planets cool and why the Earth and Venus have active volcanism, but Mars does not.
Radar image from Magellan of lava channels in the Lo Shen Valles region of Venus.
Previous studies have also made the case for active volcanoes on Venus, including this one, published on June 28, 2015, in Geophysical Research Letters. According to James Head, a geologist at Brown University and one of the 2015 study’s co-authors:
We were able to show strong evidence that Venus is volcanically, and thus internally, active today. This is a major finding that helps us understand the evolution of planets like our own.
The behavior of SO2 and polar haze can be plausibly explained by episodic injection of SO2 into the cloud top regions, for example, by active volcanism.
This was also noted in the new paper:
This active volcanism is consistent with episodic spikes of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere measured by both the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the Venus Express, which could have been produced by the same eruption that formed the young lava flows.
Justin Filiberto of Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), the lead author of the new study.
Thus the new study now builds on earlier ones, and the case for active volcanoes on Venus becomes stronger and stronger. What will need to happen to confirm active volcanoes on Venus with absolute certainty? Filiberto said:
Future missions [to Venus] should be able to see … flows and changes in the surface and provide concrete evidence of its activity.
Future missions to Venus are currently on the drawing board and advocated by many researchers. They could provide more detailed data on the volcanoes, helping scientists learn their similarities to, and differences from, those on Earth.
Studies have suggested that Venus used to be more Earth-like, billions of years ago. Why did the two worlds diverge so radically, so that Earth is now livable, while Venus is perpetually cloud-enshrouded, with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead?
It’s hoped that data from future spacecraft will help scientists understand why Venus and Earth evolved so differently.
Olivine crystals before and after alteration and oxidation, as seen in laboratory experiments duplicating Venus’ atmosphere. The rapid reaction suggests that similar lava flows on Venus are only a few years old.
Secret Space Whistleblower On Trump Space Force Secret Projects
Secret Space Whistleblower On Trump Space Force Secret Projects
COAST TO COAST AM – Pioneer in the development of ‘Exopolitics’, Michael Salla, shared evidence that the US Navy began its initial development work on a secret space program in the 1940s, signs that the Trump administration may be more open about secret space programs, as well as assorted whistleblower revelations on the ET presence.
Donald Trump doesn’t take the conventional route, he remarked, and as a businessman he may look at the information he’s exposed to regarding covert technologies, and try to maximize their potential in terms of putting Americans back to work.
Does President Donald Trump Know About Secret Projects in Outer Space?
“Many people have had prophetic warnings about the coming false rapture/alien invasion, I have had several myself. From what I have seen many millions are going to fall for it when it happens. This video shows a record of Alien Races from a KGB agent.
As far fetched as this sounds. It also sounds darn realistic and plausible. There could be many different intelligent races out there. We can’t possibly be alone. Cool & Mellow
The KGB, translated in English as Committee for State Security, was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until its break-up in 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, the committee was attached to the Council of Ministers.
UFO sightings across US 'will rise in 2020' with creation of Space Force
UFO sightings across US 'will rise in 2020' with creation of Space Force
EXCLUSIVE: Dozens of UFO sightings in 2019 were attributed to a top-secret military space fleet by conspiracy theorists. And – with US President Donald Trump recently signing a bill to officially recognise the Space Force – some believe sightings could grow
The establishment of the Space Force will likely lead to a “rise” in UFO sightings this year, a conspiracy theorist has claimed.
The Space Force – a brainchild of Donald Trump – will have the aim of maintaining the “freedom” of the US in space as well as sustaining space operations.
It was officially recognised last month when the US President signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which established a new space branch of the US Air Force.
There are those who believe the Space Force is already in existence, pointing to various military “craft” being spotted across the US in recent months
UFOs, like the one seen over Las Vegas recently, could be seen more frequently with the Space Force creation(Image: YOUTUBE/UFOS OVER VEGAS)
Blake Cousins is one of those but has said the official creation of the sixth branch of the military will now lead to more UFO sightings.
The owner of YouTube channel thirdphaseofmoon told Daily Star Online: “Is the Space Force going to create more sightings out there?
“Will people interpret a UFO sighting as a Space Force programme?
“Yes, I think the UFO sightings will go on the rise.
“There’s so much experimentation going on with the military and the new technology that is going to be implemented with the new Space Force.
“They are already testing it before it actually comes into fruition next year.”
He went on to claim the Force “has been going on for decades”.
“The Space Force was created in the early 80s,” Blake added.
SPACE FORCE REVEALED?
“Now they’re going to go public because, in my opinion, they can’t hide it anymore.”
Following the signing of the NDA Act on December 21, Trump called space “the world’s newest warfighting domain.”
“Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital,” he said.
“And we're leading, but we're not leading by enough. But very shortly, we'll be leading by a lot.
“The Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground."
It’s not aliens, but short of a planetary takeover by tall greys, it’s something worse.
Starlink was intended to bring affordable internet to millions of people, many in remote areas, but Elon Musk obviously didn’t foresee the side effects. The light pollution that has already plagued astronomers since 120 of what are essentially, at least to a scientist, fake stars were released into low-Earth orbit. Now it just got to be even more of a headache. Not only is the light from these satellites getting in the way of observations, but they are apparently shining bright enough to be mistaken for UFOs.
For whoever doesn’t keep up with SpaceX, this has come as something of a shock. Montana residents recently reported sightings of what they thought were unidentified flying objects to their local news outlets after spotting a train of Starlink satellites that could also be seen from Illionis, Iowa and Michigan in the past week. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise. When the pseudo-constellations were first launched into the night sky in May, Europe experienced a breakout of UFO sightings.
Jack Beyer@thejackbeyer
Did you see it? Not a #UFO, 60 of @SpaceX’s recently launched #Starlink satellites just passed *directly* over Los Angeles!
There are reasons this “UFO” phenomenon is more serious than that infamous radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which terrified listeners into thinking Halloween 1938 was the last day of their lives before an alien invasion. Even scarier is that Starlink is looking to launch enough satellites for a total of 12,000. Light pollution could have serious repercussion on astronomical observations.
“The number of such satellites is projected to grow into the tens of thousands over the next several years, creating the potential for substantial adverse impacts to ground- and space-based astronomy,” said a statement released by the AAS not long after the Starlink constellations were first released.
Observatories operate at night for a reason. Unfortunately, light pollution is sabotaging the clear skies they need. When there is too much artificial light after dark, it scatters and creates a sort of artificial daylight in which stars and other celestial objects, many of which are already dim from Earth, do not appear as clearly as they would in total darkness. It also affects what astronomers can infer from spectroscopy, or the study of light spectra (bands of colors). Spectra emitted by objects in space can tell you their chemical compositions and temperatures. Redshift, or how far light from an object is shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, can give away how fast something is moving through the void. Artificial light really messes with what astronomers are already straining to see.
Never mind what Musk says in the tweet below—we already know the futuretech mogul stays optimistic even when a rocket explodes. At least he resolved to reduce the reflectivity on any upcoming Starlink satellites, but some astronomers feel that it’s already too late. It definitely won’t help when competitors start launching their own internet satellites.
In the realm of astronomy, things are being seen rather differently by those who are being blinded trying to do science. The last thing you want to see through the eye of a telescope seeking out dark energy are strange twinkling objects that are definitely not dark energy. Last month, these things gave massive headaches to astronomers running the Dark Energy Survey's Dark Energy Camera (DECam) at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile. Dark Energy Survey astronomer Clara Martinez-Vazquez tweeted about how 19 of these satellites disrupted observations for over 5 minutes.
Clarae Martínez-Vázquez@89Marvaz
Wow!! I am in shock!! The huge amount of Starlink satellites crossed our skies tonight at @cerrotololo. Our DECam exposure was heavily affected by 19 of them! The train of Starlink satellites lasted for over 5 minutes!! Rather depressing… This is not cool!
“[Negative] impacts could include significant disruption of optical and near-infrared observations by direct detection of satellites in reflected and emitted light; contamination of radio astronomical observations by electromagnetic radiation in satellite communication bands; and collision with space-based observatories,” the AAS statement also mentioned.
That isn’t really what you want when you’re searching for galaxies swarming with dark matter using an ultra-sensitive camera that images vast areas of the sky in visible and near-infrared light. More light is the last thing astronomers need when peering billions of years into the past of faraway galaxies in order to find out what they were like at the dawn of the universe. DECam is equipped with five filters that each capture images in a different color of light. What happens when man-made lights invade those images? As Martinez-Vazquez said, not cool.
The Starlink constellations must be a bummer to alien hunters who are getting excited over mysterious lights that are coming from no other planet but our own. Who knows if too many shiny things in the sky could be drowning out a message from real aliens.
The researchers compared the predicted paths of four spacecraft to
the paths of nearby stars, as measured by the Gaia space telescope, to
see where and when they might overlap.
According totheir work, posted to the online pre-print server arXiv, it
would take about 90,000 years for Pioneer 10 to swing within striking
distance of a nearby star.
The intrepid Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts were launched in 1977, and despite having a roughly 12-year mission lifespan, are still hurtling through space and returning data to eager scientists on Earth. They’ve broken through barrier that protects our solar system and are now zipping through the interstellar medium along with Pioneer 10 and 11.
But how long might it take them, or another spacecraft, to actually reach another star system?
A team of scientists—Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Switzerland and Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—have done the calculations. Essentially, the pair found a way to chart how long it would take a spacecraft to get from our humble solar system to the next system over, according to a paper uploaded to the pre-print server arXiv.
In the quest for answers, Farnocchia and Bailer-Jones turned to the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope for help. For more than five years, Gaia has been gathering data on billions of stars, charting their orbits and path through the cosmos.
Using this data and data about the projected paths of both the voyager spacecrafts as well as Pioneer 10 and 11, which are careening toward the outer reaches of the solar system, the researchers were able to create a timeline of when these crafts might reach distant star systems. For those eager to visit other worlds, brace for some bad news.
Should they continue their transit, the four spacecraft will come within striking distance of approximately 60 stars in the next million years. And in that same amount of time, they’ll get even closer—try two parsecs, the equivalent of 6.5 light years—to about 10 stars.
Who will have the best shot at reaching and exploring a distant star? Pioneer 10 will swing within .231 parsecs the star system HIP 117795 in the Cassiopeia constellation in approximately 90,000 years. And how long before one of these spacecrafts is hijacked by the orbit of one of these stars? It’ll be about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
Our visits to the Moon reveal that our closest neighbor has no life on it — or, should we say had? Earlier this year, humans may have inadvertently left some on the lunar surface by accident.
On April 11 2019, the Israeli lander Beresheet crashed on the Moon with several thousand dehydrated tardigrades on board. The millimeter-long and eerily cute ‘water bears’ were part of a lunar library put together by the Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit intent on archiving everything on the planet just in case we need a back-up copy some day. Other items on board included a copy of the entire English-language Wikipedia, and a sample from India’s sacred Bodhi tree.
But despite the impact, scientists believe that if anything survived the crash intact, it may well have been the tardigrades. The microscopic creatures were sandwiched between micron-thin sheets of nickel and suspended in epoxy, a resin-like preservative that acts like a jelly — potentially enough to cushion their landing.
This wouldn’t be the first time tardigrades have survived space’s harsh conditions.
In September 2007, two species of dehydrated tardigrades were exposed to the dehydrating vacuum of space, solar radiation, or both on board NASA’s Foton-M3 mission. Back on Earth, after they were rehydrated, the tardigrades that were only exposed to the vacuum survived as though nothing had happened. Some of them even reproduced afterwards, according to a paper published in 2008.
But the chances of a little colony of water bears on the lunar surface are slim: The tardigrades are unlikely to come in contact with water on the Moon, meaning they will likely not be rehydrated.
Since the crash, the Arch Mission Foundation announced that it wants to send human DNA samples to the Moon. In September 2019, the group invited people to send swabs of their DNA to be preserved on the Moon (Unfortunately you don’t get to blast your cheek swab into space for free — the privilege of joining the dried-out tardigrades on the Moon cost $99.)
As 2019 draws to a close, Inverse is counting down our top 20 space stories from 2019. You can read them all here. Some are wild, some are mind-boggling, and others will change how you think about the universe. This has been #2. Read the original story here.
Much has been learned about Saturn’s system of moons in recent decades, thanks to the Voyager missions and the more recent surveys conducted by the Cassini spaceprobe. Between its estimated 150 moons and moonlets (only 53 of which have been identified and named) there is no shortage of scientific curiosities, and enough mysteries to keep astronomers here on Earth busy for decades.
Consider Mimas, which is often referred to as Saturn’s “Death Star Moon” on a count of its unusual appearance. Much like Saturn’s moons Tethys and Rhea, Mimas’ peculiar characteristics represents something of a mystery. Not only is it almost entirely composed ice, it’s coloration and surface features reveal a great deal about the history of the Saturnian (aka. Cronian) system. On top of that, it may even house an interior, liquid-water ocean.
Discovery and Naming:
Saturn’s moon Mimas was discovered by William Herschel in 1789, more than 100 years after Saturn’s larger moons were discovered by Christian Huygens and Giovanni Cassini. As with all the seven then-known satellites of Saturn, Mimas’ name was suggested by William Herschel’s son John in his 1847 publication Results of Astronomical Observations made at the Cape of Good Hope.
Mimas takes its name from one of the Titans of Greek mythology, who were the sons and daughters of Cronus (the Greek equivalent to Jupiter). Mimas was an offspring of Gaia, born from the blood of the castrated Uranus, who eventually died during the struggle with the Olympian Gods for control of the universe.
A replica of the telescope which William Herschel used to observe Uranus. Credit: Alun Salt/Wikimedia Commons
Size, Mass and Orbit:
With a mean radius of 198.2 ± 0.4 km and a mass of about 3.75 ×1019 kg, Mimas is equivalent in size to 0.0311 Earths and 0.0000063 times as massive. Orbiting Saturn at an average distance (semi-major axis) of 185,539 km, it is the innermost of Saturn’s larger moons, and the 8th moon orbiting Saturn. It’s orbit also has a minor eccentricity of 0.0196, ranging from 181,902 km at periapsis and 189,176 km at apoapsis.
With an estimated orbital velocity of 14.28 km/s, Mimas takes 0.942 days to complete a single orbit of Saturn. Like many of Saturn’s moons. Mimas rotation period is synchronous to its orbital period, which means it keeps one face constantly pointing towards the planet. Mimas is also in a 2:1 mean-motion resonance with the larger moon Tethys, and in a 2:3 resonance with the outer F Ring shepherd moonlet, Pandora.
Composition and Surface Features:
Mimas’ mean density of 1.1479 ± 0.007 g/cm³ is just slightly higher than that of water (1 g/cm³), which means that Mimas is mostly composed of water ice, with just a small amount of silicate rock. In this respect, Mimas is much like Tethys, Rhea, and Dione – moon’s of Saturn that are primarily composed of water ice.
Due to the tidal forces acting on it, Mimas is noticeably prolate – i.e. its longest axis is about 10% longer than the shortest, giving it its egg-shaped appearance. In fact, with a diameter of 396 km (246 mi), Mimas is just barely large and massive enough to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e. to become rounded in shape under the force of its own gravitation). Mimas is the smallest known astronomical body to have achieved this.
Mosaic image of Mimas, created from images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, showing the Herschel crater in the center. Credit: NASA/JPL
Three types of geological features are officially recognized on Mimas: craters, chasmata (chasms) and catenae (crater chains). Of these, craters are the most common, and it is believed that many of them have existed since the beginning of the Solar System. Mimas surface is saturated with craters, with every part of the surface showing visible depressions, and newer impacts overwriting older ones.
Mimas’ most distinctive feature is the giant impact crater Herschel, named in honor of William Herschel (the discoverer of Uranus, its moons Oberon, and Titania, and the Cronian moons Enceladus and Mimas). This large crater gives Mimas the appearance of the “Death Star” from Star Wars. At 130 km (81 mi) in diameter, Herschel’s is almost a third of Mimas’ own diameter.
Its walls are approximately 5 km (3.1 mi) high, parts of its floor measure 10 km (6.2 mi) deep, and its central peak rises 6 km (3.7 mi) above the crater floor. If there were a crater of an equivalent scale on Earth, it would be over 4,000 km (2,500 mi) in diameter, which would make it wider than the continent of Australia.
The impact that made this crater must have nearly shattered Mimas, and is believed to have created the fractures on the opposite side of the moon by sending shock waves through Mimas’s body. In this respect, Mimas’ surface closely resembles that of Tethys, with its massive Odysseus crater on its western hemisphere and the concentric Ithaca chasma, which is believed to have formed as a result of the impact that created Odysseus.
Color map of Mimas, created using data provided by the Cassini spaceprobe. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/SSI/LPI
Mimas’ surface is also saturated with smaller impact craters, but no others are anywhere near the size of Herschel. The cratering is also not uniform, with most of the surface being covered with craters larger than 40 km (25 mi) in diameter. However, in the south polar region, there are generally no craters larger than 20 km (12 mi) in diameter.
Data obtained in 2014 from the Cassini spacecraft has also led to speculation about a possible interior ocean. Due to the planet’s libration (oscillation in its orbit), scientists believe that the planet’s interior is not uniform, which could be the result of a rocky interior or an interior ocean at the core-mantle boundary. This ocean would likely be maintained thanks to tidal flexing caused by Mimas’ orbital resonances with Tethys and Pandora.
A number of features in Saturn’s rings are also related to resonances with Mimas. Mimas is responsible for clearing the material from the Cassini Division, which is the gap between Saturn’s two widest rings – the A Ring and B Ring. The repeated pulls by Mimas on the Cassini Division particles, always in the same direction, forces them into new orbits outside the gap.
Particles in the Huygens Gap at the inner edge of the Cassini division are in a 2:1 resonance with Mimas. In other words, they orbit Saturn twice for each orbit competed by Mimas. The boundary between the C and B ring is meanwhile in a 3:1 resonance with Mimas; and recently, the G Ring was found to be in a 7:6 co-rotation eccentricity resonance with Mimas.
This figure illustrates the unexpected and bizarre pattern of daytime temperatures found on Saturn’s small inner moon Mimas. Credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SWRI/SSI
Exploration:
The first mission to study Mimas up close was Pioneer 11, which flew by Saturn in 1979 and made its closest approach on Sept. 1st, 1979, at a distance of 104,263 km. The Voyager 1 and 2 missions both flew by Mimas in 1980 and 1981, respectively, and snapped pictures of Saturn’s atmosphere, its rings, its system of moons. Images taken by Voyager 1 probe were the first ever of the Herschel crater.
Mimas has been imaged several times by the Cassini orbiter, which entered into orbit around Saturn in 2004. A close flyby occurred on February 13, 2010, when Cassini passed Mimas at a distance of 9,500 km (5,900 mi). In addition to providing multiple images of Mimas’ cratered surface, it also took measurements of Mimas’ orbit, which led to speculation about a possible interior ocean.
The Saturn system is truly a wonder. So many moons, so many mysteries, and so many chances to learn about the formation of the Solar System and how it came to be. One can only hope that future missions are able to probe some of the deeper ones, like what might be lurking beneath Mimas’ icy, imposing “Death Star” surface!
We’ve written many great articles about Mimas and Saturn’s moons here at Universe Today. Here’s one about the Herschel Crater, one about the first detailed look Cassini made, and one about it’s “Death Star” appearance.
Another great resource about Mimas is Solar Views, and you can get even more info from the Nine Planets.
Venus may still harbor active volcanoes, with eruptions taking place as recently as a few years ago, a new study finds.
Aside from Earth, the only other place known to host active volcanoes that spew lava is Jupiter's moon Io. Mars and Earth's moon once had active volcanoes, but they died long ago.
Specifically, in 2010, researchers found unusually high emissions of visible to near-infrared light from a number of sites on Venus. Surface regions that are old are expected to have lower emissions of such light after long exposure to weathering from Venus' hot, caustic atmosphere, so these patches of higher emissions hinted at recent lava flows.
However, the exact ages of these lava flows remain uncertain. This is because much is unknown about how quickly volcanic rocks alter in response to Venus' harsh atmosphere and how such changes influence emissions of visible to near-infrared light.
Hunting volcanoes on Venus
To see if lava flows seen on Venus are recent, scientists experimented with crystals of olivine, a green mineral commonly found in volcanic rock. They focused on how these crystals altered under conditions similar in some ways to what they might experience on the surface of Venus.
The researchers heated olivine along with regular Earth air in a furnace up to 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit (900 degrees Celsius) for up to a month. They found olivine became coated within days mostly with the reddish-black mineral hematite, which in turn made certain features of olivine more difficult to detect.
Since the ESA's Venus Express, which orbited Venus from 2006 to 2014, apparently could detect signs of olivine even from orbit, these new findings suggested that such olivine came from volcanic eruptions recently, as otherwise chemical reactions with Venus' atmosphere would have obscured it.
"This is the first time we may have seen active volcanism on another planet," study lead author Justin Filiberto, a planetary scientist at the Universities Space Research Association's Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, told Space.com.
The researchers are now following up on their research with other volcanic minerals baked in air more similar to Venus' atmosphere — that is, laden with carbon dioxide and sulfur. "The results with those are pretty much the same," Filiberto said.
The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 3 in the journal Science Advances.
Poetin onthult waarom Tweede Wereldoorlog is uitgebroken. Zoiets is ‘nog nooit eerder voorgekomen in de Russische geschiedenis’
Tijdens een bijeenkomst van de GOS-landen in Sint-Petersburg presenteerde de Russische president Poetin historische documenten die laten zien waarom de Tweede Wereldoorlog is uitgebroken.
Zoiets is nog nooit eerder voorgekomen in de moderne Russische geschiedenis, meldde nieuwsprogramma Vesti.
Officieel waren de Poolse soldaten onze bevrijders, maar de documenten die Poetin had meegebracht, schetsen een ander beeld.
Mooi standbeeld
Zo schreef de Poolse ambassadeur in Duitsland Jozef Lipski op 20 september 1938 aan de Poolse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Jozef Beck:
“Als Hitlers voorstel om Joden naar Afrika te deporteren kan rekenen op goedkeuring, plaatsen we een mooi standbeeld van hem in Warschau.”
Het is bekend dat Beck geregeld ontmoetingen had met nazi-functionarissen en met de Führer.
Het pact tussen Hitler en de Poolse staatsman Jozef Pilsudski was het eerste niet-aanvalsverdrag tussen een Europees land en nazi-Duitsland.
Het is in 1934 ondertekend.
Overzicht van de verdragen
Een jaar later, in 1935, kwam het Brits-Duitse vlootverdrag tot stand, dat Duitsland in staat stelde om weer slagschepen en onderzeeboten te bouwen.
Op 30 september 1938 sloten de Britse premier Chamberlain en Hitler ook onderling nog een verdrag.
Op 6 december 1938 sloten de Franse en Duitse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, Bonnet en Ribbentrop, bovendien een verdrag in Parijs.
Daarnaast is op 22 maart 1939 in Berlijn een pact gesloten tussen de Litouwse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken en Ribbentrop.
Tot slot sloot Duitsland op 7 juni 1939 een niet-aanvalsverdrag met Letland.
Polen in de aanval
Uit de documenten blijkt dat Frankrijk Polen niet zag als een betrouwbare bondgenoot en bang was dat het land in de aanval zou gaan.
Polen weerhield Frankrijk er vervolgens van om haar bondgenoot Tsjechoslowakije te beschermen.
Het land dreigde bovendien op de Russen te vuren als zij te hulp zouden schieten.
De stukken laten zien dat de opdeling van Tsjechoslowakije door Polen en Duitsland extreem gewelddadig verliep.
Onvermijdelijk
Iconische beelden van een Poolse en Duitse soldaat die elkaar omhelzen en een Poolse soldaat die in de stad Tesin poseert met een Duitse helm, zul je vandaag de dag niet meer tegenkomen in de geschiedenisboeken.
Frankrijk en andere grootmachten lieten hun bondgenoten in de steek. Alleen de Sovjet-Unie was bereid om Tsjechoslowakije te helpen.
De Tweede Wereldoorlog was onvermijdelijk geworden.
Tijdens de Processen van Neurenberg werd de vraag gesteld of Duitsland Tsjechoslowakije zou hebben aangevallen als landen als Frankrijk en Groot-Brittannië hun bondgenoten in Praag hadden gesteund.
Niet sterk genoeg
Hierop antwoordde de Duitse veldmaarschalk Wilhelm Keitel: “Nee. We waren niet sterk genoeg.”
En zo kon het dat Polen in 1939 werd aangevallen met tanks die waren gemaakt door Skoda.
Volgens sommige bronnen werd één op de vier Duitse bommen geproduceerd in Tsjechische fabrieken.
Naar verluidt verslechterden de verhoudingen tussen Polen en Duitsland omdat de Poolse regering niet tegemoet wilde komen aan de wensen van Berlijn.
De westerse landen, waaronder Polen, hebben hun bevolking destijds voor de bus gegooid, aldus Poetin.
Bekijk de beelden van de bijeenkomst hieronder:
Vladimir Putin: Allied Powers Created Hitler’s Germany With Unfair Versailles Treaty After WWI!
While the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over fascist Germany is approaching, the attempts to rewrite the history of World War II are becoming more insolent. As a result, it's nearly said that it's the USSR's fault that the war in Europe began. The topic was also raised during Vladimir Putin's press conference. The President announced that he's preparing a big article on this topic. And for now, he's working with an archive. On Friday, during an informal CIS summit in Saint Petersburg, the President introduced some documents to his colleagues
Massive Deep Underground Bases & Alien Close Encounters
Massive Deep Underground Bases & Alien Close Encounters
A great amount of information that seems to indicate that not only are underground bases being manufactured but also that bases are perhaps being constructed under vast bodies of water. It’s likely that hundreds of these bases exist around the world, yet we don’t know about them, have no idea what they’re used for, and since they’re kept secret they obviously don’t want us to know.
I found this on line: “Author, researcher, and alien & military abductee Derek Tyler has performed hardcore research on the alien agenda conspiracy. He has had private conversations with insiders who spent their careers working in black ops, and has interviewed over three thousand abductees.” My spin? Even though he is a poor speaker, the information is right on the money.
The alien agenda is the long con that is running the surface of this planet, hence one of the needs for tunnels. Who is really in charge here? The visible matrix control system is run by the invisible control system. The invisible control system’s long term goal? Dramatically reduce the population and give the survivors a hive mind. CW
NASA Whistleblower Comes Clean About Poleshift - Are You Prepared?
NASA Whistleblower Comes Clean About Poleshift - Are You Prepared?
As we enter the unknown…will you rise to the occasion or sit by the wayside. The decision is yours and yours alone. No one can tell you what to do. We will help you get informed and prepared for the inevitable.
Thank you for all your hard work on this. You are right and I’m 77 this year coming hard to believe it will come to this. According to your grafts Penna doesn’t look too bad although I could be down wind from Limerick Nuclear plant.
I will make a concerted effort to get a group of 8 like you said and create a plan for survival. How to create food water etc. this program was quite an eye opener. God bless you, again it is scary but could very possibly happen. Better to be prepared. Help others. Mary Christy
Mr. Greg Allison is currently the Program Manager for the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5) High Altitude Lift-Off (HALO) Program, and as President of the High Altitude Research Corporation (HARC). In these capacities Mr. Allison is actively developing cheap access to space technologies. Mr. Allison has worked on the International Space Station Program for Grumman as a systems engineer specializing in robotics, for the Mevatec Corporation as an electrical power systems integration engineer, and for Teledyne Brown Engineering as a payload integration engineer for external space station experiments.
Mr. Allison is currently working for Hernandez Engineering as a safety and product assurance engineer on such projects as Orbital Space Plane, X-37 and HyTEx. Mr. Allison also studies means to defend Earth from asteroids, and the construction of large-scale space stations.
OTHER WHISTLE BLOWER STORIES, selected by peter2011
Guys, I hate to break it too you but Helley's comet is a an alien spaceship! The ship measures about 6.5 miles or 11km across. So thats no small ship. It passes earth in its wide orbit, and next time it will pass earth is in 41 years 6 months from today. Thats Jully 27, 2061. The ship is at an odd tilt putting the top of the ship towards its destination and its floor toward the tail the craft is making to disguise itself. Why hide? Because they don't want humans to be frightened of them, they just want to make a flyby to check on things and humanity as well. Nice of aliens to put so much effort into watching over us and worrying about us. Its always good to have friends in high places. :) Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
This strange unidentified flying object was seen and recorded in the sky above St Augustine in Florida on 4th December 2019.
Witness report:
The attached video is edited in order to be able to send it but it actually starts earlier and shows a longer time period Of hovering. The attached video is actually the third time we observed this bluish White white ball in the south East sky. I have pictures of the other times earlier that week. The three times that we saw the white bluish light in our Southeast sky it would either completely turn off or disappear or like in this video the last time we saw it it moved and then disappeared. this was the last night we witnessed it and was also a night that we saw a very high and unusual amount of helicopters flying around our sunset evening.
In addition we have pictures and video of an orangish reddish light that appeared during the same two weeks Knightley in the southwest sky at about 45° hovered and then moved after about an hour or after dark and it moved west across the sky nightly until we couldn’t see it.
My husband who actually recorded this video on his phone had an experience about 20 minutes after this recording that he still won’t share with me and I don’t know if he has any video or picture evidence and I still don’t know what happened other than it really freaked him out.
What if I told you that our universe was flooded with hundreds of kinds of nearly invisible particles and that, long ago, these particles formed a network of universe-spanning strings?
It sounds both trippy and awesome, but it's actually a prediction of string theory, our best (but frustratingly incomplete) attempt at a theory of everything. These bizarre, albeit hypothetical, little particles are known as axions, and if they can be found, that would mean we all live in a vast "axiverse."
The best part of this theory is that it's not just some physicist's armchair hypothesis, with no possibility of testing. This incomprehensibly huge network of strings may be detectable in the near future with microwave telescopes that are actually being built.
If found, the axiverse would give us a major step up in figuring out the puzzle of … well, all of physics.
A symphony of strings
OK, let's get down to business. First, we need to get to know the axion a little better. The axion, named by physicist (and, later, Nobel laureate) Frank Wilczek in 1978, gets its name because it's hypothesized to exist from a certain kind of symmetry-breaking. I know, I know — more jargon. Hold on. Physicists love symmetries — when certain patterns appear in mathematics.
There's one kind of symmetry, called the CP symmetry, that says that matter and antimatter should behave the same when their coordinates are reversed. But this symmetry doesn't seem to fit naturally into the theory of the strong nuclear force. One solution to this puzzle is to introduce another symmetry in the universe that "corrects" for this misbehavior. However, this new symmetry only appears at extremely high energies. At everyday low energies, this symmetry disappears, and to account for that, and out pops a new particle — the axion.
Now, we need to turn to string theory, which is our attempt (and has been our main attempt for 50-odd years now) to unify all of the forces of nature, especially gravity, in a single theoretical framework. It's proven to be an especially thorny problem to solve, due to a variety of factors, not the least of which is that, for string theory to work (in other words, for the mathematics to even have a hope of working out), our universe must have more than the usual three dimensions of space and one of time; there have to be extra spatial dimensions.
These spatial dimensions aren't visible to the naked eye, of course; otherwise, we would've noticed that sort of thing. So the extra dimensions have to be teensy-tiny and curled up on themselves at scales so small that they evade normal efforts to spot them.
What makes this hard is that we're not exactly sure how these extra dimensions curl up on themselves, and there's somewhere around 10^200 possible ways to do it.
But what these dimensional arrangements appear to have in common is the existence of axions, which, in string theory, are particles that wind themselves around some of the curled-up dimensions and get stuck.
What's more, string theory doesn't predict just one axion but potentially hundreds of different kinds, at a variety of masses, including the axion that might appear in the theoretical predictions of the strong nuclear force.
Silly strings
So, we have lots of new kinds of particles with all sorts of masses. Great! Could axions make up dark matter, which seems to be responsible for giving galaxies most of their mass but can't be detected by ordinary telescopes? Perhaps; it's an open question. But axions-as-dark-matter have to face some challenging observational tests, so some researchers instead focus on the lighter end of the axion families, exploring ways to find them.
And when those researchers start digging into the predicted behavior of these featherweight axions in the early universe, they find something truly remarkable. In the earliest moments of the history of our cosmos, the universe went through phase transitions, changing its entire character from exotic, high-energy states to regular low-energy states.
During one of these phase transitions (which happened when the universe was less than a second old), the axions of string theory didn't appear as particles. Instead, they looked like loops and lines — a network of lightweight, nearly invisible strings crisscrossing the cosmos.
This hypothetical axiverse, filled with a variety of lightweight axion strings, is predicted by no other theory of physics but string theory. So, if we determine that we live in an axiverse, it would be a major boon for string theory.
A shift in the light
How can we search for these axion strings? Models predict that axion strings have very low mass, so light won't bump into an axion and bend, or axions likely wouldn't mingle with other particles. There could be millions of axion strings floating through the Milky Way right now, and we wouldn't see them.
But the universe is old and big, and we can use that to our advantage, especially once we recognize that the universe is also backlit.
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the oldest light in the universe, emitted when it was just a baby — about 380,000 years old. This light has soaked the universe for all these billions of years, filtering through the cosmos until it finally hits something, like our microwave telescopes.
So, when we look at the CMB, we see it through billions of light-years' worth of universe. It's like looking at a flashlight"s glow through a series of cobwebs: If there is a network of axion strings threaded through the cosmos, we could potentially spot them.
In a recent study, published in the arXiv database on Dec. 5, a trio of researchers calculated the effect an axiverse would have on CMB light. They found that, depending on how a bit of light passes near a particular axion string, the polarization of that light could shift. That’s because the CMB light (and all light) is made of waves of electric and magnetic fields, and the polarization of light tells us how the electric fields are oriented — something that changes when the CMB light encounters an axion. We can measure the polarization of the CMB light by passing the signal through specialized filters, allowing us to pick out this effect.
The researchers found that the total effect on the CMB from a universe full of strings introduced a shift in polarization amounting to around 1%, which is right on the verge of what we can detect today. But future CMB mappers, such as the Cosmic Origins Explorer, Lite (Light) satellite for the studies of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection (LiteBIRD), and the Primordial Inflation Explorer (PIXIE) , are currently being designed. These futuristic telescopes would be capable of sniffing out an axiverse. And once those mappers come online, we'll either find that we live in an axiverse or rule out this particular prediction of string theory.
The 2010s saw big advances in Mars exploration, but the new decade may bring even more exciting news — the possible discovery of Red Planet life.
Scientists learned a great deal about the history and evolution of Mars in the last 10 years. NASA's Curiosity rover mission led the charge, determining that at least some parts of the planet were capable of supporting Earth-like life for long stretches in the ancient past.
"It's been a very successful and very enlightening mission, in terms of figuring out that Mars was a habitable planet," Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said last month during a media roundtable at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. "And now we can go [to] the next step of the program and figure out if life ever took hold."
That next step begins this July with the launches of NASA's 2020 Mars rover and the European-Russian rover Rosalind Franklin, both of which will hunt for signs of ancient Red Planet organisms.
But the alien-life hunt may not be the only Mars-exploration front opening in earnest in the 2020s. If the development of SpaceX's Starship Mars-colonizing vehicle goes well, it's possible that humanity could put boots on the Red Planet in the next 10 years as well.
A new phase
NASA has hunted for Mars life before. The agency's Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers, which in 1976 became the first spacecraft ever to touch down on the Red Planet, each carried four biological experiments. But the Vikings returned ambiguous results, forcing a strategy rethink.
The Viking missions "showed us that life is pretty difficult to find," Vasavada said.
NASA scientists and officials came to grips with this fact, and with the realization that it wasn't even clear if the conditions necessary for life as we know it had ever prevailed on Mars, he added. So, the agency embarked on a strategic exploration program designed to characterize the Red Planet in detail with a series of orbiter, lander and rover missions.
This work reached a crescendo in the 2010s. Curiosity and the smaller rovers Spirit and Opportunity plied their trade in the last decade, as did the InSight lander and its two fly-along cubesats and the orbiters Mars Odyssey, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN. (Spirit barely makes this list; the golf-cart-size rover last communicated with Earth in March 2010.)
And NASA didn't monopolize Mars exploration in the 2010s. India launched its first Red Planet craft, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), in 2013. Also eyeing the planet from aloft during the decade were Europe's long-lived Mars Express orbiter and the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), whose March 2016 launch took the European-Russian ExoMars program into space. (Rosalind Franklin and its accompanying landing platform, Kazachok, represent the second phase of the two-part ExoMars.)
The past tense is not really appropriate for many of the above craft, by the way: Curiosity, InSight, Mars Odyssey, MRO, MAVEN, MOM, Mars Express and TGO all remain active today.
The work done by these robots and their predecessors has paved the way for Mars 2020 and Rosalind Franklin. For example, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and the orbiters spotted lots of evidence of past water activity on the Red Planet's surface. Curiosity dug even deeper, identifying an ancient lake-and-stream system inside Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater. And MAVEN provided valuable temporal context, finding that the Red Planet likely had lost most of its atmosphere — which had kept Mars warm enough to support liquid surface water — to space by about 3.7 billion years ago.
"I think the evidence is compelling that Mars has met, in the past, all the requirements for either the occurrence of life or an origin of life, depending on how you think something might have played out," MAVEN principal investigator Bruce Jakosky, of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Space.com at the AGU meeting last month.
Two life-hunting rovers
That brings us to Mars 2020 and Rosalind Franklin. The ExoMars rover is scheduled to touch down in March 2021, likely in Oxia Planum, a plain in the Red Planet's northern hemisphere that shows lots of evidence of ancient water activity.
The solar-powered Rosalind Franklin will use its cameras and scientific instruments to search for morphological and chemical signs of ancient Mars life. The rover will be able to dig deep for such clues; it's equipped with a drill that can bore 6.5 feet (2 meters) below the Red Planet's surface.
Mars 2020, which will soon get a more memorable moniker via a student naming competition, will do similar astrobiology work inside the 28-mile-wide (45 km) Jezero Crater. (The rover will gather a variety of other data — and test out new exploration tech, including a tiny Mars helicopter — as well.)
Scientists think Jezero was home to a lake and a river delta in the ancient past, so it's a good hunting ground on multiple fronts for the NASA rover. Not only was that ancient environment potentially habitable, but river deltas here on Earth are good at preserving biosignatures, mission team members have said.
"We are very much hoping that, with our payload, we can make a very strong case that there are biosignatures on the surface of Mars," Mars 2020 deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan of JPL said at the AGU media roundtable last month.
Mars 2020 won't be able to drill nearly as deep as Rosalind Franklin. But the NASA rover will do some specialty boring of its own, collecting and caching several dozen samples for eventual return to Earth, where they can be scrutinized in detail by teams of scientists in well-equipped labs around the world.
This is a key aspect of the 2020 rover mission. After all, confirming the existence of ancient biosignatures on Mars, if any are indeed there to be found, is likely to be a tricky business, said Jim Bell of Arizona State University, principal investigator of Mars 2020's Mastcam-Z instrument.
"We could make a claim about a biosignature, but it's not clear anyone would believe us," Bell said at the AGU roundtable. "So, let's bring the samples back."
Getting the Mars material here will be a joint effort between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). Europe recently affirmed its financial commitment to the complicated sample-return effort, but NASA is still waiting for its official budgetary go-ahead.
If that green light does indeed come, the 2020s will likely get another serious jolt of spaceflight electricity. The current, still-unconfirmed plan envisions launching a NASA mission called Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL) in 2026. SRL will include a stationary lander, the ESA-provided Sample Fetch Rover and a rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle, which will blast the material collected by Mars 2020 into space. These precious samples would make it to Earth in 2031.
There will be much more Mars activity in the 2020s as well — a lot just this year, in fact, if all goes according to plan.
China aims to launch an orbiter-rover mission to the Red Planet this summer, in the same July-August window that Mars 2020 and Rosalind Franklin are targeting. (Such windows come just once every 26 months, when Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions.)
These would be the first Chinese probes to make it to Mars, but not the first to try. An orbiter called Yinghuo-1 launched in November 2011 aboard Russia's Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, which never made it out of Earth orbit.
The United Arab Emirates also plans to notch its first Red Planet success soon: the nation aims to launch an orbiter called the Hope Mars Mission this summer. Japan — whose only Mars mission to date, the Nozomi orbiter, failed in 1998 — is working to send a lander toward the Red Planet in 2022 and a sample-return mission to the Mars moon Phobos in 2024. India's MOM 2, which may include a lander and/or rover along with an orbiter, could lift off in that same general timeframe.
And then there's the realm of human spaceflight. NASA is working to put boots on Mars sometime in the 2030s, with plenty of help from its international partners and the private sector. But SpaceX has a more ambitious timeline.
Elon Musk's company is developing a giant, reusable rocket-spaceship combo known as Starship to make colonization of the Red Planet economically feasible. Starship could end up helping set up a million-person city on Mars within the next 50 to 100 years if all goes well, Musk has said.
And Starship's first interplanetary forays should come much sooner than that. SpaceX aims to launch an uncrewed Starship mission to the lunar surface as early as 2022, company president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell recently said. That flight might be a contracted NASA mission; the agency recently announced that SpaceX is eligible to deliver robotic NASA payloads to the moon's surface using Starship.
Crew-carrying milestones could follow in relatively short order. For example, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has booked a round-the-moon mission aboard Starship, with a target launch date of 2023.
Such timelines may prove to be overly ambitious. After all, the only Starship version that's gotten off the ground to date is a stubby, single-engine prototype called Starhopper, and the first full-size variant of the spaceship blew its top during its initial pressure test this past November. But SpaceX has a track record of achieving impressive spaceflight feats, as its dozens of rocket landings and many cargo missions to the International Space Station attest.
So stay tuned. With or without a crewed Mars mission, the next 10 years should be a wild Red Planet ride!
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.
Illustrations of NASA's Curiosity (also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, or MSL) and Mars 2020 rovers. While the newest rover borrows from Curiosity's design, each has its own role in the ongoing exploration of Mars and the search for ancient life.
NASA plans to launch a rover to Mars this July to hunt for signs of ancient Red Planet life.
The new Mars 2020 rover's body is similar to that of the older Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012. But the two machines are quite different in important ways.
Curiosity's mission centers on assessing the past habitability of its landing site, the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater. The rover quickly determined that Gale harbored a potentially habitable lake-and-stream system in the ancient past, and Curiosity is now fleshing out that long-gone environment as it climbs the foothills of Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 km) into the sky from Gale's center.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover looks virtually the same as Curiosity, but there are a number of differences. One giveaway to which rover you're looking at is 2020's aft cross-beam, which looks a bit like a shopping cart handle. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Mars 2020 will characterize the habitability of its landing site, Jezero Crater, after touching down in February 2021. But the new rover will also hunt for ancient biosignatures — signs of past life that could be lurking in rock or soil samples. And Mars 2020 will cache the most promising samples for return to Earth by a future mission.
The mass and dimensions of the rovers differ as well. Mars 2020 is about 5 inches (13 centimeters) longer and 280 lbs. (127 kilograms) heavier than Curiosity. That's because Mars 2020 will carry a different set of tools, officials with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) explained in a recent statement.
The two robots' arms have the same reach (7 feet, or 2.2 meters). But Mars 2020 has bigger instruments and a larger drill to do "coring."
"The drill will cut intact rock cores, rather than pulverizing them, and they'll be placed in sample tubes via a complex storage system," JPL officials said in the statement.
Curiosity has 17 cameras, including both color and black-and-white shooters. Mars 2020, by comparison, will carry 23, and most of them will take color photos. In addition, Mars 2020's Mastcam-Z will improve upon Curiosity's Mast Camera with zoom and high-definition video.
The newer rover, unlike its predecessor, will also carry two microphones to listen to the sounds of landing on Mars, as well as the Red Planet wind and the zaps coming from Mars 2020's onboard laser-equipped instrument.
Mars 2020 also will improve upon Curiosity's aluminum wheels, which have been damaged by sharp rocks. NASA successfully modified its driving plan for Curiosity to see it through its time on the Red Planet. But such troubleshooting may not be necessary for Mars 2020, whose wheels are bigger and thicker, and sport more treads, or "grousers."
"Extensive testing in JPL's Mars Yard has shown these treads better withstand the pressure from sharp rocks but work just as well on sand," JPL officials said.
Mars 2020 will also take advantage of advances in computing for "self-driving smarts," figuring out its path on Mars autonomously up to five times faster than Curiosity can. Mars 2020 team members hope this upgraded brain will reduce the amount of planning time needed for navigation, allowing the new rover to cover more ground and accomplish more tasks.
With the self-driving technique, daily operations could take 5 hours, compared with 7 for Curiosity, JPL officials stated. (Curiosity used to require 19 hours of analysis, but improved operations and newer autonavigation on Curiosity have reduced that time considerably in seven years.)
A final major difference is in the landing. Like Curiosity, Mars 2020 will endure "seven minutes of terror" that wraps up with a rocket-powered sky crane lowering the robot to the Martian surface on cables. But the new rover features "terrain relative navigation," an advanced system that will allow Mars 2020 to land much more precisely than its predecessor.
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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.
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