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...
For centuries, humans have wondered whether Earth is unique in the universe, or if similar planets exist out there. Even a decade ago, we still did not know — but then NASA's Kepler Space Telescope made discoveries that changed everything.
Thanks to that important mission, the answer became clear: other planets like ours are out in the cosmos. We just haven't seen one with our own eyes yet.
Since its 2009 launch, Kepler has discovered more than 2,000 confirmed exoplanets and has given us a huge amount of information about their orbits and sizes. The planets found range greatly in their masses, composition and orbital distances: for instance, enormous gas giants orbiting incredibly close to their stars, called hot Jupiters; planets that orbit two stars, called circumbinary planets; and rocky planets with the potential to be like Earth. [In Mission To Find Another Earth, Project Blue Hopes To Inspire (Video)]
The planets considered Earth-like are rocky on their surface and about 0.5 to 1.5 times the size of Earth. They also land in the "habitable zone" of their orbiting stars, meaning they fall in the sweet spot of orbital distance — not too close and not too far away — and therefore have the potential to be able to support liquid water on their surfaces. The ability to support water is huge, as it means the planet could have the potential to support life.
Kepler showed us these planets are common in the universe. In fact, we now know there are more potentially habitable planets in our galaxy alone than there are people alive on Earth. One out of every two sun-like stars you see in the night sky has a rocky, Earth-like planet in its habitable zone.
Depiction of NASA's Kepler mission's smallest habitable zone planet: Kepler-62f. (Image credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/Tim Pyle)
Earlier this year, one potentially habitable planet made news when scientists discovered it orbiting the nearby red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. That planet, called Proxima b, which has similarities to Earth that include orbiting in the habitable zone of its star, so the potential to support water, and a size about 1.3 times that of Earth.
Artist's conception of the surface of Proxima Centauri b (Proxima b, for short). (Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)
We now know these planets exist, but we have yet to see them. To know more about a planet's Earth-like properties, such as whether it hosts water or oxygen, further specific detection methods are needed. Thanks to recent breakthroughs, the technology now exists to capture a direct image of an Earth-like planet outside our solar system. That's what we aim to do at Project Blue.
Our mission is to capture an image, visible to the human eye, of one of these worlds. Proxima b is an unlikely candidate, as it orbits so close to its small, dim star that it would be extremely difficult to image with a telescope. Project Blue is therefore targeting our best chance at success: our stellar neighbor Alpha Centauri.
Our goal is to see a "pale blue dot" that could indicate the presence of oceans or an atmosphere — and the potential to support life. Since Alpha Centauri is a binary system, it doubles our chances, and the probability that we'll find at least one potentially habitable planet is around 85 percent.
Capturing the first image of a planet like ours and seeing it with our eyes will help us begin to characterize its properties and spark a movement to quickly further research. The photograph of Earth 2.0 would be a defining moment in human history and is sure to transform how we see ourselves in the universe.
NASA's satellite spotted a strange object moving across the solar system.
The object was as big as the Moon
Experts believe the object was an alien vessel
UFO experts claimed that a massive alien vessel as big as the Moon is currently moving across Earth’s neighborhood. According to the experts, the alleged UFO was spotted by NASA’s solar satellite.
The strange UFO sighting was reported via YouTube by the channel The Hidden Underbelly 2.0. According to the operator of the channel, the camera of NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was able to capture a strange object moving across the Solar System on Feb. 29.
The camera, known as Stereo A, was positioned to observe the Sun. In the short clip recorded by the camera, various planets such as Earth, Venus and Mercury can be seen orbiting in the Solar System. Then, an unidentified object appears in the video and stars to move towards the planets.
Unfortunately, a couple of seconds after the strange object appeared, Stereo A begins to malfunction and the video cuts off.
Based on the video, the object appears to have a circular shape with a cross or diamond-shaped structure at its center. After watching the video and enhancing its images, Scott Waring of ET Data Base claimed that the object was an alien vessel that was traveling across the Solar System.
“Here is a really interesting video of a circular craft with a diamond-shaped center,” Waring wrote in a blog post. “It was moving through a NASA SOHO video and got caught. The UFO is there for only 4 seconds, but if slowed down, we can see its detail well.”
Based on the appearance of the object, Waring estimated that it could be about as big as the Moon or possibly even bigger. For Waring, the object proves that alien vessels are currently wandering the Solar System. He also said that NASA intentionally denies their existence to prevent the public from panicking.
“This is 100% proof that aliens are in our Solar System right now,” Waring stated. “This ship is massive, moon size or bigger and moving incredibly fast. I'm sure NASA would never mention it because if they did, they would have to tell the public the truth about aliens existing. They don't want to cause any panic.”
The Kepler Spacecraft has detected a lot of exoplanets orbiting stars in other solar systems, but its data may have just uncovered an exomoon for the first time.
NASA'S CURIOSITY JUST TOOK THE HIGHEST RESOLUTION PANORAMA OF MARS TO DATE
NASA'S CURIOSITY JUST TOOK THE HIGHEST RESOLUTION PANORAMA OF MARS TO DATE
The rover is quite the photographer.
While America overdosed on turkey, NASA's Curiosity rover spent this past Thanksgiving holiday all alone, millions of miles away on Mars.
But unlike the rest of us, the rover was far from idle. Instead, the Martian explorer worked on its photography skills.
Between November 24 and December 1, 2019, Curiosity took more than 1,000 images of the Red Planet, piecing together the highest resolution panorama of Mars to date. The stunning image reveals the dry, dusty surface of Mars in its full glory.
"While many on our team were at home enjoying turkey, Curiosity produced this feast for the eyes," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which leads the Curiosity rover mission, said in a statement.
The robot took six and a half hours to produce this detailed panorama. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA released the final image on Wednesday.
The panorama captures a wide view of Glen Torridon, an area of Mars that Curiosity is currently exploring near a mountain called Mount Sharp.
Curiosity used the telephoto lens on its Mast Camera to snap the high-resolution image. Altogether, it is made up of 1.8 billion pixels, revealing the Martian landscape in unprecedented detail.
The rover also used a medium-angle lens to produce a lower resolution version of just 650 million pixels, which also features the robot’s arm and front deck.
The rover may have left its finger on the lens while snapping this lower-resolution image. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
The image marks the first time Curiosity has dedicated its operations to producing a 360-degree panorama of its surroundings, according to NASA.
It took Curiosity nearly seven hours to capture both shots. The holiday period meant the rover could spare the extra time, though — with its operating team away on holiday, it didn’t have many tasks on its to-do list.
While this view is unprecedented, Curiosity is known for its photography skills. In 2013, it snapped a lower-resolution panorama of the Martian surface while it was on the Rocknest site. The image is not as detailed as the new panorama, and features the rover’s shiny metallic body in the foreground. Clearly, the robot has stepped up its game over the intervening years.
Curiosity's first attempt at a panorama image.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
The rover is also fond of taking selfies, snapping pictures of itself as it explores the Red Planet.
Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 with the mission of searching for hints of microbial life that may have existed on the Red Planet during its early history.
The car-sized robot roams the Gale Crater on Mars, where it has discovered a lake that may have contained water billions of years ago, and an environment that may have supported life.
Curiosity will soon be joined by NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, which is scheduled to launch this summer. Like its robot peer, the Mars 2020 rover is designed to search for signs of current or past signs of life on the Red Planet.
UFO 'Bigger Than Earth' Flying Past the Sun Spotted by NASA Observation Mission aka
UFO 'Bigger Than Earth' Flying Past the Sun Spotted by NASA Observation Mission aka "Ezekiel's Wheel" Type
The development comes weeks after a camera at the International Space Station spotted an unknown cone-like object that was flying upward.
NASA’s STEREO observation mission has spotted what fans of conspiracy theories said is a gigantic UFO flying past the Sun. The incident itself occurred on 29 February, but the footage of it was posted just recently on the channel “Hidden Underbelly 2.0” dedicated to mysterious events and sightings. According to the host, STEREO’s camera filmed the humongous object for four seconds after which it turned off and began working only after the UFO passed.
The “humongous object” appears to be bigger than Mercury, Venus, and the Earth. “You can tell this thing doesn’t look like our space station, no way. It doesn’t look like any satellite that I have seen. To be honest, when I first saw the footage I thought: Ezekiel’s Wheel! It’s very similar – the circle with a cross in it”, the host said.
The host refers to a saying in the Book of Ezekiel, where the prophet spoke about a flying chariot, which he described as a “wheel in the middle of a wheel”.
NASA has not yet issued a response to the issue. via Sputnik.news
Selfie of Curiosity Rover reveals Ancient Machinery on Mars
Selfie of Curiosity Rover reveals Ancient Machinery on Mars
A selfie of the Curiosity Rover at Greenheugh Pediment on Mars, uploaded by Neville Thompson on his Gigapan page, shows a couple of strange objects.
The alleged objects appear very different compared to the large rocks surrounding them, suggesting that these objects may be parts of old machinery used for mining activities.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover has photographed many interesting images of the surface of Mars since it touched down on the red planet in 2012 and these images is yet another proof that ancient civilizations lived on the red planet in the distant past?
The Unexplained UFO Lights over G.E. Peebles Test Facility in Ohio’s Area 51 (1996)
The Unexplained UFO Lights over G.E. Peebles Test Facility in Ohio’s Area 51 (1996)
The UFO Lights over G.E. Peebles Test Operation Facility in Ohio’s Area 51.
The Peebles operation, with more than 250 employees and located on nearly 7,000 acres, is both an engine test and final assembly facility. Each year, Peebles runs final acceptance testing on about 1,250 engines manufactured by GE and its joint venture partners. From Peebles, these engines are shipped to aircraft manufacturers for installation on customer aircraft. Does Hangar 18, Legendary Alien Warehouse, Exist? Crashed UFOs, alien autopsies and government cover-ups — untangling the legend surrounding Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As home to Project Blue Book, ground zero for government investigation of UFOs from 1951 to 1969, Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) outside Dayton, Ohio, ranks up there alongside Area 51 as a subject of enduring speculation.
Posted by Andy Briggs in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | SPACE
Globular clusters are spherical collections of up to perhaps a million stars, orbiting mostly in the star halo of spiral galaxies, containing some of a galaxy’s oldest stars.
The globular cluster M5, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. This photo was an Astronomy Picture of the Day in June 2015.
Globular clusters are tightly packed, symmetrical collections of up to about a million stars, orbiting mostly in the star halos surrounding most spiral galaxies. Globular clusters contain some of the oldest stars in a galaxy and are thought to have formed early in its history. Could it be that – when it was first forming – a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way was once an amorphous cloud of gas and dust? Could its first stars have collected into globular clusters? Could these clusters have stayed put in the halo around a galaxy’s center, as the rest of the galaxy flattened out and formed spiral arms? That scenario would explain why globular clusters orbit in a galaxy’s halo and contain a its oldest stars.
But the fact is that no one knows precisely how globular clusters formed, and what role, if any, they played in the development of galaxies. We do know that globular clusters are the oldest, largest and most massive type of star cluster and that they contain the oldest stars. Their age can be demonstrated by their almost complete lack of gas and dust, all of which has presumably been incorporated into stars.
Globular clusters are big. They can reach 300 light-years in diameter. Unlike the open star clusters – containing a few hundred young, sibling stars, scattered through the disk of our galaxy and presumably other galaxies – globular clusters are big, symmetric and old, like an earthly city’s oldest and most staid citizens.
View larger. | The famous globular cluster Messier 13 or M13 – largest and brightest globular cluster easily visible from the Northern Hemisphere – seen against its star field. At 25,000 light-years away and about 145 light-years in diameter, M13 is a popular target for amateur astronomers using small telescopes.
Our own Milky Way has around 150 globular clusters, with perhaps more awaiting discovery, hidden by galactic dust. Our neighboring spiral galaxy in the direction of the constellation Andromeda – M31 or the Andromeda galaxy – appears to have around 300 globular clusters. Some football-shaped, elliptical galaxies do have globular clusters, too, like M87 in the direction of the constellation Virgo, home to the supermassive black hole that was famously imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019. This giant elliptical galaxy, M87, has been estimated to possess around 15,000 globular clusters, with more than 1,000 having been directly observed telescopically so far.
About 150 globular star clusters are known to surround our galaxy’s center.
Globular clusters orbit galaxies in orbits which are highly eccentric and highly inclined to the galactic plane. Orbiting in the “outskirts” of a galaxy, they take perhaps a few hundred million years to complete a single orbit. In a telescope, a globular cluster looks like a fuzzy ball, with individual stars at the periphery merging into a solid ball of light towards the center. However, this is simply because the stars are so close together that they can’t be resolved individually telescopically. At the center of a globular cluster, stars may reach a density of between 100 and 1,000 stars per cubic parsec. That’s in contrast to the density of stars near our sun, estimated at about 0.14 star per cubic parsec. If you were standing on a planet orbiting a star in a globular cluster, your night sky would be extremely crowded with nearby stars!
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the core of the great globular cluster Messier 13, in the constellation Hercules.
The stars in globular clusters are the galaxy’s most ancient inhabitants, comprising a population of what astronomers call Population II stars. Those whose age has been measured are between 11 and 13 billion years old, making them almost as old as the galaxy itself. Not surprisingly, many of these ancient stars have evolved into huge, bloated red giant stars, as our sun will do in a few billion years. The stars are extremely metal-poor, which is to say – in the peculiar language of astronomy – they have tiny amounts of materials heavier than helium compared to the surrounding interstellar medium (astronomers refer to all elements heavier than helium as “metals”). Because the heavier elements are made inside stars – and then spread throughout the interstellar medium via supernova explosions – this paucity of metals is exactly what would normally be expected from such old stars. In other worlds, Population II stars consist almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, the materials that were present in the early universe.
However, there is a mystery: globular clusters also have “abundance anomalies” of heavier metals, meaning there are elements present which are found elsewhere, in stars that formed more recently. In particular, there appears to be excesses of sodium, carbon, oxygen and aluminum, with heavier metals such as strontium, yttrium, barium and europium also being present in some clusters. These anomalies have not been satisfactorily explained, although there have been several explanations put forward, such as the early presence of supermassive stars .
The most famous globular cluster in the northern hemisphere is M13 in the constellation of Hercules, sometimes referred to as the Great Globular Cluster, which was discovered by Edmond Halley in 1714. Charles Messier later added it into his famous catalog in 1764. In amateur telescopes, it is a small fuzzy patch of light, some 22,000 light-years from Earth. At the center of this cluster, stars orbit so closely that occasionally they collide, their deaths leading to the creation of new stars known as “blue stragglers.” This stellar population is the only type of newer stars in globular clusters.
Other globular clusters of note are M22 in Sagittarius – one of the brightest in the sky – M5 in Serpens and M12 in Ophiuchus. Many of the night sky’s biggest and brightest globular clusters are best viewed on spring nights and often feature in so-called “Messier Marathons.”
Globular clusters are a wonderful sight in even the smallest telescopes, although a large instrument is needed to resolve individual stars towards their centers.
When you look at them, you are seeing populations of stars born in our galaxy’s infancy!
Amateur astronomers enjoy peering at globular clusters through their small telescopes. Here is Omega Centauri, captured by Greg Hogan in Kathleen, Georgia. Thanks, Greg!
Bottom line: Globular clusters are spherical collections of up to perhaps a million stars, orbiting mostly in the star halo of spiral galaxies and containing some of a galaxy’s oldest stars.
Juno arrived at Jupiter in 2016. It’s in a 53-day orbit around the planet. Close sweeps past the planet are called “perijoves” (peri means “near”). Here are some spectacular images from the most recent sweep, Perijove 25, in February.
Jupiter at mid-northern latitudes as seen by Juno during Perijove 25. The small, round, swirly spots are storms in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI/ MSSS/ Kevin M. Gill.
The Juno mission to Jupiter has been orbiting the giant planet since 2016, and NASA has made the raw images from Juno’s camera available to the public for processing. Click here if you want to help. Juno has a 53-day orbit around Jupiter, and close passes of the planet are called perijoves, from the Greek wordperi meaning near. Images are now coming in from Juno’s most recent close sweep past the planet, Perijove 25, on February 17, 2020. We’ve also included some images on this page from the next-to-last sweep past Jupiter (Perijove 24) on December 26, 2019.
Jupiter as seen from the south, also from Perijove 25.
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI/ MSSS/ Kevin M. Gill.
Brian Swift processed the video below, using imagery from the JunoCam instrument during Perijove 25.
The best place to see the latest processed images from Juno is probably Twitter. Follow the three people below, who are active in image processing.
Kevin M. Gill@kevinmgill
Fisheye view of Jupiter at mid-northern latitudes, @NASAJuno Perijove 25
A mosaic from @NASAJuno images PJ25_25 and PJ25_27 obtained on Feb 17, 2020. Approx true color/contrast and enhanced versions. The oval left of center is known as NN-WS-4. It is about 7000 km long in the east-west direction and is at planetographic latitude ~42 degrees north.
Here’s a mosaic of images of Jupiter, processed and assembled by Brian Swift from Perijove 24. He labeled this as a “collage [with] exaggerated contrast/color.”
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI/ MSSS/ Brian Swift.
And here’s a cool image to end on, processed by citizen scientist Tanya Oleksuik and released by NASA on March 2, 2020. It’s from the second-to-last close sweep past Jupiter by Juno, in December 2019 (Perijove 24). Tanya created this color-enhanced image using data from the JunoCam camera.
See the 2 white ovals merging, within the orange-colored band? NASA’s Juno spacecraft caught these 2 storms in the act of merging on December 26, 2019, a few days after a close flyby of the planet (Perijove 24). The 2 merging white ovals are anticyclones; they rotate counter-clockwise. The larger of the ovals has been tracked for many years, as it grew in size through mergers with other anticyclonic white ovals on Jupiter.
Bottom line: Newly processed images from the days around the Juno spacecraft’s most recent low pass over the planet – called a “perijove” – on December 17, 2019.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. Kepler-186f is special because it marks the first planet almost exactly the same size as Earth orbiting in the “habitable zone” – the distance from a star in which we might expect liquid water, and perhaps life.
What did not make the news, however, is that this discovery also slightly increases how much credence we give to the possibility of near-term human extinction. This because of a concept known as the Great Filter.
The Great Filter is an argument that attempts to resolve the Fermi Paradox: why have we not found aliens, despite the existence of hundreds of billions of solar systems in our galactic neighborhood in which life might evolve? As the namesake physicist Enrico Fermi noted, it seems rather extraordinary that not a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has been detected (UFO conspiracy theorists notwithstanding).
This apparent absence of thriving extraterrestrial civilizations suggests that at least one of the steps from humble planet to interstellar civilization is exceedingly unlikely. The absence could be caused because either intelligent life is extremely rare or intelligent life has a tendency to go extinct. This bottleneck for the emergence of alien civilizations from any one of the many billions of planets is referred to as the Great Filter.
Are We Alone? What exactly is causing this bottleneck has been the subject of debate for more than 50 years. Explanations could include a paucity of Earth-like planets or self-replicating molecules. Other possibilities could be an improbable jump from simple prokaryotic life (cells without specialized parts) to more complex eukaryotic life – after all, this transition took well over a billion years on Earth.
Proponents of this “Rare Earth” hypothesis also argue that the evolution of complex life requires an exceedingly large number of perfect conditions. In addition to Earth being in the habitable zone of the sun, our star must be far enough away from the galactic centre to avoid destructive radiation, our gas giants must be massive enough to sweep asteroids from Earth’s trajectory, and our unusually large moon stabilizes the axial tilt that gives us different seasons.
These are just a few prerequisites for complex life. The emergence of symbolic language, tools and intelligence could require other such “perfect conditions” as well.
Or Is the Filter Ahead of Us? While emergence of intelligent life could be rare, the silence could also be the result of intelligent life emerging frequently but subsequently failing to survive for long. Might every sufficiently advanced civilization stumble across a suicidal technology or unsustainable trajectory? We know that a Great Filter prevents the emergence of prosperous interstellar civilizations, but we don’t know whether or not it lies in humanity’s past or awaits us in the future.
For 200,000 years humanity has survived supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, and naturally occurring pandemics. But our track record of survival is limited to just a few decades in the presence of nuclear weaponry. And we have no track record at all of surviving many of the radically novel technologies that are likely to arrive this century.
Esteemed scientists such as Astronomer Royal Martin Rees at the Cambridge Center for the Study of Existential Risk point to advances in biotechnology as being potentially catastrophic. Others such as Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark and Stuart Russell, also with the Cambridge Center, have expressed serious concern about the exotic but understudied possibility of machine superintelligence.
Let’s Hope Kepler-186f is Barren When the Fermi Paradox was initially proposed, it was thought that planets themselves were rare. Since then, however, the tools of astronomy have revealed the existence of hundreds of exoplanets. That just seems to be the tip of the iceberg.
But each new discovery of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone, such as Kepler-186f, makes it less plausible that there are simply no planets aside from Earth that might support life. The Great Filter is thus more likely to be lurking in the path between habitable planet and flourishing civilization.
If Kepler-186f is teeming with intelligent life, then that would be really bad news for humanity. For that fact would push back the Great Filter’s position further into the technological stages of a civilization’s development. We might then expect that catastrophe awaits both our extraterrestrial companions and ourselves.
In the case of Kepler-186f, we still have many reasons to think intelligent life might not emerge. The atmosphere might be too thin to prevent freezing, or the planet might be tidally locked, causing a relatively static environment. Discovery of these hostile conditions should be cause for celebration. As philosopher Nick Bostrom once said:
The silence of the night sky is golden … in the search for extraterrestrial life, no news is good news. It promises a potentially great future for humanity.
Organic Molecules Found on Mars Could Have a Biological Origin, Study Shows
MICHELLE STARR
New analysis of organic molecules found in dried-up Martian mud in the Gale Crater has revealed an intriguing possibility. Scientists have concluded that we can't rule out those molecules actually have a biological origin.
NASA's Curiosity rover took this selfie in 2019.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill
Although our understanding of the Martian molecules is limited and incomplete, the information we do have could be consistent with life on the Red Planet billions of years ago.
The molecules were actually extracted by the Curiosity rover from a mudstone section of the Gale Crater called the Murray Formation; a study on the finding was published in 2018. The initial experiments revealed a number of molecules, including a group of aromatic compounds called thiophenes.
Here on Earth, these compounds are usually found in some pretty interesting places. They show up in crude oil - made of compressed and superheated dead organisms such as zooplankton and algae; and coal - made of compressed and superheated dead plants.
The compound is thought to form abiotically - that is, through a physical process, not a biological one - when sulphur reacts with organic hydrocarbons at temperatures greater than 120 degrees Celsius (248°F), a reaction called thermochemical sulphate reduction (TSR).
However, while this reaction is abiotic, the hydrocarbons and sulphur can both be of biological origin. So, researchers set out to investigate how thiophenes could have formed on Mars.
"We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof," said astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University.
"If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher."
There are a number of ways thiophenes could have emerged on Mars without necessitating the presence of life. For instance, thiophenes have been detected in meteorites; so extramartian rocks could have carried the molecules in.
Geological processes can also produce the heat necessary for TSR, especially back when Mars was volcanically active; and volcanic activity, of course, also produces sulphur.
But there's something interesting about the Martian thiophenes. The processes described above require the sulphur to be nucleophilic, that is, the sulphur atoms donate electrons to form a bond with their reaction partner. Yet most of the sulphur on Mars exists as non-nucleophilic sulphates.
These can be reduced to nucleophilic sulphides via TSR. But there's another possibility, too - biological sulphate reduction (BSR). Some bacteria - and white truffles, too, actually, although you probably won't find those on Mars - can synthesise thiophenes.
So it's possible that when Mars was a warmer, wetter place than it is today, around 3 billion years ago, that bacterial colonies existed, and produced the thiophenes. This could occur even in below-zero temperatures. Then, when Mars dried up, the thiophenes were left there for Curiosity to dig out of the mudstone all these years later.
Sadly, the sample was a bit damaged. Curiosity uses an analysis technique called pyrolysis that heats the samples to over 500 degrees Celsius. So there's a limit to the knowledge we can glean from what survived.
But the Rosalind Franklin rover, scheduled for launch in July, will have on board an instrument that is much less destructive. So any thiophenes it digs out of the ground may be more intact when analysis is applied.
In addition, the carbon and sulphur isotopes could be revealing, too. That's because living organisms prefer lighter isotopes; if the thiophenes contain lighter isotopes, that could weight the evidence towards biological processes too.
Sadly, we probably won't know for sure based on just what our robotic friends can dig out of the ground.
"As Carl Sagan said 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'," Schulze‑Makuch said.
"I think the proof will really require that we actually send people there, and an astronaut looks through a microscope and sees a moving microbe."
Two galaxy clusters collided to create the “Bullet Cluster,” shown here. Normal matter is shown in pink and the rest of the matter is illustrated in blue, revealing that dark matter dominates this enormous cluster.
(Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.; Lensing Map: NASA/STScI; ESO WFI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.)
Most of our universe is hidden in plain sight. Though we can’t see or touch it, most astronomers say the majority of the cosmos consists of dark matter and dark energy. But what is this mysterious, invisible stuff that surrounds us? And what’s the difference between dark energy and dark matter? In short, dark matter slows down the expansion of the universe, while dark energy speeds it up.
Dark matter works like an attractive force — a kind of cosmic cement that holds our universe together. This is because dark matter does interact with gravity, but it doesn’t reflect, absorb or emit light. Meanwhile, dark energy is a repulsive force — a sort of anti-gravity — that drives the universe’s ever-accelerating expansion.
Dark energy is the far more dominant force of the two, accounting for roughly 68 percent of the universe’s total mass and energy. Dark matter makes up 27 percent. And the rest — a measly 5 percent — is all the regular matter we see and interact with every day
Dark matter cannot be photographed, but researchers can detect it and map it by measuring gravitational lensing. Its distribution is shown here in the blue overlay of the inner region of Abell 1689, a cluster of galaxies 2.2 billion light-years away.
(Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/Yale/CNRS)
Dark Matter
In the 1930s, Swiss-born astronomer Fritz Zwicky studied images of the roughly 1,000 galaxies that make up the Coma Cluster — and he spotted something funny about their behavior. The galaxies moved so fast that they should simply fly apart. He speculated that some kind of “dark matter” held them together.
Decades later, astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford found a similar phenomenon when they studied the rotation rates of individual galaxies. The stars at a galaxy’s outer edge should circle slower than stars near the center. That’s the way planets in our solar system orbit. Instead, they noticed that the stars on a galaxy’s outskirts orbit just as fast — or faster — than the stars closer in. Rubin and Ford had found more evidence that some invisible form of matter is apparently holding the universe together.
“Even stars at the periphery are orbiting at high velocities,” Rubin once explained in an interview with Discover. “There has to be a lot of mass to make the stars orbit so rapidly, but we can’t see it. We call this invisible mass dark matter.”
The left galaxy rotates how astronomers would have expected if dark matter didn’t exist. The galaxy on the right reflects what their telescopes actually reveal. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Astronomers now have many other lines of evidence that suggest dark matter is real. In fact, the existence of dark matter is so widely accepted that it’s part of the so-called standard model of cosmology, which forms the foundation of how scientists understand the universe’s birth and evolution. Without it, we can’t explain how we got here.
But that lofty status puts pressure on cosmologists to find definitive proof that dark matter exists and that their model of the universe is correct. For decades, physicists all over the world have employed increasingly high-tech instruments to try and detect dark matter. So far, they’ve found no signs of it.
A wide view of the local universe, spanning hundreds of millions of light-years, reveals the clumped and weblike structure of the cosmos, with strands of galaxies and immense voids. The Milky Way is just one of many points that make up the Virgo Supercluster. Rather than just empty, passive spaces, voids may hold clues to understanding dark matter, dark energy and galactic evolution.
Astronomers have known that our universe is expanding for about a century now. Telescopic observations have shown that most galaxies are moving away from each other, which implies the galaxies were closer together in the distant past. As a result, the evidence piled up for the Big Bang. However, astronomers assumed that the combined gravitational pull of all the cosmos’ stars and galaxies should be slowing down the universe’s expansion. Perhaps it would even someday collapse back in on itself in a Big Crunch.
That notion was thrown out in the late 1990s, however, when two teams of astronomers spotted something that didn’t make any sense. Researchers studying supernovas in the the most distant galaxies discovered that distant galaxies were moving away from us faster than nearby galaxies. The universe wasn’t just expanding — the expansion was speeding up.
“My own reaction is somewhere between amazement and horror,“ astronomer Brian Schmidt, who led one of the two teams, told The New York Times in 1998. “Amazement, because I just did not expect this result, and horror in knowing that it will likely be disbelieved by a majority of astronomers — who, like myself, are extremely skeptical of the unexpected.“
(Credit: Roen Kelly/Discover)
But rather than refute it, subsequent observations have only made the evidence for dark energy more robust. In fact, some prominent critics of dark matter still accept the existence of dark energy.
Now, that doesn’t mean researchers know what dark energy is. Far from it. But they can describe its role in the universe, thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Einstein didn’t know about dark energy, but his equations suggested new space can come into existence. And he also included a fudge factor in relativity called the cosmological constant, which he added — and later regretted — to keep the universe from collapsing inward. This idea allows space itself to have energy. However, scientists have still never actually seen this force on Earth.
Some theoretical physicists think there’s an entire dark realm of particles and forces out there, just waiting to be discovered. Whatever dark energy and dark matter are made of, they seem to be playing tug-of-war with our universe — both holding it together and pulling it apart.
On February 6, weather stations recorded the hottest temperature on record for Antarctica, 64.9°F (18.3°C). The warm spell caused widespread melting on nearby glaciers
These images show melting on the ice cap of Antarctica’s Eagle Island. They were acquired by NASA’S Landsat 8 satellite on February 4 and February 13, 2020.
On February 6, 2020, weather stations recorded the hottest temperature on record for Antarctica. Thermometers at the Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula reached 18.3°C (64.9°F) – around the same temperature as Los Angeles that day. The warm spell caused widespread melting on nearby glaciers.
The warm temperatures arrived on February 5 and continued until February 13, 2020.
Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College, observed that during the warming event, around .9 square miles (1.5 square km) of snowpack became saturated with meltwater (shown in blue above). According to climate models, Eagle Island experienced peak melt – 1 inch (30 millimeters) – on February 6. In total, snowpack on Eagle Island melted 4 inches (106 millimeters) from February 6-February 11. About 20 percent of seasonal snow accumulation in the region melted in this one event on Eagle Island.
The heat is apparent on this map, which shows temperatures across the Antarctic Peninsula on February 9, 2020. The map was derived from the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model, and represents air temperatures at 2 meters (about 6.5 feet) above the ground. The darkest red areas are where the model shows temperatures surpassing 50°F (10°C).
I haven’t seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica. You see these kinds of melt events in Alaska and Greenland, but not usually in Antarctica.
He also used satellite images to detect widespread surface melting nearby on Boydell Glacier.
Pelto noted that such rapid melting is caused by sustained high temperatures significantly above freezing. Such persistent warmth was not typical in Antarctica until the 21st century, but it has become more common in recent years.
The warm temperatures of February 2020 were caused by a combination of meteorological elements. A ridge of high pressure was centered over Cape Horn at the beginning of the month, and it allowed warm temperatures to build. Typically, the peninsula is shielded from warm air masses by the Southern Hemisphere westerlies, a band of strong winds that circle the continent. However, the westerlies were in a weakened state, which allowed the extra-tropical warm air to cross the Southern Ocean and reach the ice sheet. Sea surface temperatures in the area were also higher than average by about 2-3°C (about 3.5-5.5 F).
Dry, warm foehn winds also could have played a part. Foehn winds are strong, gusty winds that cause downslope windstorms on mountains, often bringing warm air with them. In February 2020, westerly winds ran into the Antarctic Peninsula Cordillera. As such winds travel up the mountains, the air typically cools and condenses to form rain or snow clouds. As that water vapor condenses into liquid water or ice, heat is released into the surrounding air. This warm, dry air travels downslope on the other side of the mountains, bringing blasts of heat to parts of the peninsula. The drier air means fewer low-lying clouds and potentially more direct sunlight east of the mountain range.
Rajashree Tri Datta, an atmospheric researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said:
Two things that can make a foehn-induced melt event stronger are stronger winds and higher temperatures.
With warmer air in the surrounding atmosphere and ocean, the conditions were conducive this month for a foehn wind event.
This February heatwave was the third major melt event of the 2019-2020 summer, following warm spells in November 2019 and January 2020. Pelto said:
If you think about this one event in February, it isn’t that significant. It’s more significant that these events are coming more frequently.
Bottom line: In February 2020, weather stations recorded the hottest temperatures on record for Antarctica. The warm spell caused widespread melting on nearby glaciers.
Linda Moulton Howe: A Hidden Alien Language Within Binary Codes Could Reveal the ET Agenda
Linda Moulton Howe: A Hidden Alien Language Within Binary Codes Could Reveal the ET Agenda
Linda Moulton Howe – For thousands of years a secret language may have been right under our very noses. A language that has flashed up in the minds of UFO contactees, a language that has been described by witnesses of UFO Crash debris.
A language that has been seen etched into the sides of alien crafts for over 80 years. What are these Alien Symbols and how do they aquavit to the Binary Code?
Linda Moulton Howe: A Hidden Alien Language within Binary Codes Could Reveal The ET Agenda
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Advanced Ancient Civilizations That Had Abilities We Are Still Struggling To Understand
Advanced Ancient Civilizations That Had Abilities We Are Still Struggling To Understand
Legendary accounts tell of these feats of levitation being performed by ancient civilizations speaking “words of power” over the huge stones which moved of themselves. There are similar ancient accounts about the Egyptians and Tibetans employing similar mysterious mental levitational skills.
The easy cutting and movement of gigantic slabs of stone, and the carving of enormous statuary, were not the only strange abilities of bygone early civilizations. They possessed many amazing skills in such matters as navigation and map-making, of which a few specimens are still preserved today. The question remains, how did they get this seemingly advanced knowledge from?
Advanced Ancient Civilizations That Had Abilities We Are Still Struggling To Understand
Awesome craft moves unbelievably fast through the sky in Southern Arizona.
Awesome craft moves unbelievably fast through the sky in Southern Arizona.
An awesome unidentified flying object moves unbelievably fast through the sky in Southern Arizona. The footage, captured on March 6, 2020 raises many questions about what it could have been.
It is suggested that the object is a bug of some kind flying real close to the camera but not everybody is convinced and argue that it is more likely an antigravity craft whether man-made or alien.
Another point of discussion is the vortex like cloud in the background and some people wonder if it came into our dimensional plane of existence through the vortex.
Navy Has One More Video and More Documents On The Nimitz UFO Encounter
Navy Has One More Video and More Documents On The Nimitz UFO Encounter
As you may recall, the Navy released three videos of bizarre UFO encounters, involving characteristics that defy much of our understanding of physics. One was from the Nimitz aircraft carrier incident, and the others were from a much later encounter with the carrier Roosevelt. The videos were short in length and somewhat grainy. Many journalists have attempted if there’s more of those videos that are at least longer, clearer versions of the ones already made public. However, all such requests were answered in the negative.
Interestingly, researcher Christian Lambright submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in October 2019 to look for some particular details along these lines. Recently, he finally received a response. While the military did not provide him with any new videos or documents, they did concede that they have other papers and another video that would apply to his recent request. Unfortunately, they could not release the documents and video footage because they were classified top secret and secret respectively. The Navy claims that their release could cause grave damage to national security.
The new development is in contrast to what Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough had announced. Despite testimony from several of the sailors from the Nimitz battle group who witnessed these events claiming that they remembered seeing longer videos, Ms Gough informed us on several instances that those three videos were the only ones they had and no clearer or more extended versions existed.
Now, we have the Pentagon, through Ms Gough, saying there are no more videos and we have ONI saying there’s at least one more. Somebody is lying again, as both of these things can’t be simultaneously true.
Who should we believe? Let us know in the comment section.
We're used to thinking of possible homes for life on watery worlds orbiting stars like the sun, but a new research paper has found a new potential habitat: a rocky planet orbiting just past the event horizon of a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole.
The exotic forces around that black hole are able to warm up the planet just right, but the scenario comes with a catch: the planet must orbit at nearly the speed of light.
We don't know all the possible places that life could arise in our universe, because so far we only have one example: us. And while scientists (and sci-fi authors) enjoy thinking about all sorts of exotic arrangements and possibilities for lifeforms, for serious searches of extraterrestrial intelligence, our best bet is to use our own circumstances as a template, hunting for life that isn't too dissimilar to what we find on Earth.
From that, we can draw two extremely broad requirements. One, life like our own requires liquid water. Water is the most common molecule in the universe, composed of hydrogen (element No. 1 when it comes to abundance in the cosmos) and oxygen (the byproduct of fusion reactions inside stars like our sun, making it also very common). But that water is usually either vaporized into a plasma (and hence very bad for life) or locked down in its solid, frozen state as ice (also not very good for life).
The liquid stuff is harder to come by, and requires a source of heat that isn't so hot that water just evaporates. We've found this perfect balance in only two kinds of locations: the so-called "habitable zone" of stars, a band of orbits where the light output it just right; and buried underneath the icy crusts of certain moons of the outer planets in our solar system, where tidal heating generates the necessary energy.
But just raw heat isn't enough. Life is a complex process that uses energy to do interesting things (like move around, eat and reproduce). All those processes are not perfectly efficient, so they generate waste heat. This waste heat must be dumped safely away from the environment; otherwise, you end up with nightmare greenhouse scenarios, with temperatures escalating to uncontrolled levels and killing off any life that got started.
On the Earth, we dump our waste heat into the vacuum of space itself in the form of infrared radiation. This contrast, between a source of energy and a place to put all the waste, enables life to flourish on our home planet, and presumably any other planet with a similar setup.
At first glance, black holes appear to be the least inviting homes for any potential lifeforms. After all, they are objects made of pure gravity, pulling in anything that gets too close beneath their event horizons, shutting them off from further contact with the rest of the universe forever. Nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational maw.
Black holes don't give off light themselves — they're black, after all — but that inescapable gravity can provide a surprise, unique to them throughout the cosmos.
Permeating the universe is something called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB is the leftover radiation from when the universe was just a baby, only 380,000 years old. It is, by far, the greatest source of radiation in the entire cosmos, easily swamping all the stars and galaxies by many orders of magnitude. The reason you don't see it is that it's primarily in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum (hence the name).
In other words, the CMB is cold, with a temperature just about 3 degrees above absolute zero.
But as that CMB light falls into a black hole, it becomes blueshifted, bumped to higher and higher energies from the extreme gravity. Just before it hits the event horizon, CMB light can gain so much energy that it shifts into infrared, visible and even ultraviolet portions of the spectrum.
In other words, near a black hole, the CMB stops being cold, and gets very, very hot.
What's more, if the black hole is spinning, it's able to focus the light into a narrow beam, making the CMB appear as a single spot on the sky. Kind of like a sun.
Goldilocks
So if you're able to get close enough to a black hole, you'll find yourself surprisingly warm, and if you're a planet, you might just find your water ice converted into liquid water oceans — a potential home for life.
But for life to thrive, it also needs a heat sink, which can handily be provided by the black hole itself. Close to the black hole, gravitational distortions enlarge the appearance of the event horizon, swelling it far larger than you might naively think.
Close enough to the black hole (say, at a radius less than 1% above the event horizon), the hot CMB shrinks to fill only a small disk, while the event horizon swells to cover 40% of the sky. If your planet is rotating, you then have a "sun" and a "night" — and life has everything it needs to do its business.
But orbits at this radius are usually extremely unstable, prone to just falling all the way into the terrible blackness itself. Recently, a team of researchers published an analysis in The Astrophysical Journal, exploring this scenario to see if there was any way to stabilize the situation.
And they found a way to make it work. If the black hole is big, at least 1.6x108 times the mass of the sun, and rapidly spinning, then it hosts a "habitable zone" just barely above the event horizon, where the CMB light peaks in the UV part of the spectrum — hot, but not terrible. Any closer and the planet would be destroyed by extreme gravitational forces, and any farther and the CMB would be too cold. But in that narrow band? Just right.
Though this scenario is possible, it wouldn't be very pretty. The planet would have to orbit at nearly the speed of light, experiencing a time dilation factor of thousands — meaning that for every second that goes by on that world, hours would slide by for us. And who knows if a planet could even find its way that close to a black hole while still surviving.
Still, the work shows that we have to keep our minds open when it comes to potential homes for life, up to and including some of the most terrible environments in the universe.
NASA's next Mars rover — a life-hunting, sample-caching robot scheduled to launch this summer — is officially called Perseverance, agency officials announced today (March 5).
The new name suits the car-size rover and its groundbreaking mission nicely, NASA officials said.
"There has never been exploration — never, never been making history — without perseverance," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a name-unveiling ceremony today.
"Perseverance is a strong word," he added. "It's about making progress despite obstacles."
The kids are all right
Artist's illustration of NASA's 2020 Mars rover, now officially known as Perseverance, on the Red Planet. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Like all of NASA's previous Mars rovers, Perseverance was named via a nationwide student competition. The contest kicked off last year and drew 28,000 essay submissions from K-12 students, NASA officials said.
This huge initial pool was culled to 155 semifinalists, which were whittled further to nine finalists this past January. Those nine included three proposals from each of the three age categories (grades K-4, 5-8 and 9-12). The finalist monikers, and the kids who proposed them, were:
Endurance, K-4, Oliver Jacobs of Virgina.
Tenacity, K-4, Eamon Reilly of Pennsylvania.
Promise, K-4, Amira Shanshiry of Massachusetts.
Perseverance, 5-8, Alexander Mather of Virginia.
Vision, 5-8, Hadley Green of Mississippi.
Clarity, 5-8, Nora Benitez of California.
Ingenuity, 9-12, Vaneeza Rupani of Alabama.
Fortitude, 9-12, Anthony Yoon of Oklahoma.
Courage, 9-12, Tori Gray of Louisiana.
NASA encouraged the public to vote for their favorite of these final nine, but the decision ultimately was made by Zurbuchen.
As the proposer of the winning name, Mather, a seventh grader at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia, will get a free trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch Perseverance launch in July.
Mather read his winning essay during today's event and said he has a love of space and science that he plans to carry through his entire life.
"I want to go to college, get a degree in some form of engineering or science — space engineering and astronautics sound good right now," he said today. "And then, after that, go work at NASA as an engineer."
Looking for signs of life
Perseverance will land inside Mars' 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater in February 2021, kicking off a $2.5 billion mission to search for signs of ancient Red Planet life — the first time a NASA surface craft has actively hunted for possible Martians since the twin Viking landers did so from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s.
Jezero is a great place to do this work, NASA officials have stressed. The crater harbored a lake and a river delta billions of years ago, meaning that life could have both flourished there and left lasting evidence of its existence. (Here on Earth, river deltas are great at preserving biosignatures, mission team members have said.)
The rover will look for signs of life on-site, using its powerful seven-instrument suite. But Perseverance will also collect and cache several dozen samples of pristine, promising Mars material for future return to Earth, where scientists can continue the hunt using advanced equipment in labs around the world. Those samples could be here as early as 2031, if all goes according to plan.
Perseverance will do a variety of other work as well, from characterizing Jezero's geology to helping pave the way for human exploration of Mars, which NASA aims to achieve in the 2030s. For example, the rover has a ground-penetrating radar instrument that will look for deposits of subsurface water ice — a valuable resource for astronaut pioneers. And another instrument will demonstrate the production of oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere.
That's not the only technology demonstration flying on the mission. Perseverance is also carrying a small helicopter scout, which will make brief sorties to show that rotorcraft can indeed explore the Red Planet air.
Perseverance also has 23 cameras and two microphones, potentially allowing us to hear the sounds of Mars for the first time ever. (Two previous NASA Mars craft, the Mars Polar Lander and the Phoenix lander, also carried microphones. But the Mars Polar Lander crashed, and Phoenix's microphone was never turned on.)
NASA has let schoolkids name all of its Red Planet rovers to date.
NASA's first-ever wheeled Mars explorer, Sojourner, was deployed from the Pathfinder lander in July 1997. Sojourner was named by Connecticut 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise in honor of 19th-century abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth.
Sofi Collis, a third grader from Arizona, won the competition to name Spirit and Opportunity, twin NASA rovers that landed on Mars three weeks apart in January 2004. And the car-size Curiosity rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet's Gale Crater since August 2012, was named by Kansas sixth grader Clara Ma.
Perseverance's body is modeled on that of Curiosity, and the new rover will employ the same sky-crane descent and landing system as its predecessor. And the link between the two missions goes deeper than that; Perseverance aims to extend work done by Curiosity, which determined that Gale Crater was capable of supporting Earth-like life long ago.
Zurbuchen acknowledged the ties between the two missions and stressed that their names go together well, too.
"Perseverance and curiosity together are what exploration is all about," he said.
After a national contest, NASA’s next Mars rover has an official name: Perseverance.
Until now, NASA has simply called Perseverance the Mars 2020 rover, which stuck out next to past rovers with inspiring names like Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. Like Perseverance, those rovers were also named by the winners of student contests, according to a Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release — a longstanding effort to keep the public engaged with the space agency’s exploration missions.
Wherefore Art
When it launches later this year, Perseverance will scan Mars for signs of past and present life while also studying the planet’s environment and geochemistry. And Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said that contest winner and seventh-grader Alexander Mather picked a name that encapsulated those challenges.
“Alex’s entry captured the spirit of exploration,” Zurbuchen said in the release. “Like every exploration mission before, our rover is going to face challenges, and it’s going to make amazing discoveries. It’s already surmounted many obstacles to get us to the point where we are today — processing for launch.”
Honorable Mentions
When Perseverance reaches Mars, it will not only carry scientific instruments but also over 100 of the names suggested for the contest.
“All 155 semifinalists’ proposed rover names and essays have been stenciled onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division said in the release, “and will be flown to Mars aboard the rover.”
In a move that surely must have frustrated the hundreds, if not thousands, of people pouring over databases full of old Martian satellite images and rover photographs for signs of life, NASA posted an unusual shot on its “Astronomy Picture of the Day” blog of a really strange-looking hole on the side of a Red Planet volcano with a caption that readily admits it could contain life forms. (Image above. Credit: NASA.) All we need is someone or some rover to creep up to the edge and peek in. Any volunteers? Anyone? Bueller?
“Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life. These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers.”
On March 1, 2020, NASA’s pic of the day was a hole photographed in 2011 by the HiRISE instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Located on a slope of the Pavonis Mons volcano, the opening measures 35 meters (115 feet) across and the hole, based on the angle of its shadow, measures at least 20 meters (65.5 feet) deep. If Pavonis Mons sounds familiar, the volcano is the subject of the Flaming Lips instrumental song “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)” on the album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which later was made into a Broadway musical by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. Is NASA hinting that there might be pink robots in this hole? Or perhaps it’s a space elevator to Deimos, the smaller moon of Mars, as depicted in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Or is NASA hiding something else … in plain sight?
Pavonis Mons is a giant shield volcano made from stacks of overlapping lava flows that measures 8.7 miles high — taller than Mt. Everest. A digital model shows a pile of debris inside the hole, indicating it was once as deep as 295 feet. That makes the hole deeper than most caves on Earth. If early humans lived in caves, why not Early Martians? Or current Martian life forms?
“These results have important implications for habitability and human exploration of the moon but also for the search for extra-terrestrial life on Mars. Lava tubes are environments shielded from cosmic radiation and protected from micrometeorites, potentially providing safe habitats for future human missions. They are also, potentially, large enough for quite significant human settlements.”
Riccardo Pozzobon from the University of Padova, Italy, agrees. In a study conducted in 2017, he and other scientists compared volcanic lava tubes on Earth in Hawaii, Iceland, and the Galapagos Islands to those seen on the Moon and Mars. On the Moon, some are 1 km (0.6 miles) across and hundreds of kilometers in length. Both these and the smaller ones on Mars are big enough for future human settlements and possibly past or current extraterrestrial life.
Another view of pavonis mons
(NASA)
We may soon find out. The Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to launch on July 17 and land on February 18, 2021, with the mission to search for signs of life. Unlike other rovers, this one will carry a helicopter – perfect for flying over and perhaps even flying into the hole on Pavonis Mons.
Maybe The Flaming Lips should head back to the studio and begin working on some lyrics to “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)” about approaching it by helicopter or on wheels.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
