NASA Releases A Picture Of The Curiosity Rover With A Mysterious Shadow

In September 2012, Nasa released a pictureriosity, a rover that was exploring Mars. A regular photo of the rover’s exploration containing a mysterious shadow intrigued the internet and raised questions.

Other videas by perter2011

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ à

20-03-2020 om 16:51 geschreven door peter  

How will NASA deal with the moon dust problem for Artemis lunar landings?

By Leonard David 

The Apollo experience holds many lessons.

On Apollo 15, crewmembers could not see that they were descending onto the rim of a broad crater. After shutting off the engine, the lunar module rocked backward about 11 degrees into the crater until the rear footpad contacted the ground. The front footpad was then off the ground, bearing no weight. This 11-degree tilt was near the design limits for the lunar module.

(Image: © NASA)

Study teams have gone back to look at Apollo lunar landing data to appraise how much moon terrain was ejected into space. 

Not only did Apollo landing crews get fogged out by the blown dust, making touchdowns troublesome, but substantial amounts of rock and debris were also sent flying during the rocket-powered landings. 

NASA aims to put astronauts on the moon again by 2024, so what to do about the dust problem? Scientists are trying to devise the workarounds that appear needed if traveling to the moon is to become routine.

• Related: Lunar legacy: 45 Apollo moon mission photos

Apollo memories

First, there are several historical accounts concerning safe touchdowns of humans on the moon, starting with the very first Apollo lunar landing, in July 1969. As Neil Armstrong, commander of the Eagle lunar module, reflected in a technical debrief, "at something less than 100 feet, we were beginning to get a transparent sheet of moving dust that obscured visibility a bit. As we got lower, the visibility continued to decrease."

Similarly, on Apollo 12, Pete Conrad ran into so much dust that he was blinded as he made his final descent to the surface. He later recounted that "the dust went as far as I could see in any direction and completely obliterated craters and anything else … I couldn't tell what was underneath me. I knew I was in a generally good area and I was just going to have to bite the bullet and land, because I couldn't tell whether there was a crater down there or not."

Several follow-on Apollo landing commanders noted similar concerns.

Making for a bad day

NASA hopes to apply the lessons from the Apollo era to future lunar missions.

"To paraphrase an old bromide, those who forget the past are doomed to land like it," said Chirold Epp, project manager for the Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. 

"Having looked at the Apollo landings, I have come to two conclusions: One, those crews did a great job. Two, data from several of the landings support the idea that we must give future moon landers more information to increase the probability of mission success," Epp added.

Epp said that if a lunar module came to rest at an angle beyond 12 degrees, the astronauts might not be able to launch themselves off the surface. "So, if a crew landed on a hill or with a footpad or two on a large rock or in a crater, that could make for a bad day," he said.

Physics of rocket exhaust

"The moon is a low-gravity and airless body, which makes the rocket plume effects very different than what we experience on Earth," said Philip Metzger, a planetary scientist at the Florida Space Institute at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando.

"On Earth, rocks travel the farthest, while dust is stopped just a short distance away by the drag of Earth's atmosphere," Metzger told Space.com. "On the moon, it is the exact opposite, with the dust going the fastest and farthest. The dust can cause severe damage to the surfaces of materials if we land too close to other hardware on or orbiting the moon."

Lunar lander engine exhaust blows dust, soil, gravel and rocks at high velocity and will damage surrounding hardware — such as lunar outposts, mining operations or historic sites — unless the ejecta are properly mitigated, Metzger said.

Over the past 20 years,  researchers have developed a consistent picture of the physics of rocket exhaust blowing lunar soil, "but significant gaps exist," Metzger said. "No currently available modeling method can fully predict the effects. However, the basics are understood well enough to begin designing countermeasures."

Related: Moon rush: private lunar lander plans

Wanted: launching pads

Metzger and other team members at UCF's Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science (CLASS) say landing pads are needed for missions that repeatedly visit a lunar outpost.

For lunar landings, CLASS research has shown that the sandblasting that will occur at a lunar outpost is unacceptable, as it will excessively degrade optics, solar cells, thermal control surfaces and moving joints on mechanisms. Impacts of blowing rocks could also break hardware. 

Florida Space Institute rsearchers are investigating methods to mitigate the effects of these blasts, such as sintering lunar regolith. They're also looking at robotics for bulldozing and building berms, as well as considering the use of gravel or pavers. And they're organizing a series of robotics competitions for landing pad construction technologies in conjunction with machine learning firms to further advance the necessary robotics capabilities.

"NASA takes the potential ejecta issues associated with rocket engine plume surface interaction very seriously," said Robert Mueller, senior technologist and principal investigator in the Exploration Systems and Development Office at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

That's for good reason, Mueller said; future human landers will have more issues with plume effects than Apollo landers because of higher engine thrust. NASA researchers are developing concepts for lunar landing and launchpads for crewed landers as well.

The space agency is currently taking steps to evaluate the potential effects in a lunar vacuum environment, Mueller told Space.com, with new computer modeling codes that have been under development through NASA's Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs.

Caught on camera

There has not been any concerted effort to mitigate the lunar dust problem, ever, said Michelle Munk, entry, descent and landing system capability lead at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. "We have a 'production' code to predict what will happen — but it is not validated with data, so we really don't know how good the predictions are."

Munk said it is especially challenging to run a realistic ground test for the lunar environment, which would provide good "truth" data. NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate recently started a project that has both ground-testing and computational-modeling components. 

Additionally, Munk is the principal investigator for four stereo cameras that will be carried on board Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lunar lander, which is scheduled to launch in 2021 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The payload is called Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS).

SCALPSS is being developed at NASA Langley and leverages camera technology used on the agency's Mars 2020 rover Perseverance, Munk said. The camera cluster will capture video and still-image data of the lander's plume as the plume starts to impact the lunar surface until after engine shutoff, which is critical for future lunar and Mars vehicle designs, she said.

• Moon dust could be a problem for future lunar explorers
• NASA's 17 Apollo moon missions in pictures
• Moon rush: NASA wants commercial lunar delivery services to start this year

Leonard David is the author of the book "Moon Rush: The New Space Race," published by National Geographic in May 2019.

A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

20-03-2020 om 01:09 geschreven door peter  

We may not have been ready to fight the coronavirus invasion, but half of Great Britain is ready to take up arms and do battle with an extraterrestrial invasion – even though most don’t think we will win. Why are the British so afraid of attacks from outer space? Do ETs want their tea? Are they mad about Harry and Megan leaving too?

“To mark FOX tv’s new series, ‘War of the Worlds’, the network commissioned the polling company OnePoll to do a research study of 2,000 adults in the UK. The results show that half of Britons believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life and even expect an alien visitation before the year 2068. Londoners, the Welsh and those in the south west of England were the biggest believers in extraterrestrial life.”

Ah, War of the Worlds … the 1897 H.G. Wells sci-fi classic that continues to influence our thinking and stoke our fears over 100 years later. It’s still pertinent today, (spoiler alert!) especially with the demise of the Martian invaders due to a pathogen infection. Exonews covers the latest version of the novel – a new TV series – and a recent survey taken by OnePoll which found that 46% of those polled said they would join a resistance force to fight against malevolent ETs no matter where they came from. However, only 23% think they would be standing over the bodies of dead aliens at the end and over half thought it would be the end of humanity. Even worse, they believe they’d get little help from their (or any other) government.

Would you join the resistance?

“The study also found nearly three quarters of Brits believe that world governments know more about alien life than they’re letting on and are hiding information from the public. If these world leaders were aware of an impending attack, 58% think they would keep information secret to avoid panic. 67% polled think that our leaders need a plan for first contact with other life forms.”

Panic? Governments hiding information? The survey also found that 71% of those polled think that Earth has already been visited by ETs, either on scientific missions or to steal our natural resources. Where are the British getting these wild ideas? Someone who knows from the inside is Nick Pope, who was interviewed by The Sun for his views on the survey. The former member of the Ministry of Defence said, as he has many times before, that he has firsthand knowledge of authorities hiding information about UFOs. Pope also agrees with his fellow Brits that aliens aren’t our greatest threat. Is it the coronavirus?

“In the event of an alien invasion, a whopping 71% of Brits expected more danger still from their fellow humans.”

Yep. When we meet the enemy, he will be us. In the meantime, Pope doesn’t think governments are doing enough to prepare for an invasion, while 17% of those polled think we’ll see benevolent ETs sent to help us from killing ourselves with guns or greenhouse gases.

The last man?

What would you do if ETs invaded Earth? Would you go all gung-ho Will-Smith-Independence-Day on them … even if you didn’t have a fighter jet? Would you loot the possessions of the dead like The Narrator in the original “War of the World” novel, then go into hiding, hoping the coronavirus or something worse kills them before they or the virus kills us? Would you wait for government help? Would you not? Would you join an underground resistance like brave citizens around the world have in previous invasions, fighting even when they knew they couldn’t win?

Would you survive?

Would we?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

19-03-2020 om 23:37 geschreven door peter  

GROOT OBJECT ONTDEKT OP DE MAAN  VAN MARS ( VIDEO )

Eén van de meest mysterieuze zaken in de ruimte is de maan Phobos die zijn rondjes rondom de planeet Mars draait.

Met een lengte van 11 kilometer is het een kleine maan, hol van binnen en volgens de Europese ruimtevaartorganisatie ESA geen natuurlijk object.

Voor wie nog nooit gehoord heeft van de Mars maan Phobos, hierna een klein stukje uit een eerder artikel:

Zelfs als je geen wetenschapper bent en je bestudeert bovenstaande foto dan kom je als snel tot de conclusie dat het meer lijkt op een soort metalen gedeukte en geblutste carrosserie van een ruimteschip of station dan op een planeet.

Dan is er nog een ander raadsel betreffende Phobos. Toen de Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) de piepkleine maan van Mars in beeld bracht en foto’s naar de aarde stuurde, stonden op een gegeven moment alle wetenschappers te dansen van opwinding. Want, daar aan de oppervlakte van Phobos stond onmiskenbaar een uitsteeksel.

Het werd al snel een monoliet genoemd, een uitstekend stuk rots, maar zelfs kinderen in groep 3 geloven al niet meer dat er zomaar uit het niets een vierkant stuk rots de lucht in steekt.

En uit een ander artikel:

De astrofysicus Dr. Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky was de eerste die de bewegingen van de omloopbaan van deze Mars satelliet berekende. Hij kwam tot de conclusie dat deze kunstmatig en hol is en dat het in feite niets anders is dan een gigantisch ruimteschip is.

De Russische astronoom Dr. Cherman Struve bracht maanden door met het uiterst nauwkeurig berekenen van de omloopban van de beide manen van Mars (Phobos en Deimos) aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw. Toen Shklovsky de aantekeningen van hem bestudeerde, kwam hij tot de conclusie dat naarmate de jaren en de decennia waren verstreken, de snelheid en de positie van de omloopbaan van Phobos niet meer dezelfde was als die zoals die door Struve was berekend. 

Na een langdurige studie van de diverse invloeden zoals aantrekkingskracht en zwaartekracht kwam Shklovsky tot de conclusie dat er geen natuurlijke oorzaak was die het vreemde gedrag van beide manen kon verklaren en dan in het bijzonder het bizarre gedrag van Phobos. Beide manen waren kunstmatig; iets of iemand heeft ze gebouwd.

Tijdens een interview legde Shklovsky het volgende uit: “er is maar één manier waarop de voorwaarden voor de samenhang, de constante vorm en de buitengewone kleine dichtheid van Phobos kan worden verklaard. We moeten aannemen dat het een hol leeg lichaam is wat lijkt op een leeg blik”.

Decennia lang werd het werk van Shklovsky door de gevestigde wetenschap volkomen genegeerd, totdat ESA de vreemde kleine maan aan een nader onderzoek onderwierp. Het resultaat hiervan verscheen in 2010 in het "peer reviewed” Geophysical Research Letters en geeft aan dat Phobos niet datgene is wat astronomen en astrofysici generaties lang hebben geloofd, een asteroïde die gevangen is in een baan om Mars.

“Wij rapporteren onafhankelijke resultaten van twee subgroepen van het Mars Express Radio Team (MaRS) die los van elkaar de gegevens hebben geanalyseerd van de “Mars Express (MEX) radio tracking” met het doel om consequent de zwaartekrachtsaantrekking van de maan Phobos op het MEX ruimteschip te analyseren en zodoende de massa van Phobos vast te kunnen stellen. Wij concluderen dat de binnenkant grote lege ruimtes bevat. Wanneer wij de gegevens toepassen op de verschillende hypothesen met betrekking tot de oorsprong van Phobos, dan zijn de resultaten niet in overeenstemming met het gegeven dat het hier om een “gevangen” asteroïde zou gaan”.

Dit is precies hetzelfde als wat Dr. Shklovsky in de jaren zestig al concludeerde. Phobos werd kunstmatig gebouwd en in een omloopbaan om Mars gebracht. Maar waarom en door wie?

En dan gaan we van bovenstaande naar ufoloog Scott Waring die met een nieuwe ontdekking komt op Phobos.

Hij begint met het verhaal van voormalig astronaut Buzz Aldrin die een jaar of zeven geleden heeft verklaard dat er zich op de maan Phobos een monoliet bevindt. Een kunstmatig gemaakte constructie van rotsen en dergelijke.

Hij zei toen verder, dat wanneer mensen die constructie ontdekken ze zich dan zullen afvragen wie die constructie daar heeft gebouwd. Want, wanneer eenmaal duidelijk is dat er sprake is van een kunstmatige constructie, dan is dat automatisch bewijs van buitenaards leven, want het is niet gevormd door de natuur, maar door een kustmatige intelligentie.

Tot nu toe ging men er van uit dat de constructie waar Aldrin op doelde het vreemde uitsteeksel is dat in bovenstaande foto te zien is, maar Scott zegt dat dit niet het geval is, maar dat het de ontdekking is die hij heeft gedaan op Phobos.

Wat hij heeft ontdekt is te vinden op een foto die niet door NASA is gemaakt, maar door de ESA.

Een groot object helemaal aan de bovenkant van de maan met een lengte van ongeveer 2,2 kilometer. Als je bedenkt dat de complete maan 11 kilometer lang is dan krijg je een idee van de grootte.

Het heeft wel wat weg van een soort ruimteschip en wanneer je ervan uit gaat dat Phobos een soort ISS is (International Space Station), dan zou dit schip daar aangemeerd kunnen liggen, net zoals onze ruimteschepen dat doen bij het ISS.

Dan blijft natuurlijk de vraag open wat er is gebeurd waardoor dit schip daar ogenschijnlijk verlaten is achtergelaten.

Heeft Scott daadwerkelijk een bijzondere ontdekking gedaan op Phobos? Kijk naar de volgende beelden en oordeel zelf.

{ https://niburu.co/ }

19-03-2020 om 22:54 geschreven door peter  

Pleiadians vs. Reptilian Underground War! Researcher Says 800,000 Years Ago There Was an Alien War on Our Planet

COAST TO COAST AM –

Scholar of ancient cultures, Bruce Fenton, detailed evidence which he believes shows that ancient aliens visited this world almost 800,000 years ago, creating a race of hybrids by genetically altering primitive hominids. Around this time, a spaceship of 50,000 Pleiadian colonists was “crystallized” by an attacking group of Reptilians living underground, he suggested, and the remnants of the liquefied ship rained down on Earth in the form of anomalous spheres, which have been discovered in South Australia.

A media phenomenon, Coast to Coast AM deals with UFOs, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained (and often inexplicable) phenomena.

Other videos, peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

19-03-2020 om 22:04 geschreven door peter  

On March 18, 2020 Falcon 9 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which was SpaceX sixth launch of Starlink satellites.

At the moment the first stage coming back to earth an unidentified flying object shoots straight past the rocket.

Since the object moves upward at high speed while the first stage is on its way back, it indicates that it is likely not a fairing or other part of the rocket.

  

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

19-03-2020 om 21:01 geschreven door peter  

Famous UFOlogist Says the World is Completely Unprepared for Possible Alien Invasion

An alien invasion is something humanity entirely unprepared, according to ufologist and former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope. He said that if aliens are drawing up plans toward Earth, then we are the other way around as we don’t have any plans for them. Mr. Pope, the man who has been considered as the real-life Fox Mulder, added that governments around the world have no alien invasion war plan.

Conspiracy theorists have claimed that there are plans kept secret within the governments, but Mr. Pope insisted there’s none as he would have been responsible for writing it.

Currently, the world’s greatest scientists are facing a somewhat tangible threat of the coronavirus, which is becoming more than a public health risk as it has the potential to trigger a societal breakdown.

Mr. Pope pointed out that the arrival of aggressive invasive aliens might bring the same associated threat.

He stated that extraterrestrial threat or real-life War of the Worlds would not only mean facing the danger of these aliens.

According to Mr. Pope, things can fall apart very quickly in our increasingly complex and interconnected world.  Key points and critical infrastructures could come under pressure as aliens could knock out a grid, people could not get money from the cashpoints, petrol may run out, foods may run out, law and order could break down.

Mr. Pope explained that this is a worst-case scenario, but it is better to plan for the worst rather than assuming that everything will be fine. He said that it’s ironic people are searching for aliens, but we don’t have a plan for what we do if we find them.

 { https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

19-03-2020 om 20:16 geschreven door peter  

The witness claimed the "craft" was government-based and that there "is a reason" for the lack of reports about it

By Simon Green - Video News Editor

A triangle-shaped UFO has been spotted hovering in the skies above the US city of Chicago, in the third sighting this year.

Two women behind the camera can be heard trying to work out what they are, with one suggestion they could just be lights being beamed into the sky.

But her friend dismisses that explanation, saying: “There are no events going on that would mean it’s a reflection of lights.”

The video was shared by UFO conspiracy theorist Tales From Out There yesterday.

The witness later explained she and her friend both thought the object was a plane at first.

But this soon changed. “We then noticed something even stranger,” the onlooker said.

“It wasn't actually stationary, but appeared to be moving horizontally of the direction a plane would normally move.

“While a plane moves along the nose and tail, this was moving from what appeared to be a wing.

“But it was very jarring as it was quiet that night due to the spreading of COVID-19.

“I personally don’t believe this was extra-terrestrial but government-based. I haven’t been able to find other reports on it and I think there is a reason for that.”

The sighting comes after similar “crafts” were recorded in Texas since the start of the year.

But viewers were split over the latest video. Some believed the UFO was proof of a government conspiracy.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

19-03-2020 om 01:41 geschreven door peter  

Prehistoric Ostrich Egg Unravels Clues to Human Life 33,000 Years Ago

A team of scientists have discovered 33,000-year-old ostrich egg beads in the Lesotho Highlands, about a 1,000 kilometers away from where ostriches roamed. This establishes hitherto unknown prehistoric cultural exchange networks.

About 33,000 years ago, an ostrich in southern Africa’s Karoo Desert had its lunch of sweet grasses and flowers, then it laid an egg. Later that same night, the egg was lifted by a hunter-gatherer and after it was eaten, pieces of shell were drilled with holes and threaded onto an animal sinew cord and worn as a decorative string of beads. But this particular item of ancient jewelry travelled far to the east of where it was crafted and became treasured by a distant hunter-gatherer group living high in the eastern mountains.

Ostrich eggshell beads have been used to cement relationships in Africa for more than 30,000 years.

(John Klausmeyer, Yuchao Zhao & Brian Stewart / University of Michigan )

Pushing Back Prehistoric Exchanges

Now, 33,000 years after that ostrich egg was laid, stolen, crafted and exchanged, a University of Michigan study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by paleolithic archaeologist Brian Stewart and colleagues, details the discovery of the beads in what is now Lesotho. Stewart is assistant professor of anthropology and assistant curator of the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, and his new paper provides evidence not only for “where” these beads were made, but also for “how long” hunter-gatherers used such things as a kind of “social currency.

It was by measuring the atomic structure of the beads that details of the exchanging of these ornaments, over such long distances, were shown to have spanned much deeper into prehistory than previously thought. In the new study, which is available to read on PNAS, Stewart said “humans are just outlandishly social animals, and that goes back to these deep forces that selected for maximizing information, information that would have been useful for living in a hunter-gatherer society 30,000 years ago and earlier.”

Archaeologists work at rock shelters at Sehonghong and Melikane in southern Africa.

(Brian Stewart / University of Michigan )

A Small Territory at a High Altitude 

Lesotho is a small, high-altitude country consisting of a matrix of rivers cutting across dramatic mountain ranges, including the 3,482m (11,424 feet)-high peak of Thabana Ntlenyana. This landlocked kingdom is encircled by South Africa , and it has the highest average elevation in the African continent. Stewart said it would have been “a formidable place for hunter-gatherers to live.” However, the quantities of fresh water coursing through the country and its “belts of resources, stratified by the region’s elevation,” served as protection against climate and environmental changes for those who hunted there from as early “as 85,000 years ago,” according to the study.

Ostrich eggshell beads, and the jewelry items made from them, according to Stewart, are “ Stone Age versions of Facebook or Twitter likes,” in that they affirm connections with exchange partners and alert other groups to the status of those relationships. Anthropologists know that contemporary hunter-gatherers used ostrich eggshell beads as offerings to establish and cement relationships with other groups, and in Lesotho, archaeologists have found small ornaments made of ostrich eggshell, but no evidence exists of those ornaments having been made there.

Archaeologists work at rock shelters at Sehonghong and Melikane in southern Africa.

(Brian Stewart / University of Michigan )

Tracking the Ostrich Beads Origins

Finding eggshell beads “without” any evidence of production, the researchers ‘assumed’ that they had got to Lesotho through ancient exchange networks and testing their ‘suspicions’, the beads were examined using strontium isotope analysis. What this means is that the eggshell composition was analyzed to determine what and where the creature had been eating.

When animals graze strontium isotopes are absorbed into their tissues, and in this case in an eggshell, and Lesotho is situated in the Karoo Supergroup, which was created by relatively recent volcanic eruptions that formed the Lesotho Highlands. The researchers measured how much strontium was available in vegetation and soil samples, as well as rodent tooth enamel samples from museum specimens collected from across Lesotho and surrounding areas. They discovered that nearly 80% of the beads “could not” have originated from ostriches living near the highlands where the beads were found.

Ostrich eggshell beads, and the jewelry items made from them, according to Stewart, are “ Stone Age versions of Facebook or Twitter likes,” in that they affirm connections with exchange partners and alert other groups to the status of those relationships. Anthropologists know that contemporary hunter-gatherers used ostrich eggshell beads as offerings to establish and cement relationships with other groups, and in Lesotho, archaeologists have found small ornaments made of ostrich eggshell, but no evidence exists of those ornaments having been made there.

Archaeologists work at rock shelters at Sehonghong and Melikane in southern Africa.

(Brian Stewart / University of Michigan )

Tracking the Ostrich Beads Origins

Finding eggshell beads “without” any evidence of production, the researchers ‘assumed’ that they had got to Lesotho through ancient exchange networks and testing their ‘suspicions’, the beads were examined using strontium isotope analysis. What this means is that the eggshell composition was analyzed to determine what and where the creature had been eating.

When animals graze strontium isotopes are absorbed into their tissues, and in this case in an eggshell, and Lesotho is situated in the Karoo Supergroup, which was created by relatively recent volcanic eruptions that formed the Lesotho Highlands. The researchers measured how much strontium was available in vegetation and soil samples, as well as rodent tooth enamel samples from museum specimens collected from across Lesotho and surrounding areas. They discovered that nearly 80% of the beads “could not” have originated from ostriches living near the highlands where the beads were found.

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

19-03-2020 om 01:11 geschreven door peter  

Huge 1,500-Year-Old Arrowhead Released From Melting Glacier

Archaeologists in Norway have uncovered a 1,500-year-old iron arrowhead in a melting glacier.

The team of investigators inspecting Jotunheimen, a massive melting Norwegian glacier, have so far found over 2000 relics and now an arrowhead dating back to the Germanic Iron Age. Measuring seven inches long and weighing little over an ounce ‘ Climate Change ’ is being held responsible for revealing the ancient Viking's missed shot that had been embedded in a glacier for 1,500 years.

An Ancient Landscape of Unspeakable Beauty

The ancient Germanic Iron Age arrowhead was forged in iron and was discovered with its arrow shaft, and even a feather from its flight, locked in a glacier in southern Norway. The team of scientists noted that climate change has made its way to the Jotunheimen glacier and the warmer air temperature is causing the ice to melt which in turn freed the ancient artifacts.

According to a report in GlacierHub.org, anthropologist Shoshi Parks, said three national parks converge in this region of central Norway, but “Jotunheimen is arguably the most spectacular, having 250 peaks over 1,900 meters high [one mile]” including Galdhøpiggen and Glittertind which are the two tallest in northern Europe. And furthermore, in a Daily Mail article the archaeologist descries the region as having “alpine lakes and shimmering turquoise glaciers, chequering an ancient landscape of unspeakable beauty.”

Climate Change Can ‘Reverse’ Archaeology

A Feb 2019 article in Norway Today said 2018 was a very bad year for the Norwegian glaciers which retreated “33 meters on average in the course of last year alone,” which according to  heat records  represented “the greatest decline since the measurements began.” With many of the nation’s glaciers experiencing dramatic melting over the past few years experts say this is being accelerated by climate change which is causing archaeologists to uncover ice-locked relics, but conversely, this situation will also destroy any artifacts that are not discovered in time.

Last year, the archaeological team excavating Jotunheimen found an ancient snowshoe for horses, which is estimated to date back to the Viking Age or the Medieval Period, and more than 2,000 artifacts have been found at the glaciers with the oldest being around 6,000 years old. The artifacts include man-made items like hunting tools, textiles, leather and clothing, as well as zoological remains like antlers, bones, and dung. But Lars Pilø, who is part of the Glacier Archaeology Program told CNN that “rapid melting causes bits and pieces of human history to “melt out in reverse time order.”

• Global Warming Reveals Amazing Glacier Artifacts from Switzerland’s Ancient Past
• The Long Ago Person: Tracking the Canadian Ice Man
• 2,000-year-old Warrior Armor Made of Reindeer Antlers Found on the Arctic Circle

Jotunheimen National Park.

( Public Domain )

But The Arctic Is Also Warming

According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine Norway is not the only place where climate change is causing archaeological artifacts to emerge from ice, as Marissa Fessenden wrote for smithsonian.com in 2015, “bodies of soldiers lost during World War I have emerged from the Alps and Incan mummies have emerged from glaciers in the Andes.” National Geographic say melting permafrost in southwest Alaska has released “2,500 artifacts, including woven baskets and wooden masks” and while there are countless negative impacts of the changing climate, the recovery of these artifacts “could be an unexpected positive.”

Jørgen Hollesen, a researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, told Glacier Hub that melting ice is threatening archaeological artifacts locked in glaciers and that climate change is presenting different problems in the Arctic Circle. A 2018  study, coauthored by Hollesen, found there were around “180,000 registered archaeological sites in the Arctic” dating from the Stone Age to the medieval and more recent but there are also “settlements, cemeteries, churches and fishing villages of Norse, European, Inuit and Sami people .”

Climate-change related events are destroying a wide range of cultural sites with the resultant coastal erosion, landslides and melting permafrost and sea ice permits fierce waves and storms direct access to coastlines. What seems to be rising, or melting, from all this, is that our uncertain climate ‘future’ may inadvertently help archaeologists better understand our ‘past’.

• Top image: Arrowhead recently found at Jotunheimen.   Source: Secrets of the Ice

By Ashley Cowie

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

19-03-2020 om 00:37 geschreven door peter  

What is dark matter? No one knows. But it’s there, apparently, making up the vast majority of the mass of the universe. Or at least, that’s what the math says. Now some scientists think that the math might be wrong, and there might be another explanation for the apparent density of the universe. In some ways that’s a more likely scenario. After all, every one of science’s attempts to detect and conclusively prove the existence of dark matter has failed. Despite this lack of conclusive proof, the vast majority of physicists believe that dark matter is real and it does make up the majority of the universe. It’s just finding it that’s the problem.

Well, like a lot of impossible-to-find things, dark matter may have already been found. According to a  paper recently published in the Journal of Physics G by physicists Mikhail Bashkanov and Daniel Watts, dark matter may be made of a subatomic particle called a d*(2380) hexaquark, or “d-star,” a six-sided quark which was probably discovered by German scientists in 2014. Quarks and gluons are the bizarre subatomic particles that form protons and neutrons.

Dark matter is thought to make up 85% of the universe.

Most other explanations for dark matter revolve around new and never-before-observed particles that lie outside the Standard Model of physics. But Bashkanov and Watts believe that dark matter might be made of these “d-star” quarks. On their own, the d-star quarks couldn’t explain dark matter. They would decay much too quickly. But Bashkanov and Watts believe that during a brief period of time at the beginning of the universe, these quarks could have formed together in a type of matter called a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC).

If this were true, it would explain why we can’t find dark matter. It would be impossible for us to interact with. The Bose-Einstein Condensate would have mass, but no electromagnetic charge. The force that keeps objects separate and allows interaction between them (like my fingers pressing the keys on my keyboard without going right through my computer) is the electromagnetic force holding the atoms together. A d-star BEC, the physicists write, could theoretically be perfectly neutral with no electromagnetic charge. Without that, dark matter would pass through other matter like a ghost without ever interacting with it. It would, however, exert a gravitational pull on the outside universe.

There was only a brief period in our universe’s life when this type of dark matter could have been made. In the time immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was a soup of quark-gluon plasma that hadn’t yet solidified into the particles that make up the known universe. Eventually, the universe cooled and the quark-gluon soup solidified into more stable particles. Bashkanov and Watts say this transitional period had all the right conditions for some of the d-star hexaquarks to form the hypothetical Bose-Einstein Condensate that we now call dark matter.

If this is the explanation for dark matter, the scientists say that we may be able to detect it. While BECs are extremely long-lived, they do sometimes decay around Earth. Bashkanov and Watts say that the decay of the dark matter BECs would have a particular signature that would look as if it was coming from every direction at once. Now, they say, the next step is to look for that signature.

Has the mystery been solved? Who knows. It’s worth pointing out again that literally every other time someone has said they knew how to detect dark matter, they’ve been completely wrong.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

18-03-2020 om 23:53 geschreven door peter  

NASA Believes Alien Life May Be Hiding in Caves on Mars

Aaron Kesel, The Mind Unleashed
Waking Times

NASA scientists believe that if there is life on Mars it is likely to be found inside the red planet’s caves.

According to Space.com, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory research scientist Vlada Stamenković explained the Martian underground life theory at a recent astronomy conference. There were other astrobiologists and experts in attendance who expressed the theory and agreed that the best places to look for life on Mars are the subterranean caves and the salt and ice.

Speaking at the Mars Extant Life event at the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Carlsbad, New Mexico last November, Stamenković reportedly stated, “The surface of Mars is a very oxidizing, radiation-heavy environment where liquid water is not really stable for an extended amount of time.”

“It’s the worst place to look for life-sites on Mars,” Stamenković said. “Groundwater might be the only habitat for extant life on Mars if it still exists today.”

The surface of Mars is very cold and dry. There is a lot of radiation on the red planet making it mostly inhabitable for current known organisms. Although, Space.com notes that there has been recent discoveries about life in extreme environments here on Earth.

More than 1,000 possible cave entrances have been mapped on Mars by the U.S .Geological Survey’s (USGS) Astrogeology Science Center just recently, Scientific American reported.

Some scientists believe that flexible robots should be created that could explore the cave systems on Mars. Yet that would be very costly to accomplish.

Instead, Stamenković suggested that NASA use a rover that could sense underground groundwater or chemicals associated with life from the surface.

NASA intends to send its 2,260 pound Perseverance rover to Mars later this year to gather samples of potential life that is either alive or extinct and then send it back to Earth for vigorous testing.

“Scientists have long known that there is water in the form of underground ice at the Martian poles. But the poles are a harsh environment – a cold place on a planet where the summer daytime temperature at the equator can approach a balmy 70 ºF, but the night time temperatures in the same location and on the same day can swing to -100 ºF. Winter temperatures on the Martian poles can get as low as -195 ºF. So, settling on the Martian poles to get at water isn’t in the cards,” Don Lincoln, a senior scientist at Fermilab, America’s flagship particle physics laboratory, previously wrote in Forbes.

Robots have been scoping out Mars for years investigating the surface for signs of past life and evidence of water while orbiters circling around Mars image and map out the planet. Underground martian ice was discovered by the Mars Odyssey orbiter (MOO) and then followed up on by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Then in 2015, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provided strong evidence that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars, according to NASA.

Finally in 2019, it was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that ice could be just an inch beneath the surface of the planet. NASA mapped out the entire planet’s water and ice locations last year. These areas of Mars housing water or ice near caves may be where extraterrestrial life lies in the form of microbial life and maybe even undiscovered still yet unknown organisms. But we better hurry up, as the desolate planet of Mars is quickly evaporating water from the surface.

By Aaron Kesel | Creative Commons | TheMindUnleashed.com

• https://www.wakingtimes.com/2020/03/18/nasa-believes-alien-life-may-be-hiding-in-caves-on-mars/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

18-03-2020 om 22:34 geschreven door peter  

Key UFO Seen Over Massachusetts This Week, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 8, 2020
Location of sighting: Plymouth County, Massachusetts, USA

This key shaped UFO was seen over MA this week. The object seems to be made up of separate parts. The eyewitness called it many black orbs together. That may be so. My first though its its many black balloons tied together so they can't fly away, however they should not be lined up like this and if it were balloons it would not be able to accelerate and speed away, as the eyewitness says. Alien orbs however might take a shape bundling together like this and following each other in a hive like states. Odd for sure. Wish we had better video of it, more focused video would help us solve this immediately. Perhaps others have also recorded it. Time will tell. 
Scott C. Waring 

Eyewitness states: 

The object flew parallel to our heads, I would say no further than the length of a football fieldaway from us. I saw that it was about the size of a helicopter, if not larger, but couldn't tell what it was. That is why I took my camera out and began filming. By the time I got my phone out, the object had already begun accelerating away from us. While it may appear to be hovering in the video, it is actually traveling forward at a great deal of speed.  

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

18-03-2020 om 21:30 geschreven door peter  

According to Brazilian sky-watcher Tio Abadom an intrusive celestial body is being monitored by space telescopes and ground telescopes around world. The unknown object, currently near the planets Jupiter and Saturn seems to accelerate on average.

Coincidence or not but last week, a strange sky phenomenon has been captured in Trenton, New Jersey by Alonzo Ent, who was able to capture some sort of celestial object close to the sun (often called as a second sun).

Alonzo, who is an experienced cameraman stated: "It was moving extremely fast and although it was very hard to pull focus, I was able to keep it some what, steady... It only lasted about 5 minutes and then gone."

Although Tio talks about the infamous planet Nibiru we may wonder whether it could be a giant alien mothership.

Could it be that what is happening now on Earth is a direct link to this unidentified space object?

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

18-03-2020 om 21:07 geschreven door peter  

AMAZING: Really fast UFO filmed over Cisco, Texas 15-Mar-2020

This interesting footage of a bright and really fast unidentified flying object was filmed over Cisco, Texas on 15th March 2020.

Witness report:

 Lighted object moving above tree line. I went outside & saw a lighted object moving above treeline. I went back inside my home to grab my
cell phone. I was looking north west from my back yard watching the lighted object move around
just above the treeline then it descended into the treeline. I did not actually see it land.
I was able to record about 25 seconds of video that I am including in this report.

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

18-03-2020 om 20:35 geschreven door peter  

Archean Earth Was Covered by Global Ocean, New Study Suggests

The surface of Earth was likely covered by a global ocean 3.24 billion years ago (Archean Eon), according to a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

“Our findings could help scientists to better understand how and where single-cell organisms first emerged on Earth,” said Dr. Boswell Wing, a researcher in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“The history of life on Earth tracks available niches. If you’ve got a waterworld, a world covered by ocean, then dry niches are just not going to be available.”

In the study, Dr. Wing and colleagues examined 3.24-billion-year-old hydrothermally altered oceanic crust from the Panorama district in the Pilbara Craton of Western Australia.

“There are no samples of really ancient ocean water lying around, but we do have rocks that interacted with that seawater and remembered that interaction,” said Dr. Benjamin Johnson, a scientist at Iowa State University.

“The process is like analyzing coffee grounds to gather information about the water that poured through it.”

To do that, the researchers analyzed data from more than 100 rock samples from across the dry terrain.

They were looking, in particular, for two different isotopes of oxygen trapped in stone: a slightly heavier atom called oxygen-18 and a lighter one called oxygen-16.

They discovered that the ratio of those two isotopes of oxygen may have been a bit off in seawater 3.24 billion years ago — with just a smidge more oxygen-18 atoms than you’d see today.

“Though these mass differences seem small, they are super sensitive,” Dr. Wing said.

Sensitive, it turns out, to the presence of continents.

“Today’s land masses are covered by clay-rich soils that disproportionately take up heavier oxygen isotopes from the water — like mineral vacuums for oxygen-18,” Dr. Wing said.

The study authors theorized that the most likely explanation for that excess oxygen-18 in the ancient oceans was that there simply weren’t any soil-rich continents around to suck the isotopes up. That doesn’t mean, however, that there weren’t any spots of dry land around.

“There’s nothing in what we’ve done that says you can’t have teeny, micro-continents sticking out of the oceans,” Dr. Wing said.

“We just don’t think that there were global-scale formation of continental soils like we have today.”

Which leaves a big question: when did plate tectonics push up the chunks of rock that would eventually become the continents we know and love?

The scientists aren’t sure. But they’re planning to scour other, younger rock formations at sites from Arizona to South Africa to see if they can spot when land masses first roared onto the scene.

“Trying to fill that gap is really important,” Dr. Johnson said.

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

18-03-2020 om 01:20 geschreven door peter  

Star Trek fans fear resistance is futile after a UFO video appears to show the hated robot baddies invading Earth above the top secret White Sans US base

By Berny Torre

Star Trek fans are going wild for a Texas UFO video that seems to depict a perfectly square "Borg cube" appearing from the clouds above.

The clip, filmed close to the top secret White Sands US base several years ago, clearly shows a strange object in the sky that looks just like the horror aliens’ spaceship in the hit sci-fi series.

It comes as the hated robot baddies currently star in the hit new Picard series on Amazon Prime.

Thousands of Star Trek fans have been sharing the UFO video after it was posted on ufosightingsfootage.uk

The Borg coined the show's catchphrase "Resistance is futile" and turn people into drones.

Jack Greminger said on Facebook: "It's a Borg cube, we're doomed I tell you, doomed. Resistance is futile."

Sebastian Meusel added: "No it's the Borg, we are all going to be drones... where is my cat I don't want him to be assimilated."

And Mike Drennan said: "It's the Borg, but when they arrived and saw what we were like as a species, they had no interest in adding our biological and technological distinctiveness to their own and immediately left."

The UFO website shared a 2015 clip which was shared by YouTube channel secureteam10.

"Borg cube" appears above White Sands US base 

(Image: Secureteam10)

It starts with images of the black cube emerging clouds over El Paso from "a black hole type portal".

A narrator claims two independent witnesses confirmed the sightings.

El Paso resident Walter C Lands captured the footage on his phone and said: "It began to get very windy out and I noticed a small portion of clouds begin to swirl and circle in on each other forming a portal shape - at which point the portal became jet black."

A second eye-witness, an accountant who did not wish to be named, also took a picture of the skies over El Paso. She said: "I noticed a square-shaped figure.

"It was a giant solid thing with designs around it and a faint magnetic oscillation type humming."

The secureteam10 narrator said: "We've got a doozy for you today.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/}

18-03-2020 om 00:37 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

17-03-2020 om 23:53 geschreven door peter  

17-03-2020 om 23:33 geschreven door peter  

The ring of skulls, skeletons, tusks and other bones was too large for a roof, scientists say, so what was it for?

By Nicholas St. Fleur

Ice Age hunter-gatherers, foraging the bone-chilling, unforgiving steppes of what today is Russia, somehow completed a remarkable construction project: a 40-foot-wide, circular structure made from the skulls, skeletons and tusks of more than 60 woolly mammoths. The reason remains a mystery to archaeologists.

“The sheer number of bones that our Paleolithic ancestors had sourced from somewhere and brought to this particular location to build this monument is really quite staggering,” said Alexander Pryor, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter in England. “It does boggle my mind.”

Alexander Dudin, a researcher from the Kostenki Museum-Preserve, and a team of scientists began excavating the 25,000-year-old mammoth-bone circle in 2014 at a site called Kostenki 11, which is 300 miles south of Moscow. It is the third structure uncovered at the site. The discovery was published Monday in the journal Antiquity.

Archaeologists have unearthed about 70 mammoth-bone structures across Eastern Europe. But this one is the oldest on the Russian plain thought to be made by modern humans. Most of the previously identified structures were small, leading researchers to conclude they were most likely used as winter dwellings on a nearly treeless landscape.

But the researchers said this circle was too large for a roof, which might suggest it was used for a different purpose.

“There are more than 60 mammoths in this one structure” said David Beresford-Jones, an environmental archaeologist at the University of Cambridge and an author on the paper. He added, “It doesn’t make much sense, really, as a house.”

The team suggested that the hunter-gatherers instead may have butchered massive mammoth carcasses at the site and then stored the meat and fat in nearby permafrost as if in an ancient refrigerator.

Dr. Pryor arrived at Kostenki 11 in 2015 and quickly went shoeless, tiptoeing so that he wouldn’t crush any of the hundreds of mammoth bones scattered around the site. The ring, which also included ribs, jaws and leg bones, had probably been piled 20 inches high before collapsing thousands of years ago, he said.

The team collected sediment samples from inside the bone circle and from three large pits located outside.

Through further processing, they identified more than 400 charcoal pieces, evidence of wood-burning. The charcoal came from conifers such as spruce, larch and pine, suggesting that trees still grew in the harsh, frozen environment. They also radiocarbon-dated the charcoal, which further supported that the site was about 25,000 years old.

They also found burned mammoth bones, which indicated that the Paleolithic people were probably starting fires with wood and then using the beasts’ greasy bones to feed the flames. Bone-fueled fires burn brighter than wood fires, but spread less warmth.

“You won’t produce a nice good fire for roasting your mammoth meat on,” Dr. Beresford-Jones said. But the flames would have allowed the hunter-gatherers to work through the night to hastily strip meat off mammoth bones before hungry wolves and foxes arrived to try to seize the haul.

The team also uncovered plant material similar to what is seen in modern parsnips, carrots and potatoes. This suggested that the Paleolithic people may have supplemented their mammoth meals with vegetable side dishes.

Mietje Germonpré, an archaeozoologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, and who was not involved in the study, called the paper a “truly unique discovery,” and said its findings were sound.

Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University in England, applauded the team for the methods they used to recover ancient charcoal from the dirt. But he said it could not be ruled out that the structure might have been used as a cozy home during the long winters, which could reach minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

The team acknowledged that they did not fully solve the mystery of how the mammoth-bone circle was used. They still do not know whether the hunter-gatherers killed or scavenged the beasts, how long the location was used or if it held any ritualistic importance.

“These woolly-mammoth circular structures are really enigmatic, but they are hugely impressive,” Dr. Pryor said. “They speak to a time when our human ancestors were battling against the coldest and harshest and most difficult point of the last glacial cycle in Europe.”

Nicholas St. Fleur is a science reporter who writes about archaeology, paleontology, space and other topics. He joined The Times in 2015. Before that, he was an assistant editor at The Atlantic. @scifleur • Facebook

{ https://www.nytimes.com/ }

17-03-2020 om 22:33 geschreven door peter