UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Ceres is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. It’s also considered a dwarf planet, much like Pluto. In a flurry of new studies, astronomers report strong evidence of a salty ocean beneath the surface

Ceres

The Dawn spacecraft entered the orbit of Ceres in March 2015, offering an unprecedented close view of a surprisingly dynamic environment. Far from being a cold, barren, and dull planetoid, Ceres is remarkably active.

Researchers now believe its rigid crust harbors a subsurface ocean, an ocean which may have once been on the surface.

What’s inside Ceres? Gravity can tell. The map overlaid on the right gives scientists hints about Ceres’ internal structure from gravity measurements.

Image credits: NASA.

Landing on Ceres would be very challenging logistically and would risk contaminating the planet, so instead, researchers use remote sensing from Dawn’s instruments to measure the Ceresian galaxy, estimating its composition and interior structure, in addition to its topography. Maps such as the one above (right side) help researchers estimate its composition and interior structure.

“Ceres has an abundance of gravity anomalies associated with outstanding geologic features,” says Anton Ermakov, a postdoctoral researcher at JPL.

Occator Crater is one of the more interesting features on Ceres — and one that researchers looked at to infer the presence of subsurface water.

Image credits: NASA/JPL.

Occator is an impact crater located on Ceres containing the brightest of the bright spots observed by the Dawn spacecraft. Astronomers have found evidence that some of the rocks on Occator are hydrohalite — a type of rock that forms in salt water.

Before this, hydrohalite had only been observed on Earth.

Fracture system inside Occator. Image taken by the Dawn shuttle at an altitude of 22 miles (36 kilometers).

Image credits: NASA/JPL

Ceres seems riddled with minerals containing water suggesting that the dwarf planet once had a global ocean. What became of that ocean? Likely, it now only exists underground as a ‘fossil ocean’, recent NASA research indicates.

The Dawn team found that Ceres’ crust is a mixture of ice, salts, and hydrated materials — a type of crust also indicative of a former ocean.

This image of Occator Crater’s northern wall was obtained by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on June 16, 2018 from an altitude of about 21 miles (33 kilometers).

Image credits: NASA/JPL.

It’s not just Ceres’ past that intrigues astronomers — its present seems quite interesting as well. Ceres is still geologically active in several ways and exhibits signs of cryovolcanism, quite possibly connected to its subsurface water.

The Dawn team also discovered what seems to be a softer, easily deformable layer beneath the rigid crust, a potential signature of residual liquid.

A false-color mosaic of Occator Crater pieced together from multiple Dawn photos.

Image credits: NASA/JPL.

Ceres doesn’t benefit from internal heat generated by the gravitational interactions with a large planet (as is the case for some of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s satellites) yet, nevertheless, Ceres seems to be a water-rich world.

Recent evidence shows that the bright areas previously observed on Ceres were formed through hydrothermal activity that involves salt, which makes the dwarf planet even more tantalizing, as it seems to sport all the required ingredients for life.

The internal layer (the mantle) is dominated by hydrated rocks, like clays. Artistic depiction of the structure of Ceres.

Image credits: NASA / JPL.

It’s not clear what this means for potential life on Ceres. Water is essential for life as we know it, and NASA regards Ceres as one of the more promising places to host life in our solar system. If Ceresian life exists, it is likely in the form of microbes, similar to bacteria. Even if there’s no life on Ceres anymore, it could still have harbored life in its past ocean. Ceres truly is one of the more interesting places in the solar system.

“More and more, we are learning that Ceres is a complex, dynamic world that may have hosted a lot of liquid water in the past, and may still have some underground,” said Julie Castillo-Rogez, Dawn project scientist and co-author of the studies, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Ceres has plenty of interesting features. Here, a mosaic of Cerealia Facula, another bright spot area.

Image credits: NASA/JPL.

It’s remarkable just how much the Dawn mission has revealed about Ceres. Yet again, we’ve learned that one body which didn’t seem all that interesting harbors plenty of fascinating information. Our solar system is becoming more interesting every year.

“Dawn accomplished far more than we hoped when it embarked on its extraordinary extraterrestrial expedition,” said Mission Director Marc Rayman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “These exciting new discoveries from the end of its long and productive mission are a wonderful tribute to this remarkable interplanetary explorer.”

This mosaic of Ceres’ Occator Crater is composed of images NASA’s Dawn mission captured on its second extended mission, in 2018. Bright pits and mounds (foreground) were formed by salty liquid released as Occator’s water-rich floor froze after the crater-forming impact about 20 million years ago.

Out in the rural desert town of Jafr, in eastern Jordan, about 190 miles east of Amman, nothing much ever really happens. This is a simple, forgotten place in the unforgiving desert terrain well away from the rest of the world, a place that not even people in Jordan have ever really heard of, but this would change in 2010, when this rugged town of 13,000 suddenly got major national news coverage when Jafr was supposedly invaded by menacing, malevolent aliens from another world. And so would begin a panic unlike the region had ever seen before, which in the people’s minds at least involved towering aliens and their death machines out to kill them all.

On April 1, 2010, a major story ran on the front page of the Jordanian newspaper Al-Ghad. According to the report, UFOs had descended from the sky to land out in the desert boondocks surrounding the dusty town, piloted by massive, marauding aliens that were described as being a full 10 feet tall which spoke in a squawking language. During the night, the UFOs, which could supposedly shoot beams of intense heat, had reportedly flown about over town, lighting up buildings and city streets as if it were daylight, leaving scorch marks in the ground, and it was also said that some force they were generating had knocked out communications in the area. Panicked residents had reportedly run out into the streets in fear of their lives, and by the time the article made the rounds the populace was in a frenzied panic thinking the world was ending.

Jafr, Jordan

Through all of this, parents refused to send their children to school, many stores closed, and the mayor of the city, Mohammed Mleihan, was making preparations to evacuate the entire populace. He would say of this, “Students didn’t go to school, their parents were frightened and I almost evacuated the town’s 13,000 residents. People were scared that aliens would attack them.” When other news outlets picked up the story it seemed to take on a life of its own, with some saying that military personnel were being mobilized and that an alien invasion force was preparing to launch an attack from the desert. In the meantime, the mayor did have security forces patrol the outskirts of town, but they were unable to locate any UFOs or giant aliens.

As soon as the newspaper Al-Ghad realized what was happening, and became aware of the gravity of the uproar their article had caused, Moussa Barhoumeh, Al Ghad’s managing editor, came forward to say that the whole thing had been nothing but an April Fool’s joke, something many astute readers here might have already surmised by reading the date of the publication. According to the editor, it had just been a silly, good-natured prank “meant to entertain, not scare people.” The newspaper issued a formal apology for the inconvenience it had caused, but many of the people of Jafr, who had had their whole life momentarily upended, were furious, not the least of all Mayor Mleihan. He was so livid, in fact, that he threatened to sue the newspaper for their tasteless “big lie,” especially since he had allocated valuable resources to prepare for an alien invasion that had never come.

It does seem odd that Al-Ghad would decide to try and pull such a stunt. After all, whereas someone from the West might be accustomed to seeing fake April Fool’s Day news stories printed on April 1^st and cast a skeptical eye at such spectacular headlines on this day, In Jordan it is different. They have no such custom, especially not in a rural, superstitious backwater like Jafr, where most people would not even know what an April Fool’s day prank was. Considering this, it does seem pretty odd that the Jordian newspaper would not only pull a front-page prank article, but also base it in Jafr. In America or Britain it probably would not have been a big deal, but in Jordan it had led to a mass panic and minor regional emergency amongst a populace not versed in such things.

It is in some aspects quite reminiscent of the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast of October 30, 1938, in which future filmmaker Orson Welles adapted the HG Wells classic of the same name as a Halloween radio show over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network, made up to sound like it was taking place as the alien invasion of the novel happened. It was clearly announced as a dramatization, but presented in a very realistic style of another program being interrupted by news of the invaders from Mars, so some people who caught the show midway through were said to have bought it all as real and flown into a panic due to this realistic “breaking news” style of storytelling used. The extent of this panic has been disputed in recent years, as it turns out that the show wasn’t listened to by all that many people and most of them met it with curiosity rather than fear, but there were no doubt a few who took it to be real and were not too happy about having been fooled. Even though the panic caused by the broadcast was nowhere near as bad as it has traditionally been portrayed, it still did gain quite a bit of backlash from people who did not appreciate its use of its deceptive news bulletin format, leading to stricter regulation of such programs by the Federal Communications Commission.

The Jafr alien invasion scare is the worst case scenario for fake news and questionable journalistic ethics, mixed with pranksters who perhaps went a little too far. This one story threw this little town into an absolute whirlwind of fear and apprehension, and it is a cautionary tale as to how skittish and gullible people can be, especially in an out of the way, undeveloped area where the populace is especially susceptible. It is certainly an intriguing little tale, and shows that the mainstream news is probably not the best place to play out practical jokes.