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...
02-03-2021
NASA's Perseverance Rover Gives High-Definition Panoramic View of Landing Site
NASA's Perseverance Rover Gives High-Definition Panoramic View of Landing Site
Mastcam-Z's First 360-Degree Panorama: This is the first 360-degree panorama taken by Mastcam-Z, a zoomable pair of cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. The panorama was stitched together on Earth from 142 individual images taken on Sol 3, the third Martian day of the mission (Feb. 21, 2021). Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS. Full image and caption › To interact: Use the controls in the top left (or pinch) to zoom in and out of the image. Click (or touch) and drag your cursor to move around in the image.
A 360-degree panorama taken by the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument will be discussed during a public video chat this Thursday.
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover got its first high-definition look around its new home in Jezero Crater on Feb. 21, after rotating its mast, or “head,” 360 degrees, allowing the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument to capture its first panorama after touching down on the Red Planet on Feb 18. It was the rover’s second panorama ever, as the rover’s Navigation Cameras, or Navcams, also located on the mast, captured a 360-degree view on Feb. 20.
Mastcam-Z is a dual-camera system equipped with a zoom function, allowing the cameras to zoom in, focus, and take high-definition video, as well as panoramic color and 3D images of the Martian surface. With this capability, the robotic astrobiologist can provide a detailed examination of both close and distant objects.
The cameras will help scientists assess the geologic history and atmospheric conditions of Jezero Crater and will assist in identifying rocks and sediment worthy of a closer look by the rover’s other instruments. The cameras also will help the mission team determine which rocks the rover should sample and collect for eventual return to Earth in the future.
Stitched together from 142 images, the newly released panorama reveals the crater rim and cliff face of an ancient river delta in the distance. The camera system can reveal details as small as 0.1 to 0.2 inches (3 to 5 millimeters) across near the rover and 6.5 to 10 feet (2 to 3 meters) across in the distant slopes along the horizon.
The detailed composite image shows a Martian surface that appears similar to images captured by previous NASA rover missions.
“We’re nestled right in a sweet spot, where you can see different features similar in many ways to features found by Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity at their landing sites,” said Jim Bell of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, the instrument’s principal investigator. ASU leads operations of the Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.
The camera team will discuss the new panorama during a question and answer session at 4 p.m. EST Thursday, Feb. 25, which will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website, and will livestream on the agency’s Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Daily Motion, and YouTube channels, as well as the NASA app. Speakers include:
Jim Bell of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, the instrument’s principal investigator
Elsa Jensen of Malin Space Science Systems, who leads the uplink operations team that sends commands to Mastcam-Z
Kjartan Kinch of the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, who led the design, construction, and testing of Mastcam-Z’s color calibration targets, which are used to tune the instrument’s settings
Mastcam-Z’s design is an evolution of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover’s Mastcam instrument, which has two cameras of fixed focal length rather than zoomable cameras. The two cameras on Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z dual cameras are mounted on the rover’s mast at eye level for a person 6 feet, 6 inches (2 meters) tall. They sit 9.5 inches (24.1 centimeters) apart to provide stereo vision and can produce color images with a quality similar to that of a consumer digital HD camera.
The Mastcam-Z team includes dozens of scientists, engineers, operations specialists, managers, and students from a variety of institutions. In addition, the team includes deputy principal investigator Justin Maki of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
More About the Mission
A key objective of Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
A Wind Carved Rock: This wind-carved rock seen in first 360-degree panorama taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument shows just how much detail is captured by the camera systems.
Crater Rim: This shows the rim of Jezero Crater as seen in the first 360-degree panorama taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.
The Myth And Truth About The 13,000 Year-Old Alien Satellite
The Myth And Truth About The 13,000 Year-Old Alien Satellite
The story begins in 1954, three years before mankind launched its first artificial satellite, the Soviet Sputnik 1.
On May 14, 1954, several newspapers published articles centered on a statement belonging to retired Major D. E. Keyhoe. At the time, Keyhoe believed the Earth was circled by one — if not two artificial satellites.
Scientists at the famous White Sands government facility in New Mexico were actively researching this possibility and trying to determine the purpose and origin of these objects.
Later that summer, Aviation Week magazine attempted to explain the mystery by saying the two satellites’ orbits had been mapped out at an altitude of 400, respectively 600 miles above Earth.
“Pentagon scare over the observance of two previously unobserved satellites orbiting the Earth has dissipated with the identification of the objects as natural, not artificial satellites. Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, expert on extraterrestrial bodies from the University of New Mexico, headed the identification project.
“One satellite is orbiting about 400 miles out, while the other track is 600 miles from the Earth. Pentagon thought momentarily the Russians had beaten the U.S. to space explorations.”
Keep in mind that this was all happening during the space race, when spirits were high and tensions were higher. The competition between the United States and the Soviet Union fueled the paranoia as each nation raced towards the sky.
Many astronomers suspected a large satellite was indeed orbiting the Earth and by 1960, even the U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged this alien presence.
“WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — An unidentified, silent satellite has been discovered circling the Earth in a near-polar orbit by United States tracking stations, the Defense Department said today. The identity of the mystery satellite — which has been dubbed “the dark satellite” are not known despite nearly two weeks of tracking.”
It wasn’t long before people made the connection between the unknown object and Nikola Tesla. In 1899, he had detected a repeating radio signal and believed it originated in outer space. The enigma surrounding the black satellite was deepened by its strange behavior.
Virtually all the artificial satellites had been launched on West to East orbits (following our planet’s natural rotation) while this one circled Earth on a polar orbit, from North to South. Interestingly enough, polar orbits are employed by modern observational satellites that carry out mapping missions. So, was the Black Knight Satellite an observational unit? If so, who put it there?
1998 NASA photo of an mysterious object believed by some conspiracy theorists to be an extraterrestrial satellite, the “Black Knight.”
Some astronomers who claimed to have observed it said the object would disappear, only to reappear in a different place, traveling along a different orbit. They also reported it was moving twice as fast as any other known satellite.
The Black Knight is often mentioned in conjunction with astronaut Gordon Cooper’s historic flight. In 1963, on the last of his 22 days spent in orbit, Cooper radioed Muchea Tracking Station in Australia, telling them that he was able to see a glowing green object rapidly approaching his capsule.
Although his sighting had received live coverage by the National Broadcasting Company, reporters were forbidden to question him upon his return to Earth. Although Major Cooper was a stern believer in aliens and their presence here on Earth, there is no link between his sighting and the Black Knight.
An interesting yet unverified aspect is the alleged decoding of the radio message the satellite is said to broadcast. As the story goes, ham radio operators who picked up the alien transmission managed to interpret it as a star map that pointed to Epsilon Boötis, a star in the Boötes constellation, located at a distance of 52 light years from Earth. Interestingly enough, in Babylonian mythology, the Boötes constellation was depicted as the god Enlil, the chief divinity among the Anunnaki on Earth.
Almost every article on the Black Knight Satellite mentions its age of 13,000 years without referencing the origin of this claim. In 1973, Scottish astronomer and science fiction writer Duncan Lunan said he had succeeded in decoding the message caught by two Norwegian physicists in the 1920’s.
The message was said to have come from a probe orbiting the Earth in the same Lagrangian point as the Moon and that probe had been sent a long time ago by the inhabitants of a planet orbiting Epsilon Boötis. The message read:
“Start here. Our home is Epsilon Boötes , which is a double star. We live on the sixth planet of seven, coming from the sun, which is the larger of the two. Our sixth planet has one moon. Our fourth planet has three. Our first and third planets each have one. Our probe is in the position of Arcturus, known in our maps.”
The star Arcturus was pictured in the deciphered star map in the position it occupied 13,000 years ago, hence the supposed age of the Black Knight.
Lunan’s theory was picked up by Time magazine and included in several documentaries. However, in 1976 he acknowledged it was flawed and withdrew it, only to revise and reinterpret part of it in 1998.
There are a number of famous photos that allegedly show the alien satellite. The official explanations for the object they show is that it’s nothing more than a thermal blanket that had come off one of the many satellites we’ve put up there. While this might be the case, it only explains the photos and not the Black Knight itself, as the unknown object had been reported prior to these photos.
Another aspect is that these famous photos show an object far smaller than the one indicated in earlier reports, which was said to be as large as a city block. On a side note, the vimanas portrayed in ancient Hindu texts were of similar size. Perhaps there’s a connection between the two.
And since no one can deny the size and scope of the UFO phenomena, it stands to reason that among all reports of flying saucers in our skies and oceans we can fit one more: a huge alien satellite orbiting above our planet.
Like with most things related to the unexplained, there is an aura of misinformation surrounding the Black Knight Satellite. Keep in mind, this is the internet, the place where things come to get blown out of proportion.
One last thing, before you go. In medieval times, a black knight was one who had no allegiance or opted to hide it by covering his colors and emblems, effectively stating that he served no lord. Quite a fitting name for an enigmatic alien watcher, isn’t it?
Astronomers have published a map of the sky showing 25,000 black holes - the most detailed of its kind ever produced.
The map uses low radio frequencies, built from data from 52 stations across nine continents.
It covers an astounding four per cent of the northern half of the sky, but the scientists do not intend to stop until the entire sky has been mapped.
While the bright specs appear to be stars they are in fact supermassive black holes, with each one located in a distant galaxy.
“This is the result of many years of work on incredibly difficult data. We had to invent new methods to convert the radio signals into images of the sky”, research leader Francesco de Gasperin said in a statement.
(LOFAR/LOL Survey)
Making the map was not easy; the ionosphere that surrounds the Earth - a layer of free electrons that clouds telescopes - makes it difficult to track the black holes.
“It’s similar to when you try to see the world while immersed in a swimming pool”, explains co-author Reinout van Weeren.
“When you look up, the waves on the water of the pool deflect the light rays and distort the view”,
In total, it took 256 hours of observations to make the map, and advanced equipment was needed to clear up the picture.
Supercomputers used by the researchers engaged algorithms to correct the effect of the ionosphere every four seconds.
“After many years of software development, it is so wonderful to see that this has now really worked out”, Huub Röttgering said.
They say the truth is out there, but nobody ever said it would be easy to find. Now, after a search lasting decades, a giant trove of long-classified records held by the CIA in relation to reported UFO activity has finally come to light.
This huge public release of what the CIA claims is its "entire" archive of documentation on Unidentified Flying Objects – now termed "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" (UAPs) – comprises hundreds of formerly top-secret records going back more than a half-century.
The unprecedented and fascinating data dump is thanks to a long-sustained effort by intelligence website The Black Vault, which has been sourcing and sharing declassified government documentation on UFOs (among many other things) since the mid–1990s.
According to the site's founder, John Greenewald Jr., The Black Vault has been fighting since 1996 for the release of these UFO records, which began to emerge in dribs and drabs in the 1980s after legal proceedings in relation to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
While some of the documentation has seen the light of day before, this is the first time the supposedly complete archive of the CIA's UFO records has been publicly released, and was made possible after The Black Vault acquired a CD-ROM from the CIA containing what the intelligence agency claims is its entire haul of UFO records, including much information that has never been seen before.
As Greenewald points out however, there's no easy way of factually verifying whether this is the CIA's entire archive, as the agency claims – or whether the US government is still holding onto classified records on UFOs/UAPs we don't yet know about.
In any case, the 2,780-page collection now available on The Black Vault website represents a significant victory for freedom of information on this mysterious and tantalising subject, and a personal milestone for Greenewald.
Amidst the archive, hundreds of records dating back to the mid–20th century can now be read, either via individual PDFs, or a giant ZIP file.
(The Black Vault)
It's worth pointing out that not all of the information is easily readable. Many details in documents are redacted, and the overall quality of scans and photocopies is hit and miss, with some of the records being quite difficult to read, while others are clearer.
Those hoping that the haul will finally offer proof that the US government has been concealing knowledge of alien life-forms visiting Earth will be disappointed, however.
As we've explained before, UFOs or UAPs are a real, serious topic, reflecting documented accounts of incidents involving objects or phenomena that can't be easily identified or otherwise explained, even by experts.
The terms – including related descriptors such as Anomalous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) – are not themselves synonymous with (or evidence of) extraterrestrials life forms, even though they often get bundled together, given the wilder possibilities of what these strange sightings could represent.
In other words, UFO means Unidentified Flying Object – nothing more, nothing less, as astronomer Chris Impey from the University of Arizona recently explained.
That said, these hundreds of newly revealed reports offer countless riveting reads of strange and inexplicable episodes, and make a huge contribution to historical records on UFO sightings and how they get handled by those in the intelligence community.
Whether the timing is coincidental or not is unclear, but US intelligence services were already being obliged to publicly divulge more of their knowledge about UFOs in the coming months, thanks to a buried clause in the massive COVID–19 relief bill signed into law in late 2020. Strange but true.
Which is another way of saying that it's possible we may find out even more about UFOs this year – if the CIA's complete archive doesn't turn out to be as complete as it could be.
For Greenewald, it's all part of the job – an important duty to get to the truth, no matter how weird it might be.
"Plain and simple, the public has a right to know!" Greenewald told Motherboard. "I feel I am achieving what I set out to do. Easy access, to important material, for people to make up their own minds on what is going on."
The Extraterrestrial Species Almanac, 82 Documented ET's, Craig Campobosso via Leak Project
The Extraterrestrial Species Almanac, 82 Documented ET's, Craig Campobosso via Leak Project
Discover who the aliens are – the benevolent ones and those who mean us harm – and what they want from us. Here is the ultimate field guide to the 82 extraterrestrial species that populate the universe. Fully illustrated throughout.
This is the ultimate field guide to the 82 extraterrestrial species that populate the universe. ET enthusiast Craig Campobasso explores the origins, physical characteristics, technological and consciousness abilities, dimensional capacities, belief systems, and cosmic agendas of each of the species.
The species fall into two categories: 1) benevolent races, which function as the guardians of humanity, whose goals include helping people overcome duality, healing, and protecting; and 2) malevolent races, which are responsible for abductions, cloning, and ultimately domination.
This intergalactic expose will entertain all those interested in UFOs, aliens, ETs. Sci-fi and fantasy fans of the Marvel universe; Star Trek, Star Wars, and other popular TV shows like Ancient Aliens; Roswell, and Project Blue Book are prime targets for this book that delves deep into who the real extraterrestrials are and what they want with the people of Earth.
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Agartha, the Hidden Civilization of Inner Earth | Truth or Lore via Mr. Mythos
Agartha, the Hidden Civilization of Inner Earth | Truth or Lore via Mr. Mythos
Agartha, the Hidden Civilization of Inner Earth | Truth or Lore via Mr. Mythos
There’s an ancient mystery of connected tunnels across the world… could these paths lead to the legendary Hollow Earth kingdom Agartha deep under the Himalayas? Who (or what) lives in Agartha? What kind of lost knowledge might they hide from mankind?
I was looking over an old Mars photo, when something just hit me. I just opened the photo and there in front of me was a huge white triangle in the side of hill. The triangle looked like it was not a rock. I say that because there is nothing in this entire Mars photo that resembles the white color of this triangle. I do believe it to be a fungus. There is also another possibility...that its a door blocking an entrance and it was made to seal off the heat from the outside so the inside stays cool. There was also a small square opening not far from the triangle which could be a window.
On the other side of the photo there are a few anomalies that defy any explanation but one...that there was once intelligent life on Mars. A strange sculpture of a woven birdlike head. A statue head and even a large box about 2 meters across with a stone lid! These are not made by nature, but by intelligent beings from an ancient civilization that once lived and thrived on Mars.
V-shaped UFO formation over Minnetonka, Minnesota 28-Feb-2021
V-shaped UFO formation over Minnetonka, Minnesota 28-Feb-2021
This UFO video was just submitted to me through our Facebook page. It shows unidentified flying objects in some kind of a V-formation in the sky above Minnetonka, a suburban city in Hennepin County, Minnesota. This happened on 28th Februray 2021.
Witness report:
I looked at the news nothing was mentioned about it. We asked others if they saw it and nothing
From a 360-degree panorama of the dusty landscape to a cheeky rover selfie: NASA's most stunning shots of Mars from Perseverance's first week on the Red Planet
From a 360-degree panorama of the dusty landscape to a cheeky rover selfie: NASA's most stunning shots of Mars from Perseverance's first week on the Red Planet
More than 5,000 images have been sent back to Earth by the NASA Perseverance rover from the Red Planet
The images include thousands of the entry, descent and landing stage of the mission including the parachute
There are 23 cameras on board the $2.2 billion Mars vehicle covering science, landing and engineering
As well as capturing images of the Martian sunset, the desert-like landscape and the rover itself, the cameras will be used to better understand the planet and guide the rover over difficult and rocky Martian terrain
NASA's Perseverance rover has spent the last week on the surface of Mars and in that short time has already sent back thousands of photos - including a cheeky selfie.
The latest rover from the US space agency landed on the Red Planet just before 21:00 GMT on Thursday, February 18 after a hair raising '7-minutes of terror'.
The $2.2 billion vehicle is equipped with 23 cameras including nine for engineering work, seven for science and seven to help it land on the Martian surface.
The first image sent back from Mars was a grainy, dust covered black and white picture taken by one of the Navigation Cameras and shows rocks of various sizes littering the Jezero crater.
Moments after touchdown, Perseverance beamed back its first black-and-white images from the Martian surface
Among the most iconic images sent back was the rover dangling over the Martian surface, attached to the sky crane that helped it safely land on the Red Planet.
Other images returned include a sensational high resolution 360-degree panorama of the Martian landscape and a video of Perseverance's nail biting landing.
The cameras on Perseverance all serve multiple purposes, beyond simply sending back images showing the landscape, sunrise, sunset and skyline of another world.
The space agency said the rover's cameras will help scientists assess the geologic history and atmospheric conditions of Jezero Crater and identify rocks and sediment worthy of a closer examination and collection for eventual return to Earth.
Pictured is an image snapped by the sky crane as it lowered NASA's Perseverance down to Mars' surface using long mechanical bridles
The sky crane (pictured) lowered the car-sized rover to Martian surface with long mechanical bridles and flew off to a safe distance where it crashed into the surface - and Perseverance captured its selfless act
NASA PERSEVERANCE CAMERAS
There are 23 cameras mounted to the Perseverance rover including:
Nine engineering cameras, seven science cameras and seven for entry, descent and landing.
The engineering cameras give detailed information in colour about the terrain the rover has to cross.
They measure the ground for safe driving, check out the status of hardware and support sample gathering.
There are HazCams for hazard detection and Navcams for navigation.
Science cameras record in more detail and can even capture 3D images.
The Mastcam-Z on a 2 metre arm has a zoom feature for focusing on distant objects and can film video.
The Supercam fires a laser at mineral targets beyond the reach of the rovers arm to analysed the chemical composition of the rock.
The camera system can reveal details as small as 3 to 5 millimetres across near the rover and 2 to 3 meters across in the distant slopes along the horizon.
The majority of cameras on the vehicle are designed for engineering use, and they give detailed information - in colour - about the terrain the rover has to cross.
They measure the ground for safe driving, check out the status of hardware on the vehicle for analysis and support sample gathering - a core mission objective.
There are HazCams for hazard detection and Navcams for navigation, cameras that shoot lasers and those that film video or capture 3D views.
So far the majority of images have come from the various entry, descent and landing camera - including those looking at the parachute, descent stage and rover.
There are more than 4,625 images taken by the landing and descent cameras, with about 600 coming from the left and right science 'Mastcam-Z'.
This makes sense given we are only a week into a mission that could last more than a decade, capturing hundreds of thousands of images, videos and audio files.
For comparison, NASA Curiosity, the rover that has been on Mars since 2012, has captured almost 400,000 images of the Red Planet from fewer cameras.
Mastcam-Z's design is an evolution of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover's Mastcam instrument, which has two cameras of fixed focal length rather than zoomable.
The two cameras on Perseverance's Mastcam-Z dual cameras are mounted on the rover's mast at eye level for a person 2 meters tall.
They sit 24.1 centimeters apart to provide stereo vision and can produce colour images with a quality similar to that of a consumer digital HD camera.
A number of sensational images, video and even audio clips have already been shared of the Red Planet from Perseverance's array of cameras and equipment.
At about 7,000 feet into the decent, the cameras captured the sky crane manoeuvre over the landing site. As Perseverance is lowered, it kicks up dust on the ground that may have sat in the same place for billions of years
This is the shining heat shield dropping away from Perseverance, which protected the rover as it soared through temperatures of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit
NASA used a large parachute to slow the rover and online detectives discovered the red and white were code, reading 'Dare Mighty Things' and the coordinates for NASA JPL in California
The NASA team was overjoyed after hearing the news that Perseverance had landed safely on Mars
These included a hair raising video showing the '7-minutes of terror' the rover went through as it descended through the Martian atmosphere to land in the crater.
The first image NASA shared from Mars, sent minutes after the vehicle landed on the Red Planet, was a grainy black and white picture through the fish eye lens of the Perseverance Hazard Cameras.
The dust obscured image showed the baron, rock covered landscape of the Jezero crater with shadows of the Perseverance rover in the foreground and the Martian sky in the background.
The image came in while mission control crew were still celebrating the successful landing in the 28-mile wide crater that was picked as a promising target for finding ancient life signs.
The rover's rear cameras watch the sky crane fly off into the distance where it landed far enough to not interfere with Perseverance
NASA shared an image of its 'sky crane' sacrificing itself by intentionally crashing into Mars after it safely delivered the Perseverance rover to the Red Planet. Smoke is seen the in distance where the sky crane made impact with the Martian surface
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance orbiter also captured amazing images of Perseverance, showing it attached to the sonic parachute moments after shooting through the Martian atmosphere like a comet
Perseverance will make oxygen on Mars
The primary task for Perseverance is to search for signs of microbial life and take soil samples, but it will also conduct a host of other jobs during its operational window of one Martian year one (687 Earth days).
One of these, for example, involves investigating if Mars' natural resources can be turned into oxygen to make breathable air for astronauts and also to make rocket fuel for return missions.
This task is called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE).
Future crewed missions to Mars will require oxygen for astronauts to breathe. Carrying oxygen from Earth to Mars is heavy and expensive.
MOXIE is designed to see if it is possible to extract oxygen from Mars and turn it into breathable air.
Mars atmosphere is more than 95 per cent of carbon dioxide and less than 0.15 per cent oxygen.
Moxie will take Martian air, heat it to 800°C, inject energy into a pair of electrodes and this then separates oxygen from the CO2.
Oxygen is pumped out of one line and waste gase are spewed out of another.
The first colour image from Perseverance came from the Hazard Camera photo, soon followed by a look down from the sky crane that placed the rover on the surface, showing the rocks and soil as the rover approached.
The sky crane manoeuvre is the final landing stage that was also used when Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012.
The detailed image, which could become an iconic image in spaceflight shows the long Nylon cords lowering Perseverance to the Martian surface, along with the rover's mechanics and wheels dangling in the air.
This is something we've never seen before,' said Aaron Stehura, NASA flight system engineer, describing himself and colleagues as 'awe-struck' when first viewing the image.
'You are brought to the surface of Mars. You're sitting there, seven meters off the surface of the rover looking down,' he said. 'It's absolutely exhilarating, and it is evocative of those other images from our experience as human beings moving out into our solar system.'
After the first image they came in a flurry’s , including a close up of the wheel tracks on Perseverance, taken by the colour Hazard Cameras.
It wasn't just pictures taken by Perseverance that captured the imagination. The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flying above Mars. It showed the descent stage holding Perseverance.
One of the most recent images was a sensational 360-degree panorama taken by the Navcams stitched together from six individual images after they were sent back to Earth.
It showed the deep rust-coloured orange of the Martian surface, looking towards the horizon with a light orange/pink tinged sky and a large looking Sun in the distance.
Other panorama images show the deck of the Perseverance with the equipment used to search for signs of long gone Martian microbial life and a sweeping panoramic view taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument.
After landing, two of the Hazard Cameras (Hazcams) captured views from the front and rear of the rover, showing one of its wheels in the Martian dirt
Perseverance touched down on Mars Thursday and has been sending NASA videos and footage over the weekend. Pictured is one of thousands of images the rover has taken of the Red Planet
New images from Mars shot by the NASA Perseverance rover have revealed the impressive contours of the red planet's surface, pictures here are taken in false colour for calibration
The surface of Mars directly below NASA's Mars Perseverance rover is seen using the Rover Down-Look Camera in a combination of images acquired February 22, 2021 in a false colour for calibration
This was the first panorama from the science camera and shows rubble like rocks in the foreground, with sweeping hills in the background, looking towards the rim of the Jezero crater.
Within the images was one of a wind carved rock with strange angles, showing the level of detail possible in the zoomable Mastcam-Z cameras on the rover.
The stunning panorama was created with 5,000 commands parameters that shot a total of 142 images that were beamed back to Earth where NASA stitched them together.
While the image may seem like a barren landscape, taking a closer look through the area reveals a number of hidden gems waiting to be investigated by Perseverance.
NASA's Mars Perseverance rover's onboard Left Navigation Camera (Navcam), which is located high on the rover's mast and aids in driving, shows the surrounding area on Mars in an image acquired February 22, 2021
Also released Monday was the mission's first panorama of the rover's landing location, taken by the two Navigation Cameras located on its mast
NASA shared a video of the 7-minutes of terror landing on Mars that included this shot of Perseverance's aluminum wheels making contact with the surface for the first time
Captured in stunning HD, it was taken by the rover's Mastcam-Z, a dual-camera system equipped with a zoom function to help it focus on distant objects
To the left of the rover sits an interesting rock that NASA has named ‘harbor seal’ that was formed by Martian winds eroding it for billions of years and northeast of the rover are structures littering the ground that could have came from an ancient volcano.
More images are being shared all the time, with more than 5,600 raw images already shown on the Perseverance page - including bright red shots of the surface.
To the left of the rover sits an interesting rock that NASA has named ‘harbor seal’ that stands at a point that was formed from Martian wind eroding it for billions of years
NASA gave the world a tour of Mars using the high resolution 360-degree panorama Perseverance sent back from the Red Planet. The rover captured the scene using its powerful Mast Camera, Mastcam-Z for short, as it sat about one and a half miles from the basin of the Jezero Crater with mountains in the distance surrounding the rim
Perseverance's main mission on Mars is astrobiology and the search for signs of ancient microbial life. All of its cameras can aide in this mission, including those designed to help it navigate the Martian surface
A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life.
The rover will characterise the planet's geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
Subsequent missions, currently under consideration by NASA in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
NASA shared this stunning 'Sun' image taken from Mars which orbits our star every 687 days and is 227.9 million km away from it
Perseverance beamed back its first image of the crater moments after NASA established radio contact with the rover (left). The rover beamed a new image back without the camera lens that shows the Martian landscape in full color
First audio recording of Mars from Perseverance rover
Mars Rover Curiosity drills first powder samples from r…
NASA MARS 2020: THE MISSION WILL SEE THE PERSEVERANCE ROVER AND INGENUITY HELICOPTER SEARH FOR LIFE
NASA's Mars 2020 mission will search for signs of ancient life on on the Red Planet in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on Earth.
Named Perseverance, the main car-sized rover will explore an ancient river delta within the Jezero Crater, which was once filled with a 1,600ft deep lake.
It is believed that the region hosted microbial life some 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago and the rover will examine soil samples to hunt for evidence of the life.
Nasa's Mars 2020 rover (artist's impression) will search for signs of ancient life on Mars in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on our own planet
The $2.5 billion (£1.95 billion) Mars 2020 spaceship launched on July 30 with the rover and helicopter inside - and landed successfully on February 18, 2021.
Perseverance landed inside the crater and will collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for further analysis.
A second mission will fly to the planet and return the samples, perhaps by the later 2020s in partnership with the European Space Agency.
This concept art shows the Mars 2020 rover landing on the red planet via NASA's 'sky-crane' system
ROVER PERSEVERANCE MAAKT ER EEN ZOOITJE VAN OP MARS
ROVER PERSEVERANCE MAAKT ER EEN ZOOITJE VAN OP MARS
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Dat blijkt uit beelden gemaakt door de Trace Gas Orbiter.
De orbiter heeft vanuit een baan rond Mars een fraaie foto gemaakt van de landingsplek van Perseverance. En de foto onthult dat de rover er tijdens zijn landing wel een beetje een rommeltje van heeft gemaakt.
De foto Ongeveer in het midden van de foto zien we de Perseverance-rover. Helemaal links ligt de parachute en de bovenzijde van de beschermende schelp die Perseverance tijdens de reis naar Mars en afdaling omhulde. Ietsje rechts daarvan ligt de zogenoemde descent stage: een soort jetpack met acht motoren die Perseverance veilig op Mars zette. Nadat Perseverance op Mars was geland, haastte de descent stage zich weg, om iets meer dan een halve kilometer verderop – zoals gepland – te crashen.
Het hitteschild zie je helemaal rechts. Dit vormde de onderzijde van de schelp die Perseverance omringde en werd na de gang door de atmosfeer afgeworpen.
Afbeelding: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS; acknowledgement A. Valantinas.
Stoffig De verschillende attributen die gebruikt zijn om Perseverance op Mars te zetten, zijn nu nog goed zichtbaar, maar dat gaat veranderen. Mars is bijzonder stoffig en ook het hitteschild, de parachutes en wat nog over is van de gecrashte descent stage zullen na verloop van tijd bedekt worden met stof en langzaam maar zeker opgaan in de ondergrond.
Trace Gas Orbiter De foto is zoals gezegd gemaakt door de Trace Gas Orbiter. Deze orbiter – een project van de Europese en Russische ruimtevaartorganisaties – arriveerde in 2016 bij Mars. De sonde doet er onderzoek naar de Martiaanse atmosfeer, maar wordt momenteel ook ingezet om communicatie tussen Perseverance en de aarde mogelijk te maken. Zo is het mede aan de Trace Gas Orbiter te danken dat we kort na de landing al snel op spectaculaire beelden van Mars en de landing zelf getrakteerd werden.
Schiaparelli De Trace Gas Orbiter maakt deel uit van de eerste ExoMars-missie. Deze bestond uit de orbiter en een Marslander, Schiaparelli genaamd. De lander maakte zich in 2016 los van de orbiter en zette koers richting het Marsoppervlak. Het resulteerde in een nog groter zooitje dan de Perseverance-landing; Schiaparelli crashte namelijk op Mars. De crash weerhoudt ESA er niet van om nog eens naar Mars te trekken. De Europese Marsrover Rosalind Franklin moet in 2023 op de rode planeet arriveren. Daarnaast zijn er plannen voor een Sample Return Mission, waarvoor ESA nauw gaat samenwerken met NASA. Het idee is om door Perseverance verzamelde Marsmonsters op te pikken en terug te brengen naar de aarde voor analyse.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter De Trace Gas Orbiter is natuurlijk niet de enige Marsorbiter. Zo heeft NASA zelf bijvoorbeeld ook de Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter nog rond Mars cirkelen. Deze orbiter heeft Perseverance ook al op het oppervlak van Mars gespot. Nog spectaculairder is echter de foto die MRO maakte tijdens de afdaling van Perseverance (zie hieronder). Op de foto zien we de rover aan de parachute bungelen.
Afbeelding: NASA / JPL Cal-Tech.
Perseverance landde op 18 februari in de Jezero-krater op Mars. De rover zal daar op jacht gaan naar sporen van (voormalig) leven. Dat is een primeur; eerdere rovers onderzochten de leefbaarheid van Mars, maar hebben nooit actief naar leven gezocht. Daarnaast zal Perseverance ook een instrument gaan testen waarmee mogelijk zuurstof uit de Martiaanse atmosfeer kan worden gehaald (van groot belang voor toekomstige bemande missies naar Mars). En er staat een spannende demonstratiemissie op stapel; aan boord van Perseverance bevindt zich een kleine helikopter die over een paar maanden het luchtruim moet kiezen. NASA hoopt zo te weten te komen of je op Mars kunt vliegen.
Tijd voor een spectaculaire foto van de afdaling van de rover. Deze foto is gemaakt door de descent stage – een soort jetpack met acht motoren – die ervoor zorgde dat Perseverance veilig landde op het Marsoppervlak. De rover bungelt enkele meters boven het oppervlak. Nu al de ruimtefoto van het jaar?
Veel ogen waren gisteravond gericht op Perseverance, ook die van de HiRISE-camera aan boord van de Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Het ruimtevaartuig boven Mars fotografeerde Perseverance en zijn parachute. Links op de foto zie je de Jezero-krater: het doel van de missie. Onderzoekers denken dat deze krater zo’n 3,5 miljard jaar geleden gevuld was met water dat door rivieren naar de krater werd gevoerd. De ‘armen’ van deze delta zijn nog steeds op de kraterbodem te aanschouwen. De foto is op 700 kilometer afstand van Perseverance gemaakt, terwijl de Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter een snelheid had van drie kilometer per seconde. Een kwestie van zeer goede timing.
Panoramafoto van Perseverance op Mars. Afbeelding: NASA
Naast de panoramafoto, maakte Perseverance ook nog een mooie selfie:
Selfie van Perseverance.
Afbeelding: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Bekijk in deze video de beelden van Perseverance’ landing op Mars.
DOOIEND ARCTISCH PERMAFROST POMPT VEEL MEER CO2 IN DE LUCHT DAN GEDACHT
DOOIEND ARCTISCH PERMAFROST POMPT VEEL MEER CO2 IN DE LUCHT DAN GEDACHT
Vivian Lammerse
En de boosdoeners zijn hongerige, ijzer-verorberende microben…
De aarde warmt op. En dat is slecht nieuws voor permafrost; een normaliter permanent bevroren laag aarde. Stijgende mondiale temperaturen zorgen er namelijk voor dat bevroren Arctische permafrost dooit. Hierdoor komt er methaan en koolstofdioxide vrij, dat er al voor duizenden jaren in opgeslagen zat. In klimaatmodellen is hier al rekening mee gehouden. Maar mogelijk is de hoeveelheid CO2 die vrijkomt door dooiend Arctisch permafrost onderschat. Want waar onderzoekers niet aan hebben gedacht, is aan hongerige, ijzer-verorberende bodemmicroben.
CO2 Zoals gezegd zit er in Arctisch permafrost heel veel koolstof gevangen. De hoeveelheid koolstof die in het permafrost opgesloten zit, wordt geschat op vier keer zoveel als de gecombineerde hoeveelheid CO2 die moderne mensen hebben uitgestoten. Het is dan ook niet voor niets dat wetenschappers zich zorgen maken. Want wanneer alle broeikasgassen die het permafrost herbergt een weg naar onze atmosfeer weten te vinden, zou dat dus een enorme impact hebben op ons mondiale klimaat.
Studie Wetenschappers proberen dan ook al enige tijd de processen achter de dooi beter te doorgronden. En in een nieuwe studie reisden onderzoekers hiervoor af naar het Zweedse natuurreservaat Stordalen Mire. “Het dooien van het permafrost is één van de grootste verhalen van deze tijd,” zegt onderzoeker Monique Patzner in een interview met Scientias.nl. “Wat er gaande is, is geen toekomstige zorg. We ondervinden het al aan den lijve. De permafrost in ons onderzoeksgebied zal tegen 2050 naar verwachting volledig verdwenen zijn. Elk jaar, zelfs tussen de seizoenen in, zien we veranderingen en instortingen in het veld, veroorzaakt door het verlies van permafrost. Dit betekent dat de transformatie heel rap gaat.”
Ondertussen in Alaska Niet alleen in Zweden smelt permafrost weg. Ook in Alaska zien wetenschappers permafrost dooien. Dat komt omdat het in Alaska een stuk regenachtiger is geworden. Sterker nog, De Amerikaanse staat beleeft de regenachtigste vijf jaar op rij ooit. In plaats van sneeuw, komt er dus regen naar beneden zetten. En dat is behoorlijk verontrustend. Want de regen zorgt ervoor dat er steeds meer permafrost verdwijnt. Daarnaast hebben ook ijverige bevers een vinger in de pap. Hoe? Gewapend met hun scherpe tanden bouwen de bevers van struiken en bomen dammen, waardoor er kleine poeltjes ontstaan die uitgroeien tot nieuwe meren die soms wel een paar hectare omvatten. En dat gaat rap. In slechts vijf jaar tijd hebben bevers woonachtig in noordwest-Alaska 56 nieuwe meren gecreëerd. Ook al bestaande meren dijen door toedoen van de bever uit. En dat gaat ten koste van kwetsbaar permafrost. Het water is namelijk warmer dan de omringende grond. En dus kunnen deze meren en vijvers de dooi van permafrost versnellen.
Hoewel dat al verontrustend genoeg is, zijn de onderzoekers er nu achtergekomen dat we mogelijk de hoeveelheid CO2 die vrijkomt door dooiend Arctisch permafrost hebben onderschat. In feite kan er zelfs veel meer CO2 vrijkomen dan onze worstcase-modellen hebben voorspeld. En dat komt volgens de onderzoekers omdat we geen rekening hebben gehouden met hele actieve bodemmicroben. Onderzoekers zijn zich al wel langer bewust dat micro-organismen een sleutelrol spelen bij het vrijkomen van CO2 als permafrost smelt. Als reactie op de stijgende temperaturen worden microben in de grond namelijk wakker en beginnen organisch materiaal dat jarenlang in het permafrost lag opgeslagen, af te breken. Daarbij komt CO2 en methaan vrij. Maar onderzoekers hebben nu ontdekt dat bodemmicroben mogelijk een nóg grotere rol spelen dan gedacht.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
Nieuwe ontdekking Men veronderstelde dat het mineraal ijzer koolstof bindt, zelfs als permafrost dooit. Maar onderzoekers uit de nieuwe studie hebben ontdekt dat hongerige microben die zich verschuilen in de Arctische bodem, het vermogen van ijzer om koolstof vast te houden, uitschakelen. “Bevroren grond heeft een hoog zuurstofgehalte, waardoor de ijzermineralen stabiel blijven en koolstof zich aan kan binden,” legt onderzoeker Carsten Müller uit. “Maar zodra het ijs smelt en in water verandert, daalt het zuurstofgehalte en wordt het ijzer instabiel. Tegelijkertijd geeft het ijs toegang tot bacteriën. En die gebruiken vervolgens de ijzermineralen als voedselbron. Terwijl ze eten, worden de bindingen die koolstof bevatten vernietigd en komt het vrij in de atmosfeer als broeikasgas.” Het zijn verontrustende bevindingen. Want de hoeveelheid extra koolstof die kan vrijkomen – en momenteel nog gevangen en gebonden is door het ijzer – wordt geschat op circa twee tot vijf keer de hoeveelheid koolstof die jaarlijks vrijkomt door antropogene emissies van fossiele brandstoffen. “Dit betekent dat we een grote nieuwe bron van CO2-uitstoot hebben gevonden die in klimaatmodellen moet worden opgenomen en nader bestudeerd moet worden,” aldus Müller.
Vragen Hoewel de onderzoekers slechts één moerasgebied in het Noord-Zweedse Abisko hebben bestudeerd, besloten ze hun resultaten te vergelijken met gegevens uit andere delen van het noordelijk halfrond. En daaruit blijkt dat de nieuwe resultaten mogelijk ook van toepassing zijn op andere permafrost-gebieden. Het is behoorlijk zorgelijk. Al is er ook nog een hoop dat we niet weten. Hoewel koolstof opgeslagen in duizenden jaren oud permafrost een grote impact heeft op ons wereldwijde klimaat, weten onderzoekers eigenlijk nog heel weinig over de mechanismen die bepalen of koolstof in de bodem wordt omgezet in broeikasgassen. Het merendeel van het klimaatonderzoek in het noordpoolgebied richt zich op de hoeveelheid opgeslagen koolstof en hoe gevoelig deze is voor klimaatverandering. Er is veel minder aandacht voor de diepere mechanismen die koolstof in de bodem vasthouden. “De vraag blijft bijvoorbeeld of de vrijkomende koolstof door permafrost-dooi echt wordt uitgestoten als broeikasgasemissies, of opnieuw wordt opgeslagen, bijvoorbeeld in toenemende biomassa,” zegt Patzner. Ook weten we niet precies welke micro-organismen de boosdoeners zijn. “Welke microben het ijzer verorberen en zo de bijbehorende organische koolstof vrijgeven, is momenteel de focus van onze lopende onderzoeken,” gaat Patzner verder. “Ook is het heel belangrijk om de hoeveelheid ijzer in diepere lagen, de hoeveelheid koolstof gebonden aan reactieve ijzermineralen in de talrijke permafrost-gebieden en de biologische beschikbaarheid van deze koolstof na het vrijkomen ervan verder te bepalen.”
Al met al laat dit onderzoek wederom de complexe mechanismen van onze aarde zien. “Dankzij de studie krijgen we een beter begrip van de ingewikkelde processen die plaatsvinden in deze complexe permafrost-gebieden,” zegt Patzner. “Dit is van fundamenteel belang om de snelheden van broeikasgasemissies zoals kooldioxide en methaan te bepalen, wat nodig is om betere voorspellingen te doen over klimaatverandering.” Het betekent bovendien dat de kans groot is dat we onze huidige klimaatmodellen moeten herzien. En dat door hele kleine microben die ver onder onze voeten, zich hongerig te goed doen aan hun omgeving.
Asteroïdenstof gevonden in inslagkrater die einde dinosaurussen betekende
Asteroïdenstof gevonden in inslagkrater die einde dinosaurussen betekende
Nieuw onderzoek levert bewijs dat het uitsterven van de dinosauriërs linkt aan de inslag van een asteroïde 66 miljoen jaar geleden. De wetenschappers vonden voor het eerst aanwijzingen van stofresten van een asteroïde in de Chicxulub-inslagkrater in Mexico.
Zesenzestig miljoen jaar geleden vond een catastrofale massa-extinctie plaats die het leven op onze planeet volledig veranderde. De dinosauriërs verdwenen van het aardoppervlak, samen met vele andere soorten en families, waaronder de ammonieten en de mosasauriërs. De eerste aanwijzing om dit plotse en wereldwijde uitsterven van het leven beter te begrijpen werd gevonden in sedimentlagen bij Gubbio in Italië en Caravaca in Spanje, waar een zeer dunne kleilaag de grens vormt tussen de tijdperken van het Krijt en het Paleogeen.
In het begin van de jaren tachtig vonden wetenschappers in deze kleilaag opmerkelijk hoge concentraties van iridium, een zeldzaam metaal dat in hoge concentraties voorkomt in meteorieten maar in zeer lage concentraties in de aardkorst. Deze kleilaag zou gevormd zijn uit stof dat was ontstaan na de inslag en verdamping van een asteroïde met een diameter van ongeveer twaalf kilometer. Deze ontdekking werd later bevestigd door de ontdekking van de 180 tot 200 kilometer grote Chicxulub inslagkrater, die onder het oppervlak van het schiereiland Yucatán in México begraven ligt.
Nu, meer dan 40 jaar later, hebben wetenschappers het laatste stukje bewijs ontdekt dat de wereldwijde massa-extinctie met de asteroïde-inslag in verband brengt. Een internationaal team van onderzoekers onder leiding van wetenschappers van de Vrije Universiteit Brussel heeft de globale asteroïde stoflaag getraceerd tot binnen de Chicxulub inslagkrater in Mexico. 'De cirkel is nu eindelijk rond', zegt Steven Goderis, docent geochemie aan de Vrije Universiteit Brussel en hoofdauteur van de studie.
Lift boat L/B Myrtle die gebruikt werd om de Chicxulub krater in de Golf van Mexico aan te boren. Foto credit: UTexas
In mei 2016 werd een ring van heuvels die het centrum van de Chicxulubkrater in Mexico omringt, een zogenaamde piekring, aangeboord door een wetenschapsteam van het International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) en het International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) Expeditie 364. Ongeveer 835 meter gesteente werd naar de oppervlakte gebracht, die een enorme hoeveelheid nieuwe informatie heeft opgeleverd over de processen die zich in het kratergebied hebben afgespeeld tijdens en vlak na de inslag van de asteroïde.
De boorkern heeft ook zeer gedetailleerd het tijdsinterval vastgelegd waarin de krater overging van een dynamische omgeving met terugkerend oceaanwater en tsunamigolven naar veel rustigere omstandigheden. Op basis van een uitgebreide geochemische analyse van dit deel van de boorkern werden de hoogste concentraties iridium gevonden in een kleirijk interval in sedimenten die de kraterpiekring bedekken, net onder kalksteen uit het vroegste Paleogeen.
Boorkernen van drie sectie van de inslagkrater naast elkaar geplaats. Foto credit: The University of Texas at Austin
'Iridium is een element dat in deze context vrij moeilijk te meten is vanwege de lage concentraties. Daarom hebben we de resultaten van vier onafhankelijke laboratoria over de hele wereld gecombineerd om er zeker van te zijn dat we dit juist hebben', verduidelijkt Steven Goderis. De iridiumconcentraties die in de boorkern werden gemeten, komen overeen met de concentraties die eerder werden gemeten op plaatsen rond de Golf van Mexico. 'Het is heel opmerkelijk dat we zulke hoge concentraties hebben gevonden in de inslagkrater zelf. In de eerste uren tot maanden na de inslag was de krater een zeer turbulente omgeving die werd beïnvloed door tsunami's, oscillerende golven en aardbevingen. Bovendien zijn hydrothermale vloeistoffen die van dieper in de krater naar het oppervlakte kwamen ook door de iridiumlaag heen gegaan, maar hebben deze niet wezenlijk veranderd. Gelukkig is de iridiumlaag bewaard gebleven, mede dankzij de unieke positie van de boorkern in een depressie op de verhoogde piekring. Na enkele jaren in de atmosfeer rond de aarde te hebben gecirkeld, kan de afzetting van dit iridiumrijke stof tot een paar decennia na de inslag hebben geduurd', vat Goderis samen.
Het behoud van de iridiumlaag in de krater is werkelijk fantastisch, het vormt het onweerlegbare bewijs dat de inslag en de uitsterving nauw met elkaar verbonden zijnPhilippe Claeys, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
De atmosferische neerslag van dit asteroïdestof legt dus belangrijke tijdslimieten op aan de afzetting van het kratergesteente net onder deze iridiumlaag. 'Dit deel van de krater keerde terug naar een relatief laag-energetische omgeving in een veel kortere tijd dan eerder verwacht. Samen met andere tijdsindicaties, zoals microfossielen en helium-3 concentraties, geeft de iridiumlaag de timing weer van het herstel van leven gedurende de jaren tot millennia na de inslag, wat duidt op een zeer complexe biologische reactie op de snel veranderende omgeving op ‘ground zero’', aldus Sean Gulick, onderzoeksprofessor aan de Universiteit van Texas in Austin en mede-hoofdwetenschapper van de boorexpeditie. De boorkern van IODP-ICDP Expeditie 364 bevat dus een uitzonderlijk gedetailleerd verslag van de processen die gepaard gingen met de vorming van de Chicxulub-krater en het herstel van het leven.
Snelle neerdaling inslagmateriaal
De ontdekking van zo'n goed gedefinieerde iridium anomalie in de Chicxulub krater zal ongetwijfeld ook het onderzoek naar de Krijt-Paleogeen massa-extinctie nieuw leven inblazen. 'Met deze ontdekking zijn we beter dan ooit in staat om precieze tijdslimieten te stellen aan de producten die als gevolg van de asteroïde-inslag zijn gevormd. In de krater zien we een 130 meter dikke stapel van gesmolten, gebroken en fijnkorrelig gesteente dat waarschijnlijk in minder dan twintig jaar is afgezet, waarbij het grootste deel zelfs in de eerste dag is afgezet, wat verbluffend snel is. Op veel verschillende plaatsen in de wereld wordt dit tijdsinterval van twintig jaar vertegenwoordigd door een veel dunnere gesteentelaag, die bestaat uit geschokt, gesmolten en gecondenseerd materiaal dat uit de krater werd geslingerd. Door deze verschillende locaties te vergelijken, zullen we de precieze mechanismen beter begrijpen die verband houden met de Chicxulub-inslag die leidde tot het wereldwijde massa-uitsterven', legt Pim Kaskes uit, een FWO-doctoraatsstudent aan de Vrije Universiteit Brussel die werkt op de boorkern. 'Het behoud van de iridiumlaag in de krater is werkelijk fantastisch, het vormt het onweerlegbare bewijs dat de inslag en de uitsterving nauw met elkaar verbonden zijn', besluit Philippe Claeys, gewoon hoogleraar geologie aan de Vrije Universiteit Brussel en al 30 jaar veteraan op het gebied van Krijt-Paleogeen onderzoek.
Apophis definitely won't hit Earth this month, but scientists are pretending it might.
An animation shows Apophis' 2029 path compared to the swarm of satellites orbiting Earth.
(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Earth's most recent brush with asteroid danger was eight years ago, when a space rock the size of a six-story building came seemingly out of nowhere, injuring 1,200 people when it exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia.
Now, scientists are using this month's flyby of the infamous asteroid Apophis to test their responses to potentially hazardous space rocks, honing the fine art of planetary defense. Planetary defense focuses on identifying asteroids and comets that hang out around Earth, mapping their precise paths and seeing how their orbits compare with Earth's.
If an orbital model shows that an asteroid and Earth are due to reach the same place at the same time, things get serious, particularly when the space rock is large. That's the sort of scenario that ended the dinosaurs' reign, after all. But planetary defense isn't hopeless: if humans identify a dangerous asteroid long enough before impact, we could theoretically do something to divert it.
Successfully preventing damage from an asteroid impact will depend on spotting the threat in time, which takes practice. But although scientists have identified more than 25,000 near-Earth asteroids to date, the majority are too small to cause much worry. So while there are plenty of asteroids rattling around Earth's orbit, most aren't big enough or close enough to trigger realistic existential angst.
Apophis came to its fame because it isn't like most of these near-Earth space rocks. When scientists discovered it in 2004, it stood out right away. First, it is relatively large — more than 1,000 feet (300 meters) wide, around the height of the Eiffel Tower, according to NASA. And models based on early observations suggested a nearly 3% chance Apophis would collide with Earth on April 13, 2029.
More precise observations soon put the fear of impact that year to rest, but the early concern surrounding the asteroid prompted its name, which references an Egyptian "demon serpent who personified evil and chaos," as NASA put it. Right now, scientists are confident that Apophis is no threat to Earth for at least a few decades. But the space rock will still come visiting next month, offering scientists valuable opportunities to get a close look at a relatively large asteroid.
And, with a little imagination, these flybys can also serve as planetary defense rehearsals.
"The goal is to basically wrangle all the scientists from around the world, kind of the coalition of the willing," Vishnu Reddy, a planetary defense expert at the University of Arizona who is coordinating the project, told Space.com. "Then we go on this months-long campaign, trying to observe this object."
Apophis will fly past Earth on March 5. The asteroid will remain about one-tenth the average Earth-sun distance away — a downright mundane flyby compared to the 2029 event, when Apophis will pass by at about the altitude at which particularly high satellites orbit.
To mark this year's flyby, the International Asteroid Warning Network instituted its third such campaign. Previously, scientists have practiced on an asteroid called 2012 TC4 and on 1999 KW4, which is a pair of rocks circling each other. For Apophis, about 40 scientists from 13 different countries have signed on. These observers are pretending that Apophis has never been seen before, which means they are starting from scratch in terms of evaluating how much danger the asteroid poses to Earth.
"It's not a scientific goal," Reddy said. "The goal is to get new observations as if we don't know anything about this object and try and see where in the process we need to improve efficiency and also identify the human factor. Anybody dealing with scientists knows that it's like herding cats, and when you do that on an international scale, there's part diplomacy, part science, and part planetary defense."
Reddy said that the coincidence of the Apophis flyby occurring during the continuing COVID-19 pandemic offered an opportunity to understand how resilient the asteroid detection system is. At this point, most telescopes are managing to continue operating, although he said the pandemic likely would have interfered much more had the flyby occurred a year earlier, when institutions were still scrambling to respond.
"There's a reasonable amount of redundancy in planetary defense," he said. "Even if one telescope goes down or we lose a certain thing, it's not like the whole community goes down, to some extent."
A "discovery" moment
Campaign members first definitively identified Apophis around Dec. 19, thanks to a space-based instrument called NEOWISE. After the spacecraft, originally an astrophysics mission, lost the ability to keep itself cool, scientists reinvented it to identify new asteroids.
That the first discovery credit went to NEOWISE was unusual, however. These days, most new asteroids are discovered by ground-based surveys, particularly the Pan-STARRS telescopes in Hawaii and the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona.
But Apophis was tricky for Earth-based telescopes to discover this time around, Reddy said. "The challenge was that its motion and the way it was moving, it was hard to do it with short observing arcs," he said. NEOWISE is never pulled away from a target by the Earth's rotation, and since it studies infrared light, it can observe during day and night alike.
"NEOWISE got it first, and that's because of where we look in the sky and the wavelengths that we use to search for it," Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and principal investigator for NEOWISE, told Space.com. "To get to, quote-unquote, discover Apophis was really fun."
There's a perk to spotting a new asteroid with NEOWISE: The instrument can quickly determine the size of a space rock. Telescopes that identify asteroids using optical light have trouble distinguishing between larger dark rocks and smaller light rocks; NEOWISE's infrared sight eliminates that confusion.
And for this "discovery" of Apophis, the initial optical appearance turned out to be more menacing than NEOWISE's calculated diameter. "You can quickly tell if it's going to be a global catastrophe or just regional because you can get the size quickly," Mainzer said. "It makes an orders of magnitude difference in the prediction of hazard."
While a newly discovered asteroid may initially sport a slight chance of impact, additional observations typically whittle that chance to nothing. "For Apophis, if you start afresh, assuming that we don't know anything about it and we just discovered it with NEOWISE and we're following it up, there is a reasonable impact risk from Apophis," Reddy said.
It's worth emphasizing that "reasonable impact risk" appears only in the scenario they're practicing, not in the reality of scientists' full knowledge of the asteroid. "Of course, if you include the historical observations, it goes away, because we know its orbit very well, it's not going to hit us," Reddy said.
Good news for humans, but that disappearing impact risk isn't helpful to the practice session. "That's not what we're looking for, we want to see what are the effects on the ground," Reddy said. So at some point, the campaign will part with reality, and, in the safe confines of computer models, scientists will nudge Apophis toward Earth.
Altering the asteroid's trajectory lets planetary defense specialists practice each stage of the asteroid response process, the point, after all, of the campaign.
Continuing observations
Apophis has become much easier to observe since its "discovery"; by now, Reddy said, amateur astronomers can spot it with a decent backyard telescope, and he looks forward to including them in the project.
Meanwhile, for scientists, the initial hustle of "discovery" has calmed somewhat. "There's a huge flurry of activity, and then there's not a whole lot in the middle for five or six weeks," Reddy said. The team, ignoring old data about Apophis, already has much of the information a planetary defense expert would want, data that helps scientists determine an object's shape or composition.
"The key event after this point, I think, is the radar observations," he said; these observations should begin March 3. Planetary radar observations, which bounce a beam of radio waves off an object then catch the echo, are the most powerful tool scientists have to study the precise shape and location of an asteroid.
But NEOWISE isn't done with Apophis either, Mainzer said. Although the instrument moved onto other work after the "discovery," the asteroid will be back in the NEOWISE field of view after its close approach. "We're almost certain to detect it again in April," she said.
That will be another valuable science opportunity. "If we see it in December, we look at it from one direction; when we get it in April, we're probably going to see from a different direction, right?" Mainzer said. By seeing Apophis multiple times at different angles, scientists may be able to get a glimpse of the space rock's surface.
"We can combine that information to hopefully pull out some details, I'm hoping we can get some details of the surface roughness, the thickness of any rocks and dust on the surface of the object," Mainzer said. "It may help us learn quite a bit more about it, if we're very lucky."
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
It was part of a space rock that created a dramatic fireball over Uppsala.
A 30-pound chunk of iron meteorite found in Uppsala, Sweden.
(Image credit: Andreas Forsberg/Anders Zetterqvist.)
A half-melted hunk of iron-rich rock found in Uppsala, Sweden, is part of a meteorite that fell there in November 2020.
The lumpy meteorite is about the size of a loaf of bread and weighs around 31 pounds (14 kilograms), according to the Swedish Museum of Natural History. It was once part of a larger space rock, probably weighing more than 9 tons (8.1 metric tons), that created a dramatic fireball over Uppsala on Nov. 7.
After that impact, scientists at the Swedish Museum of Natural History calculated the likely landing site and found some small fragments of iron meteorite near the village of Ådalen, according to a museum statement. The fragments were only about 0.1 inches (3 millimeters) long, but the investigation also turned up a boulder and a tree root that had clearly been hit by something heavy.
Geologists Andreas Forsberg and Anders Zetterqvist hold the meteorite they discovered, which fell over Sweden on Nov. 7, 2020. (Image credit: Andreas Forsberg/Anders Zetterqvist)
Stockholm geologists Andreas Forsberg and Anders Zetterqvist headed back to the site and found a much larger piece — likely the one that smashed the boulder. The piece was about 230 feet (70 meters) from the area where the fragments were found, partially buried in moss. One side is flattened and cracked, likely from the collision, and the meteorite is pockmarked with circular depressions. These depressions are common in iron meteorites, according to the museum, and they form when the space rock partially melts during its passage through the atmosphere.
"It is the first sure example of a newly fallen iron meteorite in our country," Swedish Museum of Natural History curator Dan Holtstam said in a statement. It's also the first time that any meteorite fragments linked to an observed fireball have been recovered in Sweden for 66 years.
"Since we now know that it is an iron meteorite, it is possible to fine-tune the simulations of the meteorite fall, University of Uppsala astronomer Eric Stempels said in the statement. "It is very likely that the meteorite that has now been found is the largest existing piece after the originally about 9-ton-heavy space rock. Some smaller pieces are probably left in the area."
Iron meteorites are the second-most common kind of meteorite that land on Earth, after stony meteorites. They originate in the cores of planets and asteroids, which means they can hold clues to the formation of the solar system.
The sky crane was the crazy idea that actually worked. (Credit: NASA/JPL)
Prior to the rover Curiosity, rovers were either reaching the surface of Mars via rocket-controlled landers or merrily bouncing their way along the surface nestled in airbags. However, the creation of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), later named Curiosity, presented a dilemma for engineers. How do you get a one-ton rover the size of a Volkswagen down safely?
While previously rovers utilized landers in which they would drive off, the new car-sized Curiosity presented a problem. Landers need ramps and larger rovers need larger ramps. Additionally, ramps can be one of an engineer’s worse nightmares. Since the first successful rover, Sojourner, landed on Mars in 1997, engineers have always been scared that a multi-billion dollar project could get to a planet some 40,000 miles away from Earth, only to have the rover snag a part on the lander ramp, essentially becoming a lander itself on top of another lander, rendering them both basically useless.
(Note: The microwave-sized Sojourner was not technically the first rover on Martian soil. That distinction belongs to the Russians’ Prop-M rover which was tethered to their Mars 2 and 3 landers. Since Mars 2 pancaked itself into the surface and Mars 3 lost communications with Earth because of a sand storm, neither rover was actually deployed).
Second problem: These larger landers and larger ramps would need more room. On a planet where the main inhabitants are rocks (and lots of them), finding clearance would be a big thorn in the side of those in charge of finding a place to land. Not only that, but the good science comes when you get near the rocky stuff, which would be hard if you had to park in lot BFE.
Third problem: Putting rockets on the bottom of a rover like it was done in earlier landers like Viking creates a stability problem. In the book “Curiosity” by Rod Pyle, he likens it to “balancing a bowling ball on a broomstick.”
This is one reason why Spirit and Opportunity utilized the airbag system. The airbag system is pretty much how it sounds. Prior to the rover landing on the ground, airbags would inflate bouncing them to land where they may. This was never a viable option for the much larger Curiosity rover. Airbags can only handle so much weight and 2,000 pounds went far beyond those limits. Also, airbags also create just another thing to get the rover caught on.
So a new landing system was needed. As Curiosity’s Chief Engineer, Rob Manning, told Pyle in his book, “We were thinking out of the box. In fact, we threw away the box. We were literally going through all possible ways to land this machine, trying to imagine every possible configuration, whether it made sense or not.”
When Manning and his team first conceived the idea, it didn’t exactly have a warm reception. After all, Curiosity would be coming on the heals of two high-profile failures by NASA with the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter missions of the “better, faster, cheaper” era of the space program. (In 2004, the Harvard Review actually published a report using this NASA method as the way NOT to do business).
So the idea was tabled…but not for long.
After time devising other strategies, it always ended up coming back to the sky crane. As harrowing as it sounded, it was also one of the best options to deliver the rover to the best destination.
The Sky Crane
Think of the sky crane portion of the descent stage as a kind of jetpack with eight engines which safely lowered the rover to the ground. The sky crane slows the robot down until it hovers over the surface, then slowly winches the rover down with nylon cords.
If you’ve ever seen heavy-lift Sikorsky Skycrane helicopters with cargo dangling beneath via cables, that’s the essence of the sky crane. In fact, the engineers who first devised the idea actually met with pilots and engineers of that bird for guidance. Unfortunately, due to the gravity differences between Mars and Earth, there wasn’t a real way to test the landing system. Yes, it was a do-or-die operation where the only real test HAD to work.
“We talked about it to no end. If this didn’t go right, there would be nowhere to hide because every joe six-pack on the street would be saying that they knew it wouldn’t work,” Adam Steltzner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, chief engineer for the Perseverance rover, told Astronomy. Stelzner’s team originally thought up the sky crane idea for Curiosity.
If all goes right, and the rover makes it safely to the ground, pyrotechnically activated blades cut the cords connecting it to the descent stage. The descent stage then flies off to make its own uncontrolled landing on the surface of the Martian surface a safe distance away from the rover.
Before it hits Martian soil, the rovers have to go through six phases of EDL (Credit: NASA/JPL)
Prior to all of that though, the machine has to make it through the atmosphere. The intense period called the entry, descent and landing (EDL) phase of the mission begins when the spacecraft reaches the top of the Martian atmosphere, traveling at about 13,200 miles per hour (5,900 meters per second). EDL ends about seven minutes later (known as the Seven Minutes of Terror) with the rover stationary on the surface. From just before jettison of the cruise stage 10 minutes before the craft hits the atmosphere, to the cutting of the sky crane bridle, the spacecraft goes through six different vehicle configurations and fires 76 pyrotechnic devices, such as releases for parts to be separated or deployed.
The parachute, which is 51 feet (almost 16 meters) in diameter, deploys about 254 seconds after entry, at an altitude of about 7 miles (11 kilometers) and a velocity of about 940 miles per hour (about 405 meters per second). About 24 more seconds after parachute deployment, the heat shield separates and drops away when the spacecraft is at an altitude of about 5 miles (about 8 kilometers), traveling at a velocity of about 280 miles per hour (125 meters per second).
As the heat shield separates, the Mars Descent Imager begins recording video, looking in the direction the spacecraft is flying. The imager records continuously from then through the landing. The rover, with its descent-stage “rocket backpack,” is still attached to the back shell on the parachute.
The back shell, with a parachute attached, separates from the descent stage and rover about 85 seconds after heat shield separation. At this point, the spacecraft is about 1.3 miles (2.1 kilometers) above the ground and rushing toward it at about 190 miles per hour (about 80 meters per second), 6,900 feet (2,100 meters) above the ground.
All eight throttleable liquid-fueled retrorockets on the descent stage, called Mars landing engines, would then begin firing for the powered descent phase. The rover’s wheels and suspension system, which double as the landing gear, pop into place just before touchdown. The bridle is fully spooled out as the spacecraft continues to descend, so touchdown occurs at the brisk walking speed of about 1.7 miles per hour (0.75 meters per second). When the spacecraft sensed the rover has touched down, those pyrotechnically-fired blades release the cords, and the descent stage can then fly away before impacting on the surface of Mars far away from the rover.
A notable difference between Perseverance’s EDL and Curiosity’s is the Lander Vision System (LVS). While Curiosity used radar to determine the distance to the ground, Perseverance utilized a whole new type of technology.
The LVS’s job determined the rover’s position, handling different possible terrain conditions, within an accuracy of about 130 feet (40 meters) in less than 10 seconds. It contains a downward-facing camera that took multiple images of the ground and an onboard computer – the Vision Compute Element (VCE) — which processed these images and spit out acceptable landing locations. After the camera powered on, the LVS used an initial five seconds to take three images and process them to calculate a rough position relative to the Martian surface. Then, using that initial location solution, it took additional images, processing them every second, deriving locations on a finer scale. The VCE sent a stream of these location calculations to the main rover brain, the Rover Compute Element.
Now what started as a hair-brained idea is seeming to becoming the norm for NASA.
“If you’re landing a rover on Mars, there’s no doubt this is the right way,” said Steltzner. “(For Curiosity) we certainly had questions about whether this really was a crazy thing to try to do. Had we missed a big thing? Was it totally wrong? Did all the pieces actually come together and work? We answered those questions.”
SPACEX’S HISTORIC ALL-CIVILIAN FLIGHT HAS JUST TWO SPOTS LEFT: HOW TO JOIN
SPACEX’S HISTORIC ALL-CIVILIAN FLIGHT HAS JUST TWO SPOTS LEFT: HOW TO JOIN
SpaceX wants you.
SPACEX WANTS TO PUT FOURprivate citizens into space, and two seats are up for grabs.
The "Inspiration4" mission, expected to launch no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2021, will be the world's first all-civilian spaceflight. The mission will send a Crew Dragon capsule whizzing around the Earth for three or four days.
On Monday, February 22, the group behind the mission announced that Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude's Children Research Hospital and a bone cancer survivor, would join the mission. She will be joined by Jared Isaacman, the founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments.
The final two passengers will be decided via a competition, and will be announced in March, according to reports.
The ad for "Inspiration4" played during one of the many commercial breaks during the Super Bowl LV game. In the ad, SpaceX explained how "You could be on board" (yes, you) the world's first all-civilian mission to space. All you have to do is win.
Watch the full ad below:
The ad was directed by Bryce Dallas Howard and narrated by Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer. The music is Celeste's version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."
The ad for this once-in-a-lifetime competition follows hot on the heels of the mission's announcement by SpaceX on February 1. Now, Elon Musk's firm has put the word out at the annual sporting event, which last year received 99.9 million viewers. That is a lot of competition, so here's everything you need to know in case you missed the clip or just need a recap:
Inspiration4, as the video reveals, is set to take off no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2021 — so between September and December of 2021.
Inspiration4 and its civilian crew will launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The capsule will spend between three and four days orbiting the Earth. The capsule will circumnavigate the globe once every 90 minutes. Then, it will return to Earth by landing in the water off the coast of Florida.
Ahead of the flight, SpaceX will train the crew on how to use the rocket, the capsule, orbital mechanics, zero gravity, emergency preparedness, and other mission simulations.
The mission has two passengers chosen already: 37-year-old Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments. Isaacman bought all four seats on the journey. One of the seats was reserved for someone with ties to St Jude's Children's Research Hospital — now confirmed as Arceneaux.
The other two are still free — and, as the ad explains, you can win one of them.
Soon you could board a SpaceX Crew Dragon rocket to space.PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images
The Super Bowl clip is a sign of the emergent new era of spaceflight, when space is more accessible than ever before. SpaceX has worked to reduce the cost of spaceflight by landing its Falcon 9 boosters after missions, saving around three-quarters of the cost of the entire mission. With reusability, so the argument goes, comes greater democratization of what has been the preserve of well-funded government agencies.
The four-seater Crew Dragon is also helping to open up spaceflight to more players. The capsule was first developed to help NASA send astronauts to the International Space Station. The capsule completed its first crewed mission in May 2020 and its first non-test crewed mission in November 2020.
Beyond sending astronauts from NASA and other agencies into space, SpaceX also plans a series of private commercial flights:
The Inspiration4 mission, set to take place no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2020.
The Axiom Space AX-1 mission, taking place no earlier than January 2022. Last month, Axiom Spaceannounced the four passengers for the trip.
The Space Adventures mission, announced in February 2020, taking place sometime from late 2021 to mid-2022.
INSPIRATION4 MISSION: HOW TO JOIN THE PRIVATE SPACEFLIGHT
Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 payments, is the first member of this mission. He is also a jet pilot who holds world records, including two speed-around-the-world records. Isaacman has also flown in over 100 airshows.
Could you join Jared Isaacman on the historic Inspiration4 flight?PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images
The other three passengers have codenames: Hope, Generosity, and Prosperity.
"Hope" is Arceneax, who was confirmed on the flight on Monday. Arceneaux is a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which is located in Memphis, Tennessee. At 10-years-old, Arceneaux was diagnosed by the hospital with osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer. She received prosthetic leg bones during her treatment, which would have previously restricted her from becoming an astronaut.
Arceneaux's trip will make records: She will be the youngest American to orbit in space, and the first bone cancer survivor to go to space, too.
"I think this mission is going to inspire people in so many ways," Arceneaux told the BBC. "It shows them that anything is possible."
That leaves "Generosity" and "Prosperity" — and both are open to competition.
Could this be you?Inspiration4 screenshot
"Generosity" is one of the seats available to win. This seat on the spacecraft will go to a member of the public who supports St. Jude's via donation. Members of the public can enter by donating $10 or more to the research hospital, with 10 chances to win for every dollar donated.
There is a limit of 10,000 entries per person, no matter how you enter, however.
There are also a series of limitations on who can enter this competition. Entrants must be at least 18 years old and live in the United States. If you can't donate, then you can also enter without donating, as many times as they like up to 10,000, by filling in a form.
Seat number four is dubbed "Prosperity." This seat is reserved for "an inspirational entrepreneur" who has used the Shift4Shop e-commerce platform to launch an online business. You can sign up to the platform via the Inspiration4 mission website, thereby entering the raffle-style competition.
The competition for "Generosity" will end on February 28. The fourth seat will also be announced at that time.
All four passengers will be announced by March 2021, meaning the lucky winners should find out soon whether they will be going. Will it be you?
Vénus : Une photo inédite de la planète dévoilée par la Nasa
Vénus : Une photo inédite de la planète dévoilée par la Nasa
ESPACE La photo laisse apparaître un phénomène lumineux entourant Vénus ainsi qu’une de ses terres hautes
La planète Vénus (illustration). — JAXA
La Nasa a publié, ce jeudi, sur Instagram une photo de Vénus prise en juillet 2020 par lasonde spatiale solaire Parker. L’engin avait été lancé en août 2018 pour « éclaircir les mystères de l’atmosphère du Soleil », a expliqué l’agence américaine sur son site.
Pour cela, la sonde va survoler Vénus sept fois en sept ans, utilisant la gravité de la planète pour se rapprocher de notre étoile principale. L’image montre des détails inédits, indique RTL. Les astronomes de la Nasa ont annoté le cliché afin de mettre en avant les éléments notables qui y apparaissent.
Des détails inédits
Les spécialistes ont estimé que l’aura plus claire que l’espace qui entoure la planète est un phénomène lumineux causé par des atomes d’oxygène. Ces derniers se trouvent à une altitude importante et se réunissent à nouveau pour former des molécules dans l’ombre de Vénus.
L’image capturée par la Parker laisse également voir une tache foncée recouvrant une partie de la surface de la planète. Il s’agit d’Aphrodite Terra, la plus vaste haute terre de Vénus. La température qui y règne est plus basse que celle des régions qui l’entourent, causant la différence de couleur visible sur la photo.
A terme, la sonde Parker s’approchera du Soleil à un peu plus de six millions de kilomètres de distance, soit sept fois plus près que tout autre engin avant elle. A titre de comparaison, la distance moyenne séparant la Terre du Soleil est de 150 millions de kilomètres.
TOP SECRET SERIES: Plumed Serpents, Giants, and Human Sacrifice
TOP SECRET SERIES: Plumed Serpents, Giants, and Human Sacrifice
We believe some of the immortals—the created gods of Psalm 82 and their counterparts—migrated to North and South America to accept worship. Stephen Quayle wrote:
It is evident that fallen angels and giants, as well as their offspring and demons ruled over many of the Native American populations in the New World. Additionally it seems likely that the serpents that would be worshipped throughout the Americas were either fallen angels taking the form of snakes, or the offspring of fallen angels who mated with animals.[i]
In order to “connect the dots,” we begin with the Israelites’ formative period in Egypt, noting that, unlike the other Egyptian gods, “the reverence paid to the snake was not merely local or even limited to one period of history, but it prevailed alike in every district of the Pharaohian empire and has left its indelible impress upon the architecture and archeology of both Upper and Lower Egypt.”[ii] For example, consider the Egyptian four-winged, divine serpent, Chnuphis.[iii]
From there, the ancient Israelites moved to Canaan, where they encountered tales of the Leviathan, a dragon described as “the twisting serpent, the close–coiling one with seven heads,” by the Canaanites (KTU[iv] 1.5:1:1)[v] and appears six times in five verses of the Hebrew Bible (Job 3:8 and 41:1; Psalm 74:13–14 and 104:26; and Isaiah 27:1). According to Christoph Uehlinger, a religious studies professor at the University of Zurich, it’s likely that Leviathan was assimilated by the Egyptians as “Apophis, a huge serpent who during the night tries to hinder the sun-god’s travel through the netherworld.”[vi] According to 1 Enoch, Leviathan is a female dragon located at the bottom of the sea and Behemoth is a male dragon living in the desert.
And on that day were two monsters parted, a female monster named Leviathan, to dwell in the abysses of the ocean over the fountains of the waters. But the male is named Behemoth, who occupied with his breast a waste wilderness named Dûidâin, on the east of the garden where the elect and righteous dwell, where my grandfather was taken up, the seventh from Adam, the first man whom the Lord of Spirits created. (Enoch 60:7–8)
This beastly bifurcation is also mentioned in the apocryphal text 4 Ezra 6:49–52. If one accepts the ancient tradition, Leviathan still lurks in the deep, plotting to destroy the world:
And I saw there the sea and its islands, and its animals and its fishes, and Leviathan and his spouse, and his lair, and his dens, and the world which lies upon him, and his motions and the destruction of the world because of him. (Apocalypse of Abraham 21:4)[vii]
Leviathan is eschatologically connected to the “Day of the Lord,” because Isaiah prophesied:
In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, Even leviathan that crooked serpent; And he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea. (Isaiah 27:1)
We suspect that Leviathan is a real reptilian entity, a highly intelligent, immortal, divine creation in chaotic rebellion. When the underworld portal is opened, this sea serpent will briefly visit untold horror on the earth, only to face judgment when facing “the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven” (Matthew 26:64).
The Behemoth depicted by Job 40:15–24 (10–19) is also best understood as a preternatural creature possessing supernatural characteristics.[viii] While connections to other ancient Near-Eastern dragons have been suggested, Behemoth seems to be a distinct entity paired with Leviathan. This dragon might very well manifest from the earth when the portal to the abyss is opened (Revelation 9:1). However, you might be surprised to learn that not all flying serpents in Scripture are fallen.
Although many Christians probably recoil at the thought that God created serpentine divine beings, as we demonstrated in chapter 1 (“What Is This All About?”), Scripture does support the notion. It is also telling how the Watchers were described in explicitly reptilian terms[ix] by the ancient Hebrews, lending support to the idea that fallen ones may have matched the depiction of human sacrifice-demanding “fiery serpents” whose characteristics are partly human in appearance. With a proper understanding of the biblical Seraphim and Watchers, the Mesoamerican connection no longer seems so fanciful. The plumed serpent gods of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans share the same basic description as the biblical flying serpentine humanoids.
Early Mesoamericans who worshiped the feathered serpent included the Olmec, Mixtec, Zapotec, Toltec, and Aztec. As early as Olmec times (1400 BC), the feathered or plumed serpent is depicted throughout North, Middle, and South America. For example, the late Olmec or Toltec culture known as Teotihuacan prominently displayed the serpentine god on the sides of the pyramid located at the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.
The archaeological record shows that after the fall of Teotihuacan, the cult of the serpent spread to Xochicalco, Cacaxtla, and Cholula—the New World’s largest pyramid dedicated to Quetzalcoatl.[x]
The Incas of Peru, the Aztecs of Mexico, and the Mayas of Yucatan all worshipped similar winged serpent gods. The Inca referred to these rebel Seraphim as Amaru; the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl; and the Maya as Kukulkán. In Inca mythology, the amaru is a huge, double-headed, flying serpent that dwells underground.[xi] As a supernatural entity, the reptilian was believed to navigate portals between the netherworld of the dead to the natural world of the living.[xii] While many have connected descriptions of Quetzalcoatl as a bearded man with similar descriptions of Viracocha, the latter is not represented as a winged, serpentine-human hybrid. However, in remarkable accord with Quetzalcoatl, the title Amaru Tupa was an honorific title denoting royalty.[xiii] In fact, the Incan creator god Viracocha adopted “a stone image of an amaru”[xiv] as his huauque, the “man-made double”[xv] representing the living king during his lifetime.
Quetzalcoatl is the Aztec name for the feathered-serpent deity and is one of the main gods of Mexico and northern Central America. In the Aztec civilization of central Mexico, the worship of Quetzalcoatl was ubiquitous. He was the flying reptile deity who reportedly said, “If ever my subjects were to see me, they would run away!”[xvi] His winged reptilian adversary, Tezcatlipoca, was generally considered more powerful, as the god of night, sorcery, and destiny. During the twenty-day month of Toxcatl, a young man dressed up as Tezcatlipoca would be sacrificed.[xvii] Lesser known is that, like the Watcher angels in Genesis 6, Aztec tradition holds that their plumed serpent gods also created giants who were later destroyed in a worldwide flood:
According to Aztec myth, during the first age, or Sun, the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca created a race of giants from ashes, giving them acorns for nourishment. But the giants so enraged the gods due to their wickedness that the gods decided to end the giants’ existence and sent the jaguars to destroy them. Only seven survived the onslaught of the savage beasts. Later, when the gods summoned forth the waters to flood the Earth and destroy the first race of humans, these seven giants, the Xelhua, climbed the mountains to seek refuge from the thrashing waters that were enveloping the planet. Five of the giants survived the torrent, and in the end they built the great tower of Cholula to commemorate their survival of the flood.[xviii]
The Incans similarly believed that Viracocha’s first creation was a race of wicked giants that he destroyed in a deluge.[xix] While it is usually held that all of the Nephilim were drowned in the Flood, there are similar Jewish traditions of one giant’s survival, King Og of Bashan.[xx] A tradition of his survival is preserved in the Talmud.[xxi] Whether one accepts this ancient rabbinic tradition or not, the obvious parallel to the Aztec account entailing a few surviving giants demands an explanation. We suggest both traditions reflect actual historical events. Even so, such high strangeness is not so summarily relegated to the past.
THOMAS HORN DESCRIBES A MYSTERIOUS MOUNTAIN WHERE A PORTAL IS SAID TO EXIST
The Maya hold that Kukulkan, represented as a feathered serpent, came from Heaven to earth. Accordingly, the quetzal bird representing Heaven was chosen as his totem, and the serpent represents earth. Winged serpent iconography features prominently at Chichén Itzá, El Tajín, and throughout the Maya region. As discussed in the chapter 3, the Mayan cosmology has led to significant theological error in the New Age movement and was the impetus for most of the failed 2012 ascension predictions. The cumulative case that these plumed serpent deities are real immortal entities, fallen “fiery flying serpents,” or former Seraphim explains all of the mythological data in terms consistent with biblical theology.
The heinous practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs,[xxii] Mayans,[xxiii] and Incans[xxiv] is well enough attested to be uncontroversial. Some indigenous scholars defend the old ways on the grounds that, according to their cosmology, the gods did the same for the people. Some stories suggest vampirism, a practice associated with the fallen ones and their Nephilim progenies.[xxv] For example, in a creation myth found in the Florentine Codex, Quetzalcoatl offers his blood to give life to humanity. There are several other myths in which Mesoamerican gods offer their blood.What distinguishes this from the blood of Jesus in Christian theology is that it was a one-time offering by a willing participant who subsequently rose from the dead. In contrast, the Mesoamericans offered even their own flesh-and-blood children in various forms of ritualistic human sacrifice—a brutal idolatry that was good news to nobody. Identifying these blood-thirsty serpents as fallen “sons of God,” who defiantly court worship from humans and encourage various forms of extravagant ethical deviance, seems morally warranted from the original source documents of Mesoamerican religions.
It is nearly self-explanatory as to how such concepts of flying serpents could have extended from Mesoamerica to Native American tribes and apocalyptic beliefs. For instance, the “Cherokee Rattlesnake Prophecies” were written down by members of the Cherokee tribe during 1811–1812. These prophecies are similar to Mesoamerican apocalyptic belief and share the idea that sometime following the year 2012, a flying plumed serpent with human-hybrid features would return during a time of when the earth and heavens are shaken.
A portion of the Rattlesnake Prophecy reads:
[Following] the year…2012 an alignment will take place both on the Cherokee calendar and in the heavens of the Rattlesnake Constellation.… It is the time of the double headed serpent stick. It is the time of the red of Orion and Jupiter against the white blue of Pleiades and Venus…the Cherokee Rattlesnake Constellation will take on a different configuration. The snake itself will remain, however; upon the Rattlesnake shall be added upon its head feathers, its eyes will open and glow, wings spring forth as a winged rattlesnake. It shall have hands and arms and in its hands shall be a bowl. The bowl will hold blood. Upon its tail of seven rattles shall be the glowing and movement of Pleiades. The Rattlesnake shall become a feathered rattlesnake or feathered serpent of Time/Untime.
While the Mayans and Cherokee await the return of their serpent deity, uninvited preternatural visitations are ongoing. According to Chulin Pop, a contemporary Mayan, preternatural giants are still visiting the Watcher’s sins on the native peoples in the jungle. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke, a professor at Montana State University, recorded his testimony:
They [seven-to-eight-foot giants] come from the stars in their big silver plates and they stay here sometimes only for a night; sometimes for a week or more. They take the women and make them have their babies. They have four fingers and no thumbs. Any man who tries to defend his women is sick for days. They have great powers. They make you hear words, but they never speak. They have weapons that make rocks and things disappear.
The transparent parallels between the ancient “sons of God,” who sinned “as Sodom and Gomorrah” by “giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh” (Jude 7), worldwide reports of alien abduction, and this contemporary Mayan’s account, suggests a complex interrelated phenomenon. As with the cultural rebellion against biblical morality, modern-day testimony reminiscent of the Watchers’ lustful deviance imply the days of Noah and Lord’s return are upon us (Matthew 24:37; Luke 16:26). Stephen Quayle suggested that Americans consider this little poem, “Quetzalcotal, are evil leaders in this land waiting for you to claim America again as Amaruca, the Land of the Serpent?”
This title—Amaruca—is, according to some people, the title from which “America” is taken. It is related to Mesoamerican history, serpent-worship, and giants, and according to Freemasonry, connects the founding of the United States and its Capital designers with “wisdom” derived from the fallen flying Seraph. Tom Horn explains in Zenith 2016:
The story begins long before the Spaniards arrived on this continent and was chronicled in the hieroglyphic characters (and repeated in oral history) of the sacred, indigenous Maya narrative called the Popol Vuh. Sometime between 1701 and 1703, a Dominican priest named Father Francisco Ximénez transcribed and translated the Mayan work into Spanish. Later his text was taken from Guatemala to Europe by Abbott Brasseur de Bourbough where it was translated into French. Today the Popol Vuh rests in Chicago’s Newberry Library, but what makes the script interesting is its creation narrative, history, and cosmology, especially as it relates to the worship of the great “feathered serpent” creator deity known as Q’uq’umatz; a god considered by scholars to be roughly equivalent to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and the Yucatec Mayan Kukulkan. According to Freemasons like Manly P. Hall, no other ancient work sets forth so completely the initiatory rituals of the great school of philosophic mystery, which was so central to America’s Baconian dream of the New Atlantis, than the Popol Vuh. What’s more, Hall says, it is in this region where we find the true origin of America’s name and destiny.
In The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Hall writes:
This volume [Popol Vuh] alone is sufficient to establish incontestably the philosophical excellence of the red race.
“The Red ‘Children of the Sun,’” writes James Morgan Pryse, “do not worship the One God. For them that One God is absolutely impersonal, and all the Forces emanated from that One God are personal. This is the exact reverse of the popular western conception of a personal God and impersonal working forces in nature. Decide for yourself which of these beliefs is the more philosophical [Hall says sarcastically]. These Children of the Sun adore the Plumèd Serpent, who is the messenger of the Sun. He was the God Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, Gucumatz in Quiché; and in Peru he was called Amaru. From the latter name comes our word America. Amaruca is, literally translated, ‘Land of the Plumèd Serpent.’ The priests of this [flying dragon], from their chief centre in the Cordilleras, once ruled both Americas. All the Red men who have remained true to the ancient religion are still under their sway. One of their strong centres was in Guatemala, and of their Order was the author of the book called Popol Vuh. In the Quiché tongue Gucumatz is the exact equivalent of Quetzalcoatl in the Nahuatl language; quetzal, the bird of Paradise; coatl, serpent—‘the Serpent veiled in plumes of the paradise-bird’!”
The Popol Vuh was discovered by Father Ximinez in the seventeenth century. It was translated into French by Brasseur de Bourbourg and published in 1861. The only complete English translation is that by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, which ran through the early files of The Word magazine and which is used as the basis of this article. A portion of the Popol Vuh was translated into English, with extremely valuable commentaries, by James Morgan Pryse, but unfortunately his translation was never completed. The second book of the Popol Vuh is largely devoted to the initiatory rituals of the Quiché nation. These ceremonials are of first importance to students of Masonic symbolism and mystical philosophy, since they establish beyond doubt the existence of ancient and divinely instituted Mystery schools on the American Continent. (emphasis added)
Thus from Hall we learn that Freemasons like him believe “ancient and divinely instituted” mystery religion important to students of Masonry came to Amaruca/America—the Land of the Plumèd Serpent—from knowledge that the Red Man received from the dragon himself. What Hall conceals is that, even to this day, in the secret societies, Lucifer is considered this benevolent serpent-god who has nothing more than the best intentions for man, while Jehovah is an evil entity who tries to keep mankind in the dark and punishes him if he seeks the truest wisdom. Since these ancient serpent legends include the Mesoamerican feathered serpent gods and can be looked upon as a historical testament of that Angel thrown down by God, “then perhaps The Land of the Plumèd Serpent may also be known as the Land of Lucifer,” concludes Ken Hudnall in The Occult Connection II: The Hidden Race.
Our weekly documentary film curated by the editorial team at 21WIRE.
From its beginning in the Second World War, rocket technology honed by Nazi Germany and then exfiltrated to the United States, thus providing the beginnings of the US space program. Just in time for the Cold War, with Washington and NASA locked into an epic competition with is geopolitical rival the Soviet Union. This independent documentary project compiles what is perhaps the most extensive and detailed vérité depictions of this groundbreaking phase of modern space exploration.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
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