EXCLUSIVE*Scientists demand the Shroud of Turin to be re-analyzed amid growing evidence it could be authentic

• READ MORE:  New blood analysis of the Shroud of Turin supports the Bible

By Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com

Scientists are calling for a new analysis of the Shroud of Turin amid a seemingly growing body of evidence that challenges the idea it's a fake.

There are also claims that bad data was used in a landmark 1988 UK study which found the shroud was a Medieval forgery and not the cloth Jesus was buried in.

A new review by researchers from France and Italy has revisited those 30-year-old findings and claims to have discovered discrepancies in the data which were not made public and raise doubts about the definitiveness of the results.

Tristan Casabianca, a French independent researcher, who made the find, told DailyMail.com that his findings do not confirm the shroud is older or the burial cloth used to lay Jesus to rest.

But Casabianca - who was an atheist until he began investigating the shroud 20 years ago - said those factors could not be ruled out 'without a re-analysis.' 

The research in question is a 1988 study that conducted radiocarbon dating on a piece of the shroud. Pictured are the sample containers that held strips of the cloth

Graphic designer Otangelo Grasso created a progression of what Jesus may have looked like based on the shroud image

The 1988 study used a technique known as carbon dating to determine the age of the controversial Shroud of Turin. 

The team determined with '95 percent confidence' the relic was manufactured sometime between 1260 and 1390 AD, long after the time of Christ's resurrection. 

The conclusion was reached after analyses performed on a corner of the ancient fabric by three different labs - at the universities of Arizona, Zürich and Oxford.

Read More

EXCLUSIVE

•  Atheist who set out to prove the Shroud of Turin was fake reveals why he's now 'convinced' it's the cloth Jesus was buried in 

But after obtaining the raw data, Casabianca found the results varied by decades.

One of Zürich's estimates in the Nature study said the cloth was up to 733 years old, but 595 years in the raw data.

Oxford's shroud sample was between 730 and 795 years old, but the raw data featured estimates that were off by up to 55 years.

Arizona's linen was between 591 and 701 years old, with the raw data showing a difference of up to 59 years.

Even though that would still places the cloth in the Middle Ages, hundreds of years after Jesus, Casabianca said it raises doubts.

He continued to explained that 'the lack of precision seriously affects the reliability of the 95 percent,' suggesting it was no more than 41 percent.

Anything lower than 60 percent suggests that there is a lot of disagreement or inconsistency among the results, according to the 2019 study published in Archaeometry. 

'We can say with confidence that the 1988 radiocarbon dating process led to a failure,' said Casabianca, who is an independent researcher in France.

'It was supposed to close a book, and it has only opened a new chapter. This failure could have been avoided with a better protocol.'

The raw data obtained by Casabianca showed it varied by decades than what was published in the Nature study. The red are changes made by the laboratories between their raw radiocarbon dates and the radiocarbon dates mentioned in the Nature article

The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long piece of linen featuring a faint image of the front and back of a man who Christians believe to be Jesus

The 1988 research was conducted in three laboratories: The University of Arizona, Zürich in Switzerland and Oxford University in the UK. Each lab received a strip from the original piece cut, which were then reduced to smaller sizes for the research

But Dr AJ Timothy Jull, who worked on the 1988 analysis, told DailyMail.com that even if the teams did re-run the analysis, 'The results would be the same, but the data would be less scattered.' 

Dr Jull was part of the team at the University of Arizona.

'Zürich was close to ours, but Oxford was a bit different,' Dr Jull said.

'But that does not change the results. Others use this argument to say there is something wrong with the measurements, Casabianca tries to do this.'

The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long piece of linen featuring a faint image of the front and back of a man who Christians believe to be Jesus.

The cloth was first presented to the public in the 1350s when it was exhibited in the small collegiate church in Lirey, a village in northern France.

Christians believe those wounds were miraculously imprinted on the burial shroud after Jesus was resurrected from the dead, scorched into the fibers by a burst of energy when he came back to life.   

Some believe it to be a Medieval fake, which Dr Jull and his team determined in the 1980s.

The piece was cut from the bottom corner on the back of the shroud, which experts said was not mended in the Middle Ages

However, a research involved with the 1988 study said that the radiocarbon dating of the shroud was done correctly

The cloth was first presented to the public in the 1350s when it was exhibited in the small collegiate church in Lirey, a village in northern France

The 1988 study saw scientists take a 10 mm by 70 mm piece of the shroud from the corner, which was cut into smaller pieces and distributed to the different labs.

Co-author Emanuela Marinelli, an independent researcher in Italy, told DailyMail.com: 'The sample was not representative of the full cloth because it is different [from one corner from another].

'The [1988] study found dating was more or less 150 years, so it is impossible to say the age of the entire 14-foot cloth.

'But for us, it was the statistical analysis that is the reason to reject to carbon dating.'

This technique estimates the age of organic materials based on the amount of radioactive isotope of carbon in them. 

The results were collected and collated by London's British Museum, which held on to the raw data until Casabianca and his team issued a legal request under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the raw information for the first time.

'I received a reply from the British Museum with more than 200 pages of documents,' Casabianca said.

'Our access to the documentation kept in the archives of the British Museum showed that the statistical analysis is supported by the documentation. 

'In it, we find that the samples were contaminated (including cotton and rogue fibers). This suggests that the sampling was suboptimal, to say the least.'

Dr Jull told DailyMail.com that he conducted another in 2010 to characterize the shroud samples, finding 'odd bits of cotton.'

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

24-08-2024 om 17:12 geschreven door peter  

EXCLUSIVE / New blood analysis of the Shroud of Turin 'supports Biblical story about Jesus' crucifixion'

• READ MORE:  Scientists make new discovery after analyzing Shroud of Turin

By Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com

The agonizing crucifixion of Jesus from the Bible details how he endured severe beatings, punctures and nails driven into his hands and feet.

Christians believe those wounds were miraculously imprinted on the burial shroud after Jesus was resurrected from the dead, scorched into the fibers by a burst of energy when he came back to life.

Now, a new analysis of the Shroud of Turin - also known as the Holy Shroud - claims to have uncovered evidence that the crucifixion may be historically accurate.

An engineer from the University of Padua in Italy used modern technology to reanalyze samples taken from the cloth in the 1970s, finding tiny blood particles showing signs of organ failure, trauma, disease and radiation. 

Materials that were typical in ancient Jerusalem were also said to be discovered, suggesting that the shroud may have originated in the region and not in Europe where many skeptics think it was created as a medieval forgery.

The new study analyzed blood samples taken from the shroud in 1978, which were collected using adhesive tape. This blood, according to the study, showed signs of disease, trauma and radiation

Independent experts dismissed the findings, however, saying blood could have contaminated the cloth at any point in the past 700 years.

The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long piece of linen featuring a faint image of the front and back of a man who Christians believe to be Jesus.

The cloth was first presented to the public in the 1350s, when it was exhibited in small collegiate church in Lirey, a village in northern France. Some believe it to be a Medieval fake.

It was not until 1978 when the first physical samples were removed from the cloth, done using adhesive tape to carefully lift particles from the front fibers and a vacuum to collect dust from the back.

Read More

EXCLUSIVE

•  Atheist who set out to prove the Shroud of Turin was fake reveals why he's now 'convinced' it's the cloth Jesus was buried in 

But, back then, the results were inconclusive about whether or not blood had been present in the samples.

Now, University of Padua professor Giulio Fanti has placed those samples under modern-day microscopes capable of highlighting details down to the size of individual particles.

His study was published in Archives of Hematology Case Reports and Reviews, which peer-reviewed his research.

The reanalyzed particles showed the presence of hemoglobin, which is a key component of blood, and also two different types of blood that Fanti labeled Type A and Type B. 

Fanti says this suggests the cloth was used on someone with bloody injuries, rather than forged using ink, dye, paint or other techniques.

Traces of creatine were also identified in the shroud sample, which is released into the blood stream when a person undergoes muscle breakdown or some type of trauma.    

Your body produces creatine from amino acids in your liver, kidneys, and pancreas. It is also present in foods.

The body releases the chemical into the bloodstream when cells in the brain, heart or skeletal muscles are damaged.

It was not until 1978 when the first physical samples were allowed to be taken from the cloth, which was done using adhesive tape to carefully remove particles off the front fibers. Dr. Max Frei, a Swiss criminologist, can be seen taking samples from the shroud

The Shroud of Turin features hundreds of reddish spots, varying in shapes and sizes, across the imprinted body image

The expert found another type of blood that was shed while Jesus was still alive. It also contained signs of radiation, which Christians believe was released when Jesus rose from the dead

'The high percentage of creatinine found in [the sticky tape samples], may be explained, especially during Jesus' last hour before dying on the cross, by a reduced blood flow to the kidneys also caused by hypovolemia and by severe dehydration,' the study reads.

Fanti claimed that his findings align with John 19:28 that states 'Jesus said, I thirst.'

The samples also featured signs the person whose blood allegedly stained the shroud had suffered from uremic syndrome which occurs when the kidneys are unable to eliminate waste products.

While the condition typically happens from kidney disease, it can also be brought on by blunt trauma to the organ, which Fanti believes may have occurred when Jesus was whipped. 

John 12:1 reads, 'Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged.'

'I would refer to Type A blood as that which came out of the corpse and therefore postmortem blood; it consists of microcytes which indicate the respiratory suffering of Jesus on the cross,' Fanti, a Christian who has been studying the shroud for 25 years, told DailyMail.com.

While the testing cannot prove whose blood litters the cloth, a new recent study claimed to find evidence that the shroud dates back 2,000 years. 

This new finding came in stark contrast to a 1988 study which found the shroud to be a fake, after researchers determined it had been produced between 1260 and 1390 AD.

The study analyzed samples taken from the 1970s. Researchers collected particles using adhesive tape. Pictured are the samples zoomed in 1,500 times

The 1970s research also collected samples from the back of the shroud using a vacuum. Pictured are dust particles with traces of blood attached

In his study, Fanti found the blood particles he labled 'Type B' to mostly have a darker color than the 'Type A' blood and sharper edges.

He claims this suggests Type B came from before Jesus had died, with the differences being due to clotting characteristics.

'Type B consists of coagulated blood crusts probably formed when Jesus was on the cross or ascended Calvary,' said Fanti.

Both types of blood also had traces of earth materials that Fanti said are typically found in Jerusalem, such as clay and limestone, suggesting that the shroud may have originated in the region.

Mark 15:46 explains how Joseph, one of Jesus' disciples, removed Christ from the cross and 'bought a linen shroud, and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud and laid him in a tomb that had been cut out of the rock.'

Some believe that Jesus' body was not washed during that time, but quickly placed in the tomb, which means he was not cleaned of earthy materials before being wrapped.

'When I went to Jerusalem to analyze the earthy material taken from the Holy Shroud, geologist Amir Sandler of the Geological Survey Of Jerusalem recognized among other things, like smectite and illite, which are typical of the Jerusalem soil as well as other material coming from the Sahara winds,' Fanti explained. 

The blood detected by Fanti was also said to have evidence of possible radiation in different forms.

The Type A blood contained Beta particles that are electrons of great kinetic energy emitted by some radioactive nuclei, such as Potassium-40 used in explosives and fireworks.

Photon radiation particles were identified in the Type B samples - these are also known as Gamma rays, which are typically formed by a nuclear reaction.

However, Dr Lawrence Kobilinsky, a forensic scientist who is a professor emeritus at John Jay College, told DailyMail.com that the 'blood' was likely a 'secondary thought.'

'Earlier work... found a pigment [coloring agent] constituted the image,' he said.

Indeed, American chemist Dr Walter McCrone, who analyzed the tape strips in 1978, found the image consisted of red ochre and a gelatin solution.

'The simplest explanation is that this shroud was placed over a statue covered with pigment in certain areas, which transferred to the cloth, and gave it this three-dimensional configuration when you do the right kind of photography,' Dr Kobilinsky said.

The shroud features a faint image of a man with long hair and a beard, which many believe is the face of Jesus

The burial cloth has captivated the imagination of historians, church chiefs, skeptics and Catholics since it was first presented to the public in the 1350s. It is housed in Turin, Italy inside this chapel

Both types of blood had earth materials that Fanti said are typically found in Jerusalem, such as clay and limestone, suggesting that the shroud may have originated in the region. The image shows elements captured from the surface of the fibers

A study in 2018 also determined the shroud to be a fake after a new forensic investigation showed that its bloodstains were left by someone who had been standing – rather than crucified.

Researchers concluded that the bloodstain patterns were also not consistent with a face-down corpse.

Dr Matteo Borrini, a forensic scientist at Liverpool John Moores University, worked with chemist Luigi Garlaschelli, of the University of Pavia in Italy, looking at the orientation of the shroud's stains. 

They sought to answer whether the crucifixion shown on the shroud was T-shaped, Y-shaped, or revealed another type of ancient Roman execution.

What they found, however, was that the bloodstains were not consistent with any one pose in particular. This suggested that someone who had been standing was used to imprint the famous patterns at different angles for the hands, chest and back.

Christians have claimed the imprints were created by energy released from Christ's body at the moment of resurrection.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

24-08-2024 om 16:57 geschreven door peter  

Scientists analyse the famous 'WOW!' signal first detected in 1977 - and finally reveal the truth about the mysterious flash

• Scientists have new found evidence that the signal was not sent by aliens
• The signal could have been caused by a natural microwave laser hitting Earth  

By Wiliam Hunter

In 1977, the Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope captured a signal from space so strange that scientists are still baffled by it almost 50 years later.

For decades, scientists have struggled to find any natural process capable of producing the 72-second burst which prompted astronomer Jerry Ehman to write 'WOW!' on the telescope's readout.

Now, new analysis of the so-called WOW! signal has revealed that it might have been caused by a hugely powerful laser slamming into Earth.

Experts say this was not the first salvo of an alien invasion, but rather the entirely natural product of a rare alignment between a collapsed star and a cloud of cool hydrogen.

Unfortunately for alien-hunters, scientists from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo say this new evidence shows that the WOW! signal is not evidence of life beyond Earth.

For decades, scientists have struggled to find any natural process capable of producing the 72-second burst which prompted astronomer Jerry Ehman to write 'WOW!' on the telescope's readout

What are the theories to explain the WOW! signal?

There have been many theories over the years for what could have been the source for the short-lived, narrow band radio signal that became known as the Wow! signal.

At the time, it was seen has having all the traits of having come from a distant planet, but the inability to pick it up again has frustrated astronomers.

While some have taken it to be a radio message broadcast by an alien beacon into space, others have looked for other astronomical sources. 

Theories have included collisions between asteroids and stars, flares from stars, merging white dwarfs and colliding neutron stars. 

Now, experts suggest that it could have been caused by energy from a neutron star trigger a cloud of atomic hydrogen gas to release a laser burst. 

When the WOW! signal hit Earth, many scientists put forward the idea that this could have been the first 'hello' from a distant alien civilisation.

The signal was not only uniquely powerful but also arrived in an unusually narrow band of frequencies around 1420 MHz - similar to those produced by atomic hydrogen.

Since hydrogen is so abundant in the universe, some suggested that advanced civilisations might be using its frequency as a calling card for signalling to other intelligent species.

Other natural explanations for the signature have been proposed, such as passing comets releasing clouds of gas.

In the absence of any good natural explanation, the idea that the WOW! signal was a 'technosignature' from another world became widespread.

Now, Professor Abel Méndez and his colleagues believe they have identified a series of similar signals which could explain the WOW! signal's origin.

The made the discovery by combing through the archives of the now-collapsed Arecibo Observatory's Radio Emissions from Red Dwarf Stars (REDS) project.

Since this telescope had a similar experimental set-up to the Big Ear radio telescope, he hoped that it would be able to reveal if anything like the WOW! signal had ever been spotted.

The researchers spotted several signals which appeared to be extremely similar to the WOW! signal, albeit considerably fainter. 

In 1977, the Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope (pictured) captured a signal from space so strange that scientists are still baffled by it almost 50 years later 

Researchers have used data from the now defunct Arecibo Observatory (pictured) to find signals that match the original WOW! signal. This evidence suggests it could be been the product of a giant space laser 

Read More

• Amateur astronomer traces possible source of notorious 'WOW!' signal first detected in 1977 to a sun-like star 1,800 light years from Earth  

Four of those originated from the tiny red dwarf star, Teegarden's Star, which is just 12.5 light-years from Earth.

Professor Méndez says: 'Our latest observations, made between February and May 2020, have revealed similar narrowband signals near the hydrogen line, though less intense than the original Wow! signal.'

What makes Teegarden's star unique, however, is that it is surrounded by clouds of cool atomic hydrogen.

When intense light from the red dwarf hits these clouds of hydrogen atoms, they are stimulated to produce a powerful burst of microwave energy in the 1420 MHz. 

Researchers spotted similar bands of energy (pictured) being produced at fainter levels from a nearby red dwarf star called Teegarden's Star. Importantly this star is surrounded by clouds of atomic hydrogen 

Read More

• Signals from outer space: The FOUR times scientists have believed we were contacted by aliens... as 'impossible' spinning object 4,000 light years away sends repeated radio bleeps to earth  

The result is an entirely natural microwave laser, or maser, within the hydrogen range which looks extremely similar to that of the WOW! signal.

The researchers argue that the WOW! signal was likely produced when an even more powerful burst of energy collided with a similar hydrogen cloud, producing an even bigger maser.

A burst that powerful is rare, but could have been produced by a type of neutron star called a magnetar.

These are formed when a star collapses and explodes into a supernova, leaving behind an ultra-dense, fast-spinning core with an extremely powerful magnetic field.

If the burst from a neutron star hit a cloud of cool hydrogen gas it could trigger a colossal maser burst just like the WOW! signal.

The signal may have been produced by a microwave laser triggered by the collision of energy from a magnetar (artists impression pictured) and a cloud of hydrogen gas. This means that the Wow! signal is not evidence for alien life 

Since it would be extremely rare for a magnetar to line up with a hydrogen cloud in just the right way, this also explains why we haven't heard the signal again.

If true, this would mean there is no need to suppose that the WOW! signal is evidence of alien life.

In their paper, published on arXiv, Professor Méndez and his colleagues write: 'Our hypothesis accounts for all observed characteristics of the Wow! signal introduces another source of false positives in technosignature searches, and suggests that this signal represented the first recorded astronomical maser flare in the hydrogen line.

'We will continue with Arecibo Wow! exploring our extensive sets of observations from Arecibo REDS. Future studies will incorporate archival data from the Arecibo Observatory.'

WHAT IS THE FERMI PARADOX?

The Fermi Paradox questions why, given the estimated 200bn-400bn stars and at least 100bn planets in our galaxy, there have been no signs of alien life. 

The contradiction is named after its creator, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.

He first posed the question back in 1950.

Fermi believed it was too extraordinary that a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has yet to be detected in the universe — despite its immense vastness. 

Fermi concluded there must a barrier that limits the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced space-colonising civilisations.

This barrier is sometimes referred to as the 'Great Filter'.

Italian physicist Enrico Fermi devised the so-called Fermi Paradox in the 1950s. It explores why there is no sign of alien life, despite the 100 billions planets in our galaxy

If the main obstacle preventing the colonisation of other planets is not in our past, then the barrier that will stop humanity's prospects of reaching other worlds must lie in our future, scientists have theorised.  

Professor Brian Cox believes the advances in science and engineering required by a civilisation to start conquering the stars ultimately lead to its destruction.

 He said: 'One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that.

‘It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.'

Other possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox include that no other intelligent species have arisen in the universe, intelligent alien species are out there — but lack the necessary technology to communicate with Earth.

Some believe that the distances between intelligent civilsations are too great to allow any kind of two-way communication.

If two worlds are separated by several thousand light-years, it's possible that one or both civilisation will be extinct before a dialogue can be established. 

The so-called Zoo hypothesis claims intelligent alien life is out there, but deliberately avoids any contact with life on Earth to allow its natural evolution.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

24-08-2024 om 16:44 geschreven door peter  

I witnessed a UFO crash and aliens flee the ship - and I have a piece of the craft to prove it

• READ MORE:  Ex-Pentagon official claims US has recovered alien bodies

By Ellyn Lapointe For Dailymail.Com

A man from Los Angeles claims that he witnessed aliens fleeing from a UFO after it crashed landed in the desert - and he has a piece of the spacecraft to prove it.

Jose Padilla was just a nine-year-old boy growing up in San Antonio, New Mexico, when he and his friend discovered the 'avocado-shaped' UFO.

To this day, he swears that what he witnessed was real. 

Jose Padilla claims to have had a real alien encounter as a young boy living in San Antonio, New Mexico - he even has a piece of the UFO to prove it. 

The encounter occurred while the two boys were horseback riding in the desert just 13 miles from the Trinity nuclear test site, Robert Oppenheimer and other members of the Manhattan Project detonated the world's first nuclear bomb in 1945.

The encounter occurred that very same year, and at first, Padilla thought the sound of the crash was just another bomb test, he told CBS News Los Angeles. 

'I told my friend, 'it must be another test from the bomb' and he said, 'no, it's not a bomb, look at the smoke coming out of the ground,'' Padilla said.

Upon closer inspection, the smoke appeared to be coming from a crashed aircraft.

Then, all of a sudden, three extraterrestrials emerged from the aircraft and began 'sashaying and running in circles,' he said. 

But Padilla wasn't afraid of these creatures. 

'They had crashed at my father's ranch, and they needed help,' he said. 

Over the next ten days, the military cleaned up the wreckage while Padilla and his friend watched from a nearby ridge, despite being warned to stay away.

An artist's rendering of the crashed spacecraft that Padilla claims to have discovered in San Antonio, New Mexico in 1945.

'We were hiding behind cactuses,' he said.

Read More

EXCLUSIVE

•  US Congress to investigate controversial Peru 'alien' mummies amid fears they could be linked to UFOs 

When the soldiers took a break from cleaning up the wreckage, Padilla and his friends entered the aircraft.

The 'extraterrestrials' were gone, giving Padilla the perfect opportunity to extract a souvenir from inside. 

He pulled a small 'dial' off the wall, brought it home and hid it in his garage. 

Frontier Analysis, a chemical testing lab based in Ohio, analyzed the artifact in 2015. Their report revealed that it was made of aluminum mixed with silicon and copper, CBS Los Angeles reported.

This mix of metals is commonly found in engine parts, and the report stated that the isotopic ratios were terrestrial.

An artist's rendering of the 'dial' that Padilla extracted from the inner wall of the crashed spacecraft.

But an extraterrestrial source for the metals could not be ruled out, the report stated.

'No one knows what it is,' Padilla said.

The years passed, and Padilla moved from San Antonio to Rowland Heights, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles, California, and quietly raised a family.

But he always held onto that strange artifact from his childhood.

Padilla has held onto the strange metal artifact for all these years, claiming that it's proof of his alien encounter. 

In 2012, Padilla and the friend who was with him when he witnessed the UFO were interviewed by investigative journalist and UFO researcher Paola Harris. 

At the time, Harris was investigating a claim by the son of World War II army pilot William Brophy.

Brophy's son told Harris that one of his father's last missions was to fly over the area that Padilla claims the UFO crash landed in. During one such flight, he saw two young boys on horseback, Harris told CBS Los Angeles.

She believes those two little boys were Padilla and his friend. 

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

24-08-2024 om 16:30 geschreven door peter  

Since landing on June 1, Chang’e 6 has been carrying out a robotic lunar exploration mission launched by China’s National Space Administration. The Chinese probe was initially launched in early May.

Nearly a week after Chang’e 6 touched down in the Apollo basin, NASA’s LRO passed above its landing site, allowing it an opportunity to capture images that revealed the Chinese spacecraft’s location near the rim of a 50-meter crater.

With the new imagery in hand, LRO imaging experts were quickly able to determine the coordinates of Chang’e 6’s position to be roughly 42 degrees south latitude, 206 degrees east longitude, and placing the probe at an elevation of about minus 5,256 meters.

The new imagery obtained by the LRO was released amid a flood of recent social media posts that falsely link earlier imagery obtained by NASA, some dating as far back as 2010, to the recent landing of Chang’e 6.

Land of the Ancient Lunar Lava Flows

Billions of years ago, the area where Chang’e 6 is carrying out its mission was the site of basaltic lava flows that made their way to the area, where they likely subsided once they met a geological fault believed to exist in the area.

Chang’e 6’s landing site is roughly halfway between a pair of prominent dorsum or “wrinkle ridges,” features that are ubiquitous on lunar basalt plains and can sometimes reach several hundreds of kilometres in length. The basaltic flow in this region appears to overlap with an earlier one located to the west, which lacks the iron oxide and titanium dioxide that is evidenced by the adjacent younger basaltic formation.

NASA’s Spy in Lunar Orbit

Since June 18, 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been observing the moon from its unique eccentric mapping orbit, providing crucial imagery for creating a 3D map of the lunar surface.

Although the LRO was initially planned for a two-year mission, its operation was extended to gather data addressing various scientific questions, including the evolution of the moon’s crust and regolith.

The recent photos the LRO obtained of China’s Chang’ e 6 spacecraft aren’t the first time NASA’s ever-watchful eye in lunar orbit has successfully spotted operations on the lunar surface undertaken by other countries. Last September, the LRO captured images of India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft at its landing site. Also, in April of this year, the LRO managed to capture images of the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), an orbital spacecraft operated by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).

Mapping the Moon and Beyond

Apart from photographing spacecraft sent to the Moon by other nations, the LRO has provided an unprecedented amount of information that has helped scientists expand our knowledge of Earth’s natural satellite. With a suite of high-resolution cameras and other powerful instruments, the LRO has succeeded at mapping the surface of the Moon with an impressive amount of detail, imagery which NASA has made available for viewing online.

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in orbit around the Moon

(Credit: NASA).

The LRO has played a significant role in several major discoveries, including the confirmation of water ice in craters on the Moon that remain in permanent shadow. Last December, the LRO also transmitted a laser beam from its laser altimeter instrument toward a tiny device on the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Vikram lander, proving that the LRO could be used to locate retroreflectors on the surface of the Moon.

Currently, Chang’e 6 is carrying out China’s second sample return mission. The samples collected by the lander were transferred to an ascender module and carried to an orbiter where it docked on June 6 for their transfer back to Earth. The Chang’e 6 lander and its associated rover have also conducted experiments while operating on the lunar surface.

Additional information on China’s Chang’e 6 mission can be found here, and more about the ongoing operations of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissaince Orbiter can be found on NASA’s official LRO mission webpage.

• Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.

• https://youtu.be/7kagUc6kDho

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/space/  }

24-08-2024 om 01:39 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

24-08-2024 om 00:41 geschreven door peter  

Planetary scientists want to know more about the moon’s geological processes. Io is considered a high heat flux world, and scientists want to learn more about its tidal dissipation. Studying Io can also tell us more about primitive planetary bodies that were once more volcanic, which Earth likely was early in its history.

Io can also tell us more about volcanogenic atmospheres, which can play a vital role in shaping a planet’s environment. This 2020 paper draws a link between Earth’s volcanic activity and the Great Oxygenation Event, a critical period when oxygen accumulated in Earth’s atmosphere. A better understanding of the link between volcanic activity and atmospheric evolution will help us better understand exoplanets and habitability.

Scientists know that the Galilean moons exchange material with Jupiter’s atmosphere and magnetosphere. They also know that material ejected from Io’s volcanoes can reach the surfaces of the other moons. Some of it can be turned into plasma by Jupiter’s powerful magnetosphere, forming Io’s plasma torus. They’re curious about this mass exchange in the Jupiter system and how it’s shaped the moons.

These are the reasons for a dedicated mission to Io.

In 2010, scientists at the University of Arizona and Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory first proposed the Io Volcano Observer (IVO) as part of NASA’s Discovery Program. IVO was proposed as a low-cost mission to explore Jupiter’s volcanic Moon. It was proposed again in 2015 and in 2019. In 2020, IVO was selected with two other missions for further study but ultimately lost out to the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions to Venus.

Now, there’s another proposal for the Io Volcano Observer, but this time, it’s under NASA’s New Frontiers Program. The new proposal shows that the desire for an Io-focused mission won’t go away. Instead, it’s gaining steam.

In a new paper still subject to peer review, a group of mostly American scientists present their case for the New Frontiers IVO. It’s titled “Comparing NASA Discovery and New Frontiers Class Mission Concepts for the Io Volcano Observer (IVO).” The first author is Christopher Hamilton from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona.

The IVO NF would address our scientific questions by reaching three goals, according to the authors:

• Determine how and where tidal heat is generated inside Io;
• Understand how tidal heat is transported to the surface of Io;
• Understand how Io is evolving.

The original IVO proposal had the spacecraft encounter Io ten times in four years after reaching the moon in 2033. It would’ve carried five instruments, with a sixth under consideration. The IVO would’ve crossed Io from pole to pole, passing over the equator at an altitude of between 200 and 500 kilometres (124 and 310 miles.)

The closest approaches were carefully designed to give the spacecraft the best observations of the moon’s magnetic field, gravity field, and libration amplitude. The approaches also would’ve allowed for both sunlit and dark views of volcanoes, allowing the spacecraft to study the composition of lava. The polar perspective would’ve provided new views of heat emanating from the moon that were unavailable to Galileo and unobservable from Earth.

The new IVO NF proposal maintains the polar orbit of the original IVO but improves it in several ways. Universe Today talked with lead author Christopher Hamilton about the new proposal. His remarks have been lightly edited for clarity.

The first change in the new proposal concerns the number of flybys, which would increase from 10 to 20.

“10 flybys for the original Discovery-level IVO mission would fill important gaps in image coverage that remain unfilled after the Voyager and Galileo era,” Hamilton said. So why double it?

“The new tour not only doubles the image coverage of Io’s surface with high-resolution imaging but also enables more flybys of active volcanoes, like Loki, Loki Patera, and Pillian Patera,” Hamilton said. “These are highly dynamic volcanic systems that include active lava lakes and explosive eruptions—one pass over the volcanic systems is simply not enough to constrain their time-variability and eruption dynamics.”

Like Earth’s Moon, Io is tidally locked to Jupiter, with one side more readily available for study than the Jupiter-facing side. But Jupiter’s effect on Io is much stronger than Earth’s effect on the Moon. “However, tidal interactions between Jupiter and Io are much stronger, exciting tides in solid rock with an amplitude of about 100 m (328 feet), which is taller than the Statue of Liberty!” Hamilton said. These tidal interactions drive Io’s powerful volcanism. “However, studies of the past decade have suggested that this heat has also melted a layer within Io to form a subsurface ‘”‘magma ocean,'” Hamilton said.

The original IVO’s ten orbits, with its magnetometer instrument, would have confirmed or excluded this hypothesis. The new proposal will carry an improved version of this instrument, and with more orbits, it could answer questions about Io’s magma ocean.

“IVO-NF would also carry a fluxgate magnetometer and with the repeat passes, carefully timed to measure Io’s induced magnetic field at different times in its orbit, would greatly reduce the uncertainty in estimating a potential magma oceans depth,” Hamilton said. The current uncertainty is ±10 km, but IVO NF would reduce it to ±3 km. This “would revolutionize our understanding of Io’s interior and the links between tidal heating and volcanism,” Hamilton told Universe Today.

“Both IVO and IVO-NF are great missions, but doubling the number of flybys more than doubles the scienctific return from an Io mission!” Hamilton said.

IVO-NF would also approach Io much closer than the original IVO. The original mission called for an altitude of 200 and 500 kilometres (124 and 310 miles) above Io’s surface. IVO-NF would begin its mission with high-altitude fly-bys, but as the mission progressed and objectives were reached, it would come much closer.

“With 20 flybys, IVO-NF can be more daring, flying closer to Io’s surface and even flying through its volcanic plumes to determine the chemistry of its erupted products in unprecedented detail,” Hamilton told Universe Today.

Initial flybys would be at about 200 km, “but as the mission progresses and Baseline objectives are achieved, we will be able to lower the altitude of later flybys over active volcanoes like Pele Patera,” Hamilton said.

“Nonetheless, we would image and analyze these volcanoes first, making use of repeat coverage to further constrain the safety of the close approach, and take precautions like reorienting the spacecraft’s solar panels so that they fly through the plume side-on rather than exposing the full cross-sectional area,” Hamilton told Universe Today. “Plume flythroughs for Io would also open the door to other sampling opportunities for plumes on Saturn’s active moon, Enceladus.”

“This may seem dangerous, but even at altitudes of 50 km, there would be very few particles,” Hamilton said. But before the spacecraft comes that close, it’ll use its Surface Dust Analyzer to understand the hazard. This instrument was added to the IVO-NF as a top priority. It will measure surface dust composition and the composition of nanograins in the volcanic plumes. Overall, it will give scientists a better understanding of Io’s dust environment and inform them if it’s safe to approach within 50 km.

According to Hamilton, we’re experiencing a renaissance in exploring the Jovian system.

“This is an important time in Planetary Exploration, and exploration of the Jupiter System is undergoing a renaissance, with Juno, Europa Clipper, and JUICE examining Jupiter, Europa, and Ganymede at the same time,” Hamilton told Universe Today. Io is a critical part of Jupiter’s moon system. It’s at the heart of the orbital resonance configuration between Io, Europa, and Ganymede, and the resonance drives geological activity on all three moons, including volcanism, tectonic activity, and the formation of surface features.

“Juno has filled some important gaps left after the end of the Galileo mission (1995–2003), but IVO and IVO-NF would be the first to have an instrument suite that is optimized specifically for Io,” said Hamilton.

To the intellectually curious, everything in nature is worthy of study and deeper understanding. An extraordinary world like Io is certainly no exception, with everything it has to tell us about itself, its sibling moons, and even about the early Earth and Moon.

“Our paper makes the case that Io is a priority target for exploration that should be considered in the next New Frontier Announcement of Opportunity,” Hamilton told Universe Today. He acknowledges that the original IVO mission at the Discovery level is possible, but the IVO New Frontiers mission would accomplish a lot more and would more thoroughly address our outstanding questions about Io.

“A larger mission to Io via New Frontiers would more than double the scientific return of the mission and would offer the best approach to understanding not just Io, but the Jupiter System as a whole, and the origins of high-heat flux worlds like the early Earth, early Moon, and other terrestrial planets in the Solar System and beyond,” Hamilton concluded.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

24-08-2024 om 00:35 geschreven door peter  

• READ MORE: 'compelling evidence' at Roswell site may prove alien craft crashed

By Matthew Phelan Senior Science Reporter For Dailymail.Com

A former top Pentagon spy claims that the US has recovered 'aliens.'

Former US counterintelligence official and onetime Pentagon UFO investigator Luis Elizondo told reporters that he can confirm one of two 'vehicles of unknown origin' were recovered from the now legendary Roswell UFO crash of 1947.

More shocking still, Elizondo said, 'We, as a nation have, been interested in not only the vehicles themselves but the occupants,' which he called 'biological specimens.'

Elizondo helped release three of the most famous UFO videos in history after leaving his role in the US Department of Defense in late 2017. His new explosive allegations come amid the ex-spy's press tour for his new memoir. They'll be broadcast in NewsNation's Special Report: Confessions of a UFO Hunter at 9PM ET on Friday August 23. 

'We're not alone,' former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo (pictured) told Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart in an advanced clip of TC channel NewsNation's upcoming special. 'It is a simple fact,' he added. 'The US government has been aware of that fact for decades' 

Elizondo first rose to national prominence in 2017 in the pages of the New York Times, after he helped release three US Navy infra-red UFO videos - including the GOFAST video (above)

The book contains, among its many incredible revelations, details on a 2016 plan hatched by Elizondo and his military colleagues to catch a UFO in the ocean. 

'The United States has been involved in the recovery of objects,' Elizondo told cable network NewsNation in the new interview, 'vehicles of unknown origin that are neither from our country or any other foreign country that we're aware of.'

'We're not alone,' the former Pentagon official told Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart in an advanced clip of the channel's upcoming special report.

'We are not alone in this universe and it is a simple fact,' Elizondo continued. 'The US government has been aware of that fact for decades.. 

Elizondo first rose to national prominence in late 2017 in the pages of the New York Times — where he blew the whistle on the US military and intelligence community's pervasive mismanagement and excessive secrecy on the topic of UFOs.

His public resignation and opaque role within the Pentagon's UFO-hunting portfolio, known to its Senate backers as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), brought fame and a lead role in a History channel docu-series.

Read More

EXCLUSIVE

•  New Pentagon report on Roswell UFO crash is 'bogus' says former NASA scientists and Air Force veterans 

In April 2020, the Pentagon officially released three videos that Elizondo had helped leak in 2017, each taken by US Navy fighter pilots who had reportedly witnessed 'unexplained aerial phenomena' (UAP) as UFOs are now more technically known.

The videos depict, as Elizondo told CNN, 'things that don't have any obvious flight sufaces, any obvious forms of propulsion [...] maneuvering in ways that include extreme maneuverability beyond, I would submit, the healthy G-forces of a human or anything biological.

Despite corroboration from his peers and the late Senate Majority leader who helped create AATIP, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, the Department of Defense has maintained that Elizondo's military role had no official UFO-hunting duties.

Pentagon officials denied the existence of any 'credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity,' in a statement responding to NewsNation's forthcoming interview.

'As we have stated previously, Luis Elizondo had no assigned responsibilities for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) while assigned to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security,' DoD spokesperson Sue Gough told NewsNation.

Critics of Gough have pointed to a 2003 research paper on psychological warfare that she wrote for the US Army War College, implying the Pentagon spokesperson might be part of a coordinated campaign to undermine Elizondo's credibility.  

And, in May 2021, Elizondo filed a 64-page complaint to the DoD's Office of the Inspector General accusing high-ranking military officials of attempting to silence him by threatening his security clearances and obfuscating of his work with AATIP.

DailyMail.com obtained an advance copy of Elizondo's book, Imminent, in which he shockingly and unequivocally stated that a 'Legacy Program' is 'in possession of advanced technology made off-world by nonhuman intelligence'

Elizondo said he endured 'malicious activities, coordinated disinformation, professional misconduct, whistleblower reprisal and explicit threats perpetrated by certain senior-level Pentagon officials.' 

These actions, he and his attorneys said, suggested 'a coordinated effort to obfuscate the truth from the American people, while impugning my reputation as a former intelligence officer at the Pentagon.'

His new memoir, Imminent, sees the former Pentagon official opening up about much more incredible personal accounts — including the story of his own family's disturbing experience with 'green orbs' floating through their house. 

In the book, Elizondo also details he and another AATIP member's plan to catch UFOs on the high seas.

He told DailyMail.com that their investigations pointed to these craft having an apparent interest in military operations, nuclear power, and were often seen around bodies of water.

So they coordinated with the Navy and other branches to create 'Project Interloper': an attempt to lure the mysterious craft and record them with high-tech equipment.

Above, veteran Australian TV news broadcaster and investigative reporter Ross Coulthart - who conducted the first televised interview with government UFO whistleblower David Grusch last year - conducted the new interview with Elizondo, which airs in full on Friday

'You take a nuclear carrier strike group, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, you have a nuclear powered submarine and other nuclear equities in the area, and you put it on the water,' he told DailyMail.com.

The idea was to gather warships in the ocean, focusing their radar, sonar, and cameras where they believed the UFOs would appear.

'There was an official plan that had support. It got briefed all the way to the Joint Staff,' Elizondo said. 'We had a lot of interest from the intelligence community. A lot of agencies were part of this. They were ready to put their effort and assets into it. And at the last minute it got denied.'

'That, for me, was one of the last straws,' he told DailyMail.com this past Saturday.

NewsNation's 'Confessions of a UFO Hunter' TV special airs this Friday at 9pm Eastern / 8pm Central.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

24-08-2024 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

“Our species, Homo sapiens, has been successful at adapting to ecological conditions — from tropical forests to arctic tundra — that require different kinds of problems to be solved,” said associate professor Charles Perreault, an anthropologist from Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change. and a research scientist with the Institute of Human Origins.“Cumulative culture is key because it allows human populations to build on and recombine the solutions of prior generations and to develop new complex solutions to problems very quickly.”

Toolmaking Suddenly Underwent a Rapid Advance in Technology

In their published study, “3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene,” which appeared in the journal PNAS, Perreault and fellow author Jonathan Paige, a University of Missouri anthropologist, explain how their analysis of stone tools dating back to 3.3 million years ago revealed this sudden and unexpected technological leap.

The researchers analyzed tools collected from 57 separate ancient hominin sites. The oldest tool, dating back over 3 million years, came from an African site. However, the researchers also studied ancient stone tools discovered at ancient hominin sites in Eurasia, Greenland, Sahul, Oceania, and the Americas.

Next, the team ranked the tools’ complexity. This meant analyzing how many steps would need to be taken to create the tool in question. The researchers characterized and ranked 62 distinct tool-making sequences.

Above: Tools that become increasingly more complex over the course of 3 million years. Left: First time period studied — Oldowan core, Koobi Fora, Kenya; Center: Second time period studied — Acheulean cleaver, Algeria; Right: Characteristic of 600,000 years ago technology — Levallois core, late Pleistocene Algeria (Image credits: (left) Curry, Michael. 2020. Oldowan Core, Koobi Fora. Museum of Stone Tools LINK; (middle) Curry, Michael. 2020. Acheulean Cleaver, Morocco, Koobi Fora. Museum of Stone Tools. LINK; (right) Watt, Emma. 2020. Levallois Core, Algeria. Museum of Stone Tools. LINK).

After charting the tools’ complexity, the team saw some unexpected patterns. Tools made between 3.3 million years ago and 1.8 million years ago required somewhere between two and four procedural units to manufacture. The complexity of stone tools steadily increased over the next 1.2 million years, with the top samples requiring an impressive seven steps. While significantly more complex than tools made over a million years earlier, the researchers say this is still within the range of complexity for a single craftsman. This means knowledge from previous generations of toolmakers had most likely not been passed down over that span.

However, the researchers discovered that when they looked at tools made around 600,000 years ago, in the Middle Pleistocene, they began to see a sudden and unexpected increase in complexity. Tools from this time period were not only more complex, but more complex manufacturing processes were required to make these tools.

“We analyzed the stone tools made during the last 3.3 million years,” the researchers explain. “We found that these stone tools remained simple until about 600,000 B.P. After that point, stone tools rapidly increased in complexity.”

Where previous tools had required only a handful of procedural steps to manufacture, tools from this time often required as much as 18 steps. According to Paige and Perreault, this is way too many steps for a single generation of craftsmen to achieve without the knowledge passed down from previous generations.

This evidence, the researchers write, is consistent with findings from other research teams, suggesting that such a rapid transition “signals the development of cumulative culture in the human lineage.”

“By 600,000 years ago or so, hominin populations started relying on unusually complex technologies, and we only see rapid increases in complexity after that time as well,” said Paige. “Both of those findings match what we expect to see among hominins who rely on cumulative culture.”

Dawn of Cumulative Culture and the Evolution of Modern Humans

Although the evolution of stone toolmaking provides evidence for the dawn of cumulative culture, the researchers behind the findings say such a leap likely affected all aspects of early humans. This likely included changes in human culture, biology, and even the ability to adapt to a range of environments and habitats found across the globe.

Such changes can increase in complexity as genetic and cultural evolution happen concurrently. According to the researchers, this “gene-culture coevolution process” may explain increases in relative brain size, a prolonged life history, “and other keystone traits underlying human uniqueness.”

Notably, the researchers point out that the Middle Pleistocene shows many other examples of evolving technology. For example, studies of this era reveal consistent evidence of the controlled use of fire, hearths and other domestic spaces. This era also features the evolution of wooden structures constructed with logs hewn using hafted tools, which, the researchers explain, “are stone blades affixed to wooden or bone handles.”

In their conclusion, Paige and Perreault note that toolmaking is just one measure of cumulative culture, and further study could spot other increases in this behaviour that may have occurred in the past but are not immediately evident in the archaeological record. “It is possible that early hominins relied on cumulative culture to develop complex social, foraging, and technological behaviours that are archaeologically invisible,” they write.

Ultimately, the research team believes that their findings show how knowledge can be passed down through the generations without each successive generation having to rediscover the knowledge of the past. When enough knowledge makes it through, like what appears to have happened 600,000 years ago, this process can result in an ever-increasing and adaptive knowledge pool that allows for a consistent upward progression in cultural and technological evolution.

“Generations of improvements, modifications, and lucky errors can generate technologies and know-how well beyond what a single naive individual could invent independently within their lifetime,” the researchers conclude. “When a child inherits her parent’s generation’s culture, she inherits the outcome of thousands of years of lucky errors and experiments.”

“The result is, our cultures — from technological problems and solutions to how we organize our institutions — are too complex for individuals to invent on their own,” Perreault adds.

• Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

23-08-2024 om 21:38 geschreven door peter  

Lockheed Martin artist concept of Mk21A

(Credit: Lockheed Martin).

The unarmed reentry vehicle was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, aboard a Minotaur I rocket at 11:01 p.m. Pacific Time.

In a press release, the American aerospace company said the test allowed engineering teams to evaluate several of the Mk21A’s technological capabilities and primary design components. The development of the Mk21A is part of a broader initiative that forms a critical component of the U.S. Air Force’s strategy to modernize its ICBM weapon systems.

“Test launches like these are crucial for protecting our nation’s defense,” said Col. Mark Shoemaker, Commander of Space Launch Delta 30, in a statement following Monday’s launch.

Presently, the Mk21A reentry vehicle represents the cutting-edge ICBM weapon technologies of the future, providing the basis for technologies that are already becoming integral to the U.S.’s deterrent posture.

Jay Watson, vice president of Strategic Reentry at Lockheed Martin, said his company’s more than six decades of involvement in the development of aerospace systems has “demonstrated exceptional performance in reentry technologies and a pioneering digital engineering approach on this program from its beginning.”

“We remain focused on delivering this capability for the warfighter as a trusted partner to the U.S. Air Force for ICBM reentry systems and modernization of the deterrent triad,” Watson said.

Monday’s test was part of an Engineering and Manufacturing Development contract the aerospace company presently has with the Air Force Nuclear Systems Center, based at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico.

The company says that the data it collected during the test flight will provide potentially crucial information that it will use in the ongoing development and future testing of the Mk21A.

Presently, the reentry vehicle’s development remains on schedule, with assistance from modelling and simulation and the implementation of advanced digital engineering capabilities that have helped Lockheed Martin maintain an economical approach to the system’s development.

The Mk21A’s unique design includes the arming and fuzing subsystem and support elements, which contribute to ensuring the vehicle’s operational performance and overall effectiveness.

“As global threats evolve, it’s essential to support these launches and maintain access to space to safeguard our nation,” Col. Shoemaker said following Monday’s launch.

• Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/defense/ }

23-08-2024 om 21:18 geschreven door peter  

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

23-08-2024 om 21:06 geschreven door peter  

23-08-2024 om 20:43 geschreven door peter  

A rare landing on the south pole of the moon led to this scientific discovery

There was once a magma-filled ocean on the south pole of the moon, scientists recently discovered after analyzing lunar soil that revealed ancient information about the moon's origin.

The study of soil taken from a less-studied region of the moon suggests the presence of remnants of a former ocean of magma, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature.

• MORE: Climate change is altering the length of days on Earth, according to new research

The researchers analyzed lunar soil extracted from high-latitude regions on the southern portion of the moon -- taken as part of the Chandrayaan-3 mission when India’s Vikram lander module made a historic touchdown near the south pole of the moon in August 2023. The mission is the southern-most landing that has ever taken place on the moon -- a difficult feat considering the lack of sunlight, which can create visibility and communication issues, Anil Bhardwaj, director of Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad and co-author of the study, told ABC News. Most lunar landings, especially human landings, have taken place in the equatorial or low-latitude regions.

India's lunar mission found remnants of a magma ocean on the south pole

The mission embarked the use of new technology -- a particle access spectrometer -- an instrument aboard the rover that was able to make observations and collect data very close to the lunar surface, M. Shanmugam, the lead engineer of the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, told ABC News.

The Moon's South Pole.

© NASA GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio

The composition of the soil found on Vikram’s landing site is consistent with an ancient magma ocean, the authors conclude.

When analyzing the soil, the researchers found a relatively uniform elemental composition among 23 measurements at various spots along the lunar surface, primarily containing the rock-type ferroan anorthosite. The spectrum of elements also included all of the major and minor elements of the presence of magma, including sodium, aluminum, magnesium, carbon, silicon, sulfur, potassium, iron, titanium, chromium and manganese, Bhardwaj said.

MORE: The future of space exploration is a transforming, animal-like robot, scientists say

The moon is believed to have formed after a body the size of Mars struck Earth about 4.24 billion years ago, Bhardwaj said. The material that formed as a result of the volatile impact was likely magma that was thrown into space that remained within the Earth's gravitational pull and eventually began forming a planetary-mass object.

The magma ocean is likely to have existed for tens to hundred million years, Santosh Vadawale, a professor in the Physical Research Laboratory and lead author of the study, told ABC News.

Researchers believed the magma disappeared as the moon cooled throughout its formation, hypothesizing that, less dense ferroan anorthosite floated to the lunar surface while heavier minerals sank to form the mantle during the cool-down -- forming the lunar highlands as a result of the floatation of lighter anorthositic rock.

Previous research into the Moon’s geology has primarily relied on samples taken by missions to lunar mid-latitudes, such as the Apollo program, giving scientists a more nuanced look into the history of the moon's formation, according to the paper.

Chandrayaan-3's rover Pragyaan explored the south pole region for 10 days last August

• MORE: Water vapor and temperatures that could support life found on exoplanet, NASA says

While the lunar magma ocean hypothesis has existed for decades, ever since the Apollo mission placed humans on the moon in 1969, the new research has allowed researchers to confirm the evolutionary history of the moon from billions of years ago, Vadawale said.

"Our next mission, we would like to try to go as close as possible to poles, where there are these permanently shadowed regions where there is water is supposed to be there," he said.

{ https://www.msn.com/en-us/channel/topic/ }

23-08-2024 om 18:45 geschreven door peter  

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn Is Sending Astronauts to a Literal Radiation Belt to Test New Spacesuits

The risky new private space mission will launch on Monday, August 26.

by Kiona Smith

 

The mission is scheduled to launch Monday, August 26 from Kennedy Space Center, sending four astronauts in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule (like the one the stranded Starliner crew will ride home in) on a long, narrow orbit that will carry them through the innermost of the Van Allen belts — bands of high-energy radiation that surround our planet — making them the first people to cross the belts in 52 years. Midway through the 5-day mission, two crew members will leave the capsule for the first spacewalk by private astronauts.

Those plans might look like more space billionaire stunts — this is also the age of space tourism, after all — but Isaacman (who will fly on Polaris Dawn as the mission’s commander) insists the Polaris program has real science and technology development goals.

Polaris Dawn Will Test SpaceX’s New EVA Suits

One goal of the Polaris Dawn mission is to test new technology for deep space travel. The mission will be the first flight test of SpaceX’s new pressure suits for extravehicular activities (EVAs), such as spacewalks. Isaacman and mission specialist Sarah Gillis are about to become the first non-government-employed astronauts to ever attempt a spacewalk, but they’re also about to depressurize their spacecraft, open the door, and step outside while wearing spacesuits that have never flown before.

The design is meant to be lighter and more maneuverable than the ones currently in use, and the helmet comes with a heads-up display that shows a mission clock alongside the suit’s pressure, temperature, and humidity. At the moment, neither NASA’s spacesuits nor SpaceX’s current generation “intervehicular activity” (IVA) suits have the heads-up display. Both the IVA suits and the new EVA suits are much less bulky than NASA’s version, but Isaacman and SpaceX claim the EVA suits flying on Polaris Dawn offer more mobility at the joints, and they’re also easier to get into and out of.

SpaceX previously took the new suits to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to fire tiny projectiles at them at thousands of miles an hour, arguably the most direct way to test whether the suits could endure strikes from micrometeorites or other tiny bits of orbital debris. Next week’s mission will be their first flight test — and since the mission calls for opening up the whole Crew Dragon cabin to the vacuum of space before Isaacman and Gillis venture outside, it will be a high-stakes test, and it carries more than the usual amount of risk that comes with flying to space.

The four astronauts will also test communications systems using laser links between the Crew Dragon capsule and SpaceX’s (increasingly problematic) constellation of StarLink satellites in low Earth orbit.

What Will Happen During Polaris Dawn’s Spacewalk?

While the spacesuits are very new and Polaris Dawn’s crew are about to be the first non-space-agency astronauts to ever attempt a spacewalk, the method they’ll be using for this test is extremely old-school. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk is going to look almost exactly like the very first American spacewalk back in 1965, except with twice the number of people and much sleeker spacesuits.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will breathe pure oxygen for about two hours before a spacewalk, then step into an airlock (a separate room that air can be let in and out of) and then into the vast vacuum of space — leaving the rest of the space station safely sealed and pressurized behind them. But the Crew Dragon capsule doesn’t have an airlock, just a main hatch, so in order to walk in space, the crew will have to open the hatch and expose the whole cabin to vacuum.

Isaacman and Gillis will float out the hatch, tethered to the capsule by umbilical cables that provide life support and keep them tethered to the ship. Pilot Scott Poteet and mission specialist and medical officer Anna Menon will be strapped into their seats, managing the umbilicals and the ship’s systems — but all four of them will be exposed to the unforgiving forces of vacuum, with nothing but their suits and open hatchway between them and eternity. That’s exactly how the crew of Gemini 4 — pilot Edward White and commander James McDivitt — did it 59 years ago, when White became the first American spacewalker.

Spacesuits keep astronauts’ bodies under enough air pressure to survive and function, but the pressure inside an EVA suit will still be very low compared to the normal air pressure in the room you’re sitting in now, or in the Crew Dragon’s cabin.

That’s why astronauts on the ISS spend a couple of hours “pre-breathing” oxygen before an EVA. The goal is to make sure there’s no nitrogen in their bloodstream, so they can avoid a painful and often fatal condition called decompression sickness (DCS), or the bends. Normal air is 78 percent nitrogen, which ends up in our bloodstream when we breathe. That’s not a problem, unless our bodies are suddenly under much lower pressure than normal. Then, it quickly becomes a big problem because all the nitrogen gas mixed with our blood comes fizzing out, like the bubbles in soda bottles when you take the lids off too quickly.

Polaris Dawn’s crew will spend a lot more time pre-breathing. They’ll start as soon as they reach orbit, and for the next two days, they’ll gradually turn the cabin pressure down and the oxygen concentration up. That will force the nitrogen out of their bodies even as they’re adjusting to lower pressure. By day 3, it will be time to open the hatch and hope it worked.

Medical Research in Space

Exploring how the human body responds to the physical weirdness of being in space — changing air pressure, microgravity, and radiation exposure — is another key goal of the Polaris Dawn mission (and pretty much every crewed mission, on some level). During their 5 days in orbit, the crew will gather data for more than 30 experiments on the human body.

When it launches, the Crew Dragon capsule will be carrying samples of human tissues and cells, which researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University will compare with their “BioBank” samples here on Earth. The goal is to learn how deep space affects the tissues that make up the human body on a microscopic level, looking for changes on the cellular level.

Other experiments will study bone and muscle loss in microgravity — and test a couple of possible methods to track and prevent them. Still other experiments will study changes to astronauts’ vision, which are believed to be caused by changes in the amount of fluid in astronauts’ heads during spaceflight. The crew will measure the pressure on their eyes with portable ultrasound instruments, tiny sensors in contact lenses, and small cameras that measure the size of astronauts’ pupils.

A couple of other experiments are focused on how exposure to microgravity and cosmic radiation impacts medicines; a NASA study will track whether there are any physical or chemical changes to medicines stored on the Crew Dragon capsule during the flight, while a UTHealth Houston study will measure blood flow in the astronauts’ liver and kidneys (again with portable ultrasound devices) to build digital models of how the human body might process medicines taken during a space flight.

Meanwhile, NASA will be testing a nasal spray for space sickness, a type of motion sickness that happens to people in space. All of these tests will hopefully get us all one step closer to feeling safer and healthier in space.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

23-08-2024 om 17:10 geschreven door peter  

The U.S. Government Set ‘Traps’ to Catch UFOs, Former Pentagon Official Claims

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

23-08-2024 om 16:56 geschreven door peter  

True Story of a Man who Worked for the CIA: He was Tasked with Viewing Jupiter and Made Wild Claims that Later Came True.

This is the true story of a man who was part of a secret government program. As a CIA psychic informant, he was tasked with viewing Jupiter and the far side of the Moon. He made wild claims about Jupiter, and they later came true…

INGO SWANN (1933-2013) was internationally known as an advocate and researcher of the exceptional powers of the human mind and as a leading figure in governmental and scientific projects to investigate and identify the scope of subtle human perceptions.

In the 1970s, Ingo was involved in remote viewing experiments established by the U.S. Army and the CIA in collaboration with the Stanford Research Institute. This clandestine initiative — code-named Project Stargate — later became the basis for the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney and Jeff Bridges. (Source)

For Stargate, Ingo and a group of psychics used their abilities to spy on Russia from Palo Alto, California, even remotely discovering a downed Soviet spy plane under a jungle canopy in the African country of Zaire after the U.S. Department of Defense had deemed it lost.

Ingo’s various remote views of celestial bodies included: Jupiter (1973), Mercury (1974), the Moon (1975), and Mars (1975, 1976, and 1984). Selected information on these sessions is provided below. More can be found in his archives at the University of West Georgia.

In 1973, most scientists, academics, and media strongly opposed research into parapsychology or psychoenergetics. So, it was surprising when the country’s second-largest think tank started researching these topics. This caused a big reaction because the think tank, SRI, was highly respected and connected to the military and intelligence communities.

The idea of controlled remote viewing was a process in which viewers could view a location given nothing but its geographical coordinates and was developed and tested by Puthoff and Targ with CIA funding.

The experiment was controlled by Harold Puthoff and according to the account, during the experiment; Swann using the power of his thought visited the distant planet. The experiment was dated April 27, 1973.

According to Ingo, in the space to the right of the room, he could see Jupiter, remotely located many millions of miles away. (Source)

He could see how it was shining with a blinding light. He could look at it from all directions of his mind’s eye. At first, everything was seen in miniature and then everything was suddenly expanded.

“These visions are inside me, then outside. There is a yellow cast to space and seeming dark objects show through it. Can they be other moons of contrasting colors or densities? The impressions come to me that there are 17, some yet undiscovered by earth scientists, much closer to Jupiter, and the feeling also comes that some of them have been and are being spawned by the conclusive, volcanic action in the interior..,” Swann said, according to the document.”

Ingo also “saw” rings around Jupiter, but, he said that they were not as noticeable as that of Saturn. (Source)

Later, in 1979, the space probe Voyager confirmed the existence of the Jovian ring system; however, the hypothesis of its existence was put forward by the Soviet astronomer Sergey Vsehsvatskiy in the 1960s.

Perhaps, it was Swann who earlier provided the CIA with information regarding ancient civilizations on Mars. The Stargate project was launched in 1970 after the CIA stated that the Soviet Union reportedly spent more than $1 million a year on research into Psychotronics.

This experiment has been ridiculed by skeptics, who often haven’t reviewed its details. There are two key points that skeptics overlook: first, the Jupiter Probe was just an exploratory experiment, not a claim of any findings; second, it had prestigious sponsorship and scientific oversight.

The experiment’s focus on remote sensing of a distant planet was seen as radical, challenging not only mainstream academic views but also the usual practices in parapsychology.

Six of these thirteen factors were given scientific substantiation by 1975. Before Jupiter’s ring was “scientifically” discovered in 1979, most scientists flatly denounced the possibility of the RING. (Source)

In February 1975, he was contacted by a certain highly-placed figure from Washington, DC, who guardedly told Swann that he, Swann, would soon be receiving a telephone call from the aforementioned Mr. Axelrod

Ingo quickly agreed to a mysterious, last-minute meeting, despite feeling concerned. He met a man who resembled a Marine, exchanged brief formalities, and was then driven to a helicopter. Blindfolded for a 30-minute flight, Swann was taken to what seemed like a secret underground location. Once there, he met a man named Mr. Axelrod, who admitted the name was fake, adding to the secrecy of the situation.

Axelrod quickly got to the main point, asking Ingo many questions about remote viewing. He also made it clear that he wanted to use Swann’s skills for a secret mission and offered a large sum of money. It was an offer Swann couldn’t refuse, and he didn’t.

Read also:

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• Ex-Pentagon Official & Jacques Vallée Suggest Higher-Dimensional Beings Crossing Into Our World

Axelrod then asked Ingo what he knew about the Moon, revealing the true purpose of their meeting. Someone in the government wanted the Moon to be remote-viewed, and Swann agreed to do it.

When Ingo began his work, he was shocked by what he saw. His mind focused on an image of a massive tower on the Moon, similar in size to the United Nations Secretariat Building. Swann was told that this structure wasn’t made by humans but by mysterious extraterrestrials. However, no one knew where they came from.

In later remote-viewing sessions, Ingo saw many unusual things on the Moon. He described domed structures, advanced machines, tall towers, large cross-shaped structures, and strange tubes spread across the landscape. He also saw signs of what looked like mining operations. It seemed that someone, or something, had secretly built a base on the Moon.

Ingo also focused on a group of people on the Moon who looked human. They were inside some kind of enclosure and were digging into a cliff. The strange thing was that they were all completely naked.

Suddenly, Axelrod, who was overseeing the experiment, stopped it. He hinted that the beings on the Moon might have noticed they were being watched and that Ingo could be in serious danger if they decided to confront him.

Axelrod asked Ingo if he knew a man named George Leonard. Ingo said no, he didn’t know him.

At the same time, Axelrod was asking him to investigate strange things on the Moon. Meanwhile, George Leonard was writing a book called “Somebody Else is on the Moon”.

In 1977, Leonard’s book was published. It talked about strange structures on the Moon, which was exactly what Axelrod was worried about —strange, possibly man-made structures on the Moon.

Ingo and Axelrod had several secretive meetings about strange events on the Moon. These meetings, which felt almost like a spy movie, ended suddenly in 1977, leaving Swann confused.

He wondered if he had psychically seen an advanced base on the Moon built by extraterrestrials. However, since the people he “saw” there looked like naked humans, he also considered it might be a secret Earth-based installation that Axelrod wanted to investigate.

The mystery remains unsolved, but there are more questions. The idea of aliens secretly using our Moon brings to mind similar claims about aliens on Earth.

In the 1997 book Remote Viewers, Jim Schnabel shared a story about the U.S. Intelligence community’s involvement in psychic spying, which started in the 1970s.

One remote viewer, Pat Price, believed that Alaska’s Mount Hayes housed one of the largest alien bases. He claimed the aliens looked human but had different hearts, lungs, blood, and eyes, and could control people through thought. Price also mentioned that this base caused problems for both U.S. and Soviet space missions.

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

23-08-2024 om 16:46 geschreven door peter  

Footage Of UFO Landing At Holloman AFB With Aliens Walking Out Exists, Producer Told James Fox

There is a UFO/alien controversy surrounding Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where one of three UFOs allegedly landed in May 1971. The incident has been recently discussed by “Moment of Contact” filmmaker James Fox, who says the full video of the UFO landing exists, including the alien entities walking out of the craft.

However, as it is so often in such cases, instead of the government releasing a film of the entire incident to author/filmmaker Robert Emenegger as promised, it only released 8 seconds of this special footage that ultimately made it into the film. Holloman Air Force Base is the United States Air Force base established in 1942 and located six miles southwest of the central business district of Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The story begins in 1971 when Emenegger and producer/director Allan Sandler were invited by US intelligence to Norton Air Force Base in California to discuss the significant UFO phenomenon that had occurred previously and create a documentary film about it.

Apparently, Mr. Fox recalls the Holloman incident on Julian Dorey Podcast, published on February 25, 2023. He says that he interviewed Sandler and Emenegger about it and they as well believe the UFO landing film footage exists. He points out this happened not far from Socorro, where Lonnie Zamora had his famous sighting roughly a year prior of a similarly shaped “tic tac” white craft and beings walking around the UFO.

There is no official record of the reason why the US government allowed giving secret UFO footage for a documentary film. It is believed that the administration of President Nixon did it to look strong in the science field for the upcoming 1972 re-election campaign.

Emenegger said that he was promised by the USAF officials to get the authentic UFO landing footage that happened at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in 1971. It showed the alien visitors emerging out of the craft that met with the US military. Even though Emenegger was skeptical about it, the Air Force assured him that the footage was authentic.

One of the military’s officials named Paul Shartle, who was in charge of the audio-video department, said in a 1988 national television broadcast with Mike Farrell that he had watched the 16mm film of three disc-shaped craft. One of them landed and the others flew away.

“I saw footage of three disc-shaped crafts one of the crafts landed and two of them went away. It appeared to be in trouble because it oscillated all the way down to the ground. However, it did land on three pods, a sliding door open a ramp was extended, and out came three aliens. They were human-sized. They had an odd gray complexion and a pronounced nose. They wore tight-fitting jumpsuits, thin headdresses that appeared to be communication devices, and their hands in their hands they held a translator I was told.”

Mr. Fox revealed on the podcast that Allan Sandler told him on the phone call that he had seen three discs escorted by a military jet. “He was not sure of the altitude, but he estimated that they were at roughly 10 to 12,000 feet,” Mr. Fox said. He continued: “Paul Shartle (One of the military’s officials at Norton Air Force Base in California who was in charge of the audio-video department) admitted that he had seen it and that it was not of Earth origin.”

Sandler told Mr. Fox that two of the discs peeled away while one wobbled to the ground. He said it was like a leaf floating down from the sky, and it looked like it was in trouble. Mr. Fox said that the wobbling movement was similar to the footage he had seen of a UFO before. He does not think that Allan knew how the UFO hovered. The disc eventually went to the ground.

“He said James, just like in a sci-fi movie, the seamless door opens and out come these beings that had very large noses, slits for mouths, and their eyes were almost like a vertical slit, like a cat’s eye, very, very big. They had… I’m just like… I [Fox] need to make this abundantly clear to your audience. I’m not saying what’s true or what’s not true, or if it happened or if it’s alien or whatever it is. I’m just telling you what I was told by people who saw it, and claimed to have seen it. They came out and they met with the base commanders, and then they either got into a Jeep or were about to get into a Jeep or do something and then the film footage just cuts.”

Emenegger claimed that he personally visited the landing site and inspected the area where the extraterrestrial craft had been stored, and that the US military and the alien visitors had held meetings that lasted for several days.

Additionally, Emenegger’s production team was granted access to highly classified documents at DoD facilities, and they received assistance from military officials who had expertise in UFO-related matters, such as Col. William Coleman of Project Blue Book and Col. George Weinbrenner, who headed Foreign Technology at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.

Paul Shartle, who showed the footage to Allan Sandler, faced some men in dark suits that showed up from an unknown location and warned him not to speak of the incident. They confiscated the footage, stating that it was not supposed to have happened. Sandler did not inform Emenegger for over 40 years.

Emenegger completed extensive research and film production only to feel cheated when the authorization to use real footage was withdrawn. Despite this setback, he went ahead and released his documentary “UFOs: Past, Present, and Future,” which was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1974. The documentary was groundbreaking because it provided information from the Department of Defense (DoD).

The United States Air Force (USAF) required Emenegger to add animated footage of the alleged Holloman UFO landing. According to Emenegger, some frames from the original footage were used during the editing stage with USAF authorization, which was not entirely missing from the frames. The viewers spotted a genuine bright disc coming down slowly in the distance against the backdrop of Holloman’s surrounding landscape.

David Cameron, a UFO researcher, shared in an interview that he was involved in confirming that the Pentagon was not covering up UFO sightings. He recounted the story of the Holloman Air Force Base film, where the government allowed producers to use eight seconds of footage of a landed alien ship in a documentary, but the classified part where an alien got out was removed.

Mr. Fox explains that the point of the story is that there is compelling evidence of an event occurring involving an unidentified object and that there may be film footage of the incident. Despite the existence of this evidence, the story has been overshadowed by other sensational claims, such as secret meetings between President Eisenhower and aliens.

While it is unclear what exactly happened, there is substance to the story and it should not be dismissed outright. However, the addition of other claims has muddied the waters and made it difficult to investigate the case of the president making contact with extraterrestrial life.

 { https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

23-08-2024 om 01:51 geschreven door peter  

“For the first time, we have shown that even a tiny fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer onboard a spacecraft,” said lead author Fabian Klenner, a University of Washington (UW) postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences. “Our results give us more confidence that using upcoming instruments, we will be able to detect lifeforms similar to those on Earth, which we increasingly believe could be present on ocean-bearing moons.”

Oceans Beneath Surface of Icy Moons are Ideal Targets for Alien Lifeforms

While the search for life outside Earth has many targets, including the soil of Mars or the clouds of Venus, astrobiologists are increasingly optimistic about finding signs of past and present alien lifeforms within the subsurface oceans of the solar system’s icy moons. Along with Europa, these targets include Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Those hopes received even more fuel when researchers recently found evidence of phosphate on the surface of Enceladus.

The researchers explain, “This planetary body now appears to contain energy, water, phosphate, other salts, and carbon-based organic material, making it increasingly likely to support lifeforms similar to those found on Earth.”

This image shows red streaks across the surface of Europa, the smallest of Jupiter’s four large moons. The upcoming Europa Clipper mission will send instruments to investigate this moon.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Galileo

In the decade since NASA’s Cassini mission detected plumes of water and ice being ejected by Enceladus, mission planners and amateur enthusiasts alike have theorized about how such a life-hunting mission might actually take place. While some of the more exotic proposals include mini submarines or a snakelike probe that can crawl down into those subsurface oceans, the most popular involves flying a sample mission through those ejected plumes and scanning them for clues to alien lifeforms.

Now, an international team of researchers says instruments that might be included on upcoming missions should not only be able to detect signs of alien lifeforms, but they believe the conditions are ideal for such a finding as soon as the Europa Clipper.

Lab Study Shows Instruments Could Spot Signs of Life in a Single Grain of Ice

To see if instruments slated to join future missions would be able to detect signs of life in the plumes ejected from Enceladus and Europa, the UW research team selected a type of bacteria called Sphingopyxis alaskensis for study. That’s because this particular bacterium lives in cold environments on Earth and can survive on very little nutrients, making it a likelier analog of extraterrestrial bacteria that may thrive beneath the surface of these icy moons. The researchers also say this bacterium is just the right size for future probes to spot within a single grain of ice.

“They are extremely small, so they are, in theory, capable of fitting into ice grains that are emitted from an ocean world like Enceladus or Europa,” Klenner said.

After coming up with a lab experiment that would best simulate the conditions a future mission might experience these ejected ice grains, the team used a mass spectrometer to see if they could spot the life signs of their chosen bacterium in a single grain of ice. Significantly, they note that their instrument was less sensitive than the one planned for the Europa Clipper.

As hoped, their study was a success. An analysis of water injected into a vacuum showed that the right instruments could indeed detect alien lifeforms as they were ejected from Enceladus or Europa. In fact, the scientists behind the successful experiments say searching for life in this method “is more successful than averaging across a larger sample containing billions of individual grains.”

Instrument on NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission May Be First to Discover Alien Lifeforms

In their published study, the UW researchers supplemented their experiments by looking at the conditions on Earth that cause bacteria to collect on the ocean’s surface and cause a layer of “ocean scum.” They soon realized that a similar set of conditions likely exists on the surface of these extraterrestrial oceans. As a result, any subsurface water ejected into space would likely capture pieces of alien lifeforms and encapsulate them within grains of space ice, where NASA’s instruments could detect them.

“We here describe a plausible scenario for how bacterial cells can, in theory, be incorporated into icy material that is formed from liquid water on Enceladus or Europa and then gets emitted into space,” Klenner said.

Although they are not directly involved with the planning of NASA’s missions, the team notes that NASA’s Europa Clipper, thanks to its unique instrumentation, could be perfectly equipped to find alien lifeforms living beyond Earth.

“With suitable instrumentation, such as the SUrface Dust Analyzer on NASA’s Europa Clipper space probe, it might be easier than we thought to find life, or traces of it, on icy moons:” said senior author Frank Postberg, a professor of planetary sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin, “if life is present there, of course, and cares to be enclosed in ice grains originating from an environment such as a subsurface water reservoir.”

•  Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/space/ }

23-08-2024 om 01:35 geschreven door peter  

The ionosphere, a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere extending from about 50 to 400 miles above the surface, is a region where solar radiation ionizes atmospheric particles, creating a plasma of charged particles. 

This layer plays a crucial role in long-distance radio communications, as it can reflect radio waves back to Earth. However, GOLD’s new observations have shown formations that challenge current scientific models.

Observations from NASA’s GOLD mission shows charged particles in the ionosphere forming an X shape on Oct. 7, 2019. (The colors indicate the intensity of the ultraviolet light emitted, with yellow and white indicating the strongest emission, or highest ionospheric density.) 

(Image credit: F. Laskar et al.)

“A unique phenomenon—A geomagnetically quiet time merging of Equatorial Ionization Anomaly (EIA) crests, leading to an X-pattern (EIA-X) around the magnetic equator—has been observed in the night-time ionospheric measurements by the Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk mission,” researchers wrote in the study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

Observations of these distinctive X-pattern structures had previously been noted only during geomagnetic disturbances, such as after solar storms or volcanic eruptions. However, these new sightings during geomagnetically calm conditions suggest that unknown processes from the lower atmosphere can affect the ionosphere, presenting a new scientific mystery.

Computer simulations showed that these bizarre X-shaped equatorial ionization anomalies are generated during pre-sunset hours and persist until after sunset at local times. 

Models also propose that these X-shapes may develop when changes in the lower atmosphere draw plasma downward. However, this hypothesis requires further investigation. 

Images from NASA's GOLD mission show C-shaped and reverse-C-shaped plasm

“The X is odd because it implies that there are far more localized driving factors,” Dr. Jeffrey Klenzing, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who studies the ionosphere, said in a statement. “This is expected during the extreme events, but seeing it during ‘quiet time’ suggests that the lower atmosphere activity is significantly driving the ionospheric structure.”

Additionally, GOLD identified C-shaped and reverse-C-shaped plasma bubbles near each other. C-shaped plasma bubbles are typically long and straight and form along magnetic field lines. However, on several occasions, GOLD found these structures a mere 400 miles apart, implying that strong turbulence or vortex-like activity in the lower atmosphere influences the ionosphere. 

This discovery of closely linked C-shaped bubbles offers further evidence that more complex dynamics are at work in the Earth’s atmosphere than is currently understood. 

Dr. Deepak Karan, a research scientist at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and author of a 2023 study on these mysterious C-shaped bubbles, highlighted the significance of these recent discoveries. 

“Within that close proximity, these two opposite-shaped plasma bubbles had never been thought of, never been imaged,” Dr. Karan said. “To have wind patterns change course in such a small area suggests some sort of strong turbulence — like a vortex, wind shear, or tornado-like activity — is likely at play in the atmosphere.”

“The fact that we have very different shapes of bubbles this close together tells us that the dynamics of the atmosphere is more complex than we expected,“ Dr. Klenzing added.

GOLD’s findings are notable for their clarity and consistency, thanks to the satellite’s geostationary orbit, which allows it to continuously monitor the same region of the Earth. This extended observation capability has enabled scientists to detect the persistent nature of these X- and C-shaped structures.

Since its launch in 2018, GOLD has only recorded two instances of C-shaped atmospheric structures being closely paired. Researchers say the bizarre X-shape anomaly has been detected “very clearly on one occasion and to some extent on other six occasions, during geomagnetically quiet periods.“ This suggests that this mysterious phenomenon, which researchers likened to atmospheric “alphabet soup,” is extremely rare. 

Nevertheless, these findings are significant as they could impact our understanding of how the ionosphere interacts with communication and navigation signals, which can be disrupted by such plasma structures. 

The presence of strong turbulence or localized disturbances in the ionosphere can lead to signal loss or degradation. Our reliance on technologies that depend on stable ionospheric conditions, such as GPS and satellite communications, makes understanding these influences increasingly critical.

Likewise, the mission’s findings underscore the complexity of the Earth’s atmosphere and the need for continued research to understand the various factors that influence its behavior. 

NASA says ongoing observations by GOLD, alongside data from other heliophysics missions, are expected to provide more insights into these phenomena. Scientists hope to use this information to shed more light on these enigmatic structures and their implications for our technological world.

Researchers concluded their recent study by noting, “A comprehensive understanding of the dynamics during the pre- to post-sunset period will not only advance our knowledge of the ionosphere’s response to external (lower atmospheric or geomagnetic) drivers but also plays a crucial role in the development of space weather forecasting capability.”

NASA scientists have discovered some unusual shapes high up in the Earth’s ionosphere, which is a layer stretching from 50 to 400 miles above the planet.

Normally, the ionosphere can get electrically charged, especially when influenced by space weather.

In addition to the X shapes, scientists have also found C-shaped bubbles in the ionosphere. These shapes can appear close to each other, indicating that the dynamics of the atmosphere are more complex than previously thought.

• Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/space/ }

23-08-2024 om 01:16 geschreven door peter  

LINK VIDEOS

• https://youtu.be/tNok1SexGA8

• https://youtu.be/B5Mdht_mcX8

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/  }

22-08-2024 om 23:40 geschreven door peter