Wil je een videoclip bekijken en stoort het X-files-deuntje jou daarbij. Schakel het deuntje gewoon uit door in deze kolon, helemaal beneden op de 2 witte balkjes in het blauwe cirkeltje te klikken, tot een pijltje verschijnt. Veel kijk- en luisterplezier en bedankt voor jouw bezoek.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
UFO'S - MET HET LAATSTE NIEUWS OVER UFO'S BOVEN BELGIË EN IN ANDERE LANDEN...
UFO's in België en de rest van de wereld In België heb je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE ww.ufo.be.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandeliiks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal. Since 02/01/2013 is Pieter not only president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
26-05-2018
Zonnestelsel in beginjaren geroosterd door supernova
Zonnestelsel in beginjaren geroosterd door supernova
Het zonnestelsel heeft in zijn beginjaren mogelijk flink te lijden gehad van een nabije supernova-explosie.
Tot deze conclusie komt een Nederlands/Hongaars team op basis van gedetailleerde computerberekeningen. Het supernova-scenario verklaart onder andere waardoor het baanvlak van de planeten gekanteld is ten opzichte van de evenaar van de zon en waarom het zonnestelsel aan de buitenkant abrupt ophoudt.
Het zonnestelsel kent verscheidene lastig te verklaren eigenaardigheden. Zo maakt het gemiddelde baanvlak van de planeten een hoek van 5,6 graden ten opzichte van de evenaar van de zon. Daarnaast houdt ons zonnestelsel al op bij 45 keer de afstand aarde-zon, terwijl er net daarbinnen een rijke ring van ruimtepuin is, de Kuipergordel. Bij veel andere sterren strekken dergelijke puinschijven zich doorgaans uit tot wel 400 keer de afstand aarde-zon.
Onderzoekers van de Universiteit Leiden en van de Hongaarse Academie van wetenschappen beargumenteren dat deze eigenaardigheden het gevolg zijn van een supernova-explosie dicht in de buurt van het jonge zonnestelsel. Onze zon bevond zich toen waarschijnlijk in een sterrenhoop van enkele duizenden sterren, waarvan er een als supernova ontploft kan zijn.
De onderzoekers hebben met in Leiden ontwikkelde simulatiesoftware berekend op welke afstand en in welke richting de supernova zich bevond. Ze komen uit bij een afstand van 0,5 tot 1,3 lichtjaar en een hoek van 35 tot 60 graden ten opzichte van de protoplanetaire stofschijf rond de zon.
Het afkappen en kantelen van de stofschijf om de zon werd volgens de onderzoekers niet veroorzaakt door de supernova zelf, maar door de nucleaire schokgolf van de gloeiendhete buitenlagen van de ontploffende ster die het zonnestelsel ramde. Er zat ongeveer dertig jaar tussen het ontploffen van de ster en het moment dat de nucleaire schokgolf het zonnestelsel bereikte. De aarde was toen nog niet gevormd, maar mogelijk zijn de sporen van de supernovaschokgolf nog wel zichtbaar in de chemische en isotopische samenstelling van de oudste gesteenten in het zonnestelsel.
With so many incredible, newly developing technologies, could we build a real-life Millennium Falcon? In short, no. But we're getting closer.
In the "Star Wars" universe, the Millennium Falcon is heralded as the coolest ship around. The cargo vessel that Han Solo originally won from Lando Calrissian in the Cloud City Sabacc Tournament, the Millennium Falcon lies at the center of some of the most incredible adventures in the series.
The Millennium Falcon's signature speed comes from its hyperdrive, a propulsion system that pushes the vessel to light speed — though Han Solo has famously boasted that the ship can travel even faster. The hyperdrive functions by using "hypermatter particles" to send the craft into hyperspace, an alternative dimension reached by traveling at or beyond the speed of light. This technique uses wrinkles in the fabric of space-time, or wormholes: pieces of the fabric that fold over to connect two otherwise-distant points.
Now, while the theory of general relativity does predict wormholes, they are still just a theoretical phenomenon. So, because we can't prove their existence, we certainly can't manipulate them for our own purposes. Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon, told our sister site Live Science, "You would need some very exotic type of matter in order to stabilize a wormhole, and it's not clear whether such matter exists in the universe."
Now, there is some excitement in the scientific community surrounding an engine called the EmDrive. This is not a hyperdrive, or a warp drive as some have suggested. But it bounces microwaves around a chamber as a substitute for propellant. Recently, researchers put the EmDrive to the testand found that the thrust it produced comes from some kind of electromagnetic interaction that is likely between the engine's power cables and Earth's magnetic field, according to their study This might not be the end of the EmDrive as a potential, future engine — but it certainly isn't a hyperdrive.
Illustrator Kemp Remillard detailed the interior of the Millennium Falcon.
Even if we suspend our disbelief and accept the ship's speed, another issue arises: g-forces. According to calculations from Wired, passengers aboard the Millennium Falcon could experience up to about 12 g's while traveling at the speeds portrayed in the films (though this might not be the case if they are traveling through hyperspace). This is comparable to being in a gravitational field 12 times higher than what we normally experience on Earth. ["Star Wars" Spaceships from a Galaxy Far, Far Away]
At 1 g, we can still push blood up to our brains, but as the g's increase, this becomes more difficult. Twelve g's is about the maximum that jet-fighter pilots can experience before passing out, but this assumes they're wearing g-suits, which squeeze the legs in high-g situations to prevent blood from being pushed down.
So, theoretically, without high-g suits, the human passengers aboard the Millennium Falcon would black out when the ship took high-g turns, even without traveling as fast as Han Solo has bragged it can.
Holochess
At Chewbacca's request, a hologram "chess," or holochess, table was installed on the Millennium Falcon so passengers could play Dejarik, a classic strategy game in the "Star Wars" universe. But while astronauts aboard the International Space Station won't be playing Chewie's favorite game anytime soon, hologram technology is inching its way into modern spacecraft.
In 2016, after some launch difficulties, two of Microsoft's HoloLens AR headsets traveled to the space station to aid crewmembers. Additionally, the innovators behind the Voxiebox have built an early version sort of holochess. You can't feel the pieces or move them with your hands — but this feature is not far off, and researchers have already gotten close.
Aboard most ships in the "Star Wars" universe, and throughout sci-fi stories, deflector shields are a staple security measure. Whenever conflict arises, deflectors go right up, keeping the ship intact despite enemy attacks. But is this just a well-worn science fiction trope? Not exactly.
Back in 2014, ExtremeTech profiled a team of students from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom who considered the possibility of using plasma to build such a deflector. The students took notice of the Earth's ionosphere, a part of the upper atmosphere that contains plasma.
Currently, we bounce communication signals off of the ionosphere's plasma to send them to different locations on Earth. This "invisible shield" around Earth was the inspiration for this team's suggestion that you could use and manipulate plasma to deflect electromagnetic radiation — such as that coming from an energy-based or laser weapon, possibly. Such a shield isn't technically feasible yet, but their general concept to use plasma to deflect radiation is certainly within the realm of possibility.
Additionally,in 2008, Ruth Bamford of the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England and her colleagues studied the possibility of deflecting radiation using a portable magnetic shield. While it's not the battle-ready deflector we've seen in Star Wars, it's definitely a step in that direction.
Other than its description as a power source for starships like the Millennium Falcon, the Quadex power core is a fairly mysterious technology. The series never explains how the power core operates, so it is equally possible and impossible that we could build one.
Quad Laser Cannons
Some of the Millennium Falcon's most powerful and most-used weapons, its quad laser cannons are also relatively feasible. The U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent years developing the closest thing we have to a "Star Wars" style laser cannon. It can fit on a fighter jet but is still powerful enough to shoot a 150-kilowatt energy beam.
Additionally, researchers have suggested that a coherent amplification network (CAN) laser, a beam created from multiple small lasers, could get rid of space debris surrounding Earth by vaporizing a thin layer of matter off of the surface of the space junk. This would push the debris downward, where it would burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
Laser weapons may currently be large, dangerous and difficult to create, but they are certainly possible.
Hodgepodge Design
The technologies aboard the Millennium Falcon are not a constant. The ship is an ever-evolving amalgamation of assorted, stolen, customized and found parts. It might seem odd that a highly capable future ship could be assembled this way — but when you think about current spaceflight advances, it makes sense.
The Millennium Falcon has a lot in common with SpaceX's Dragon, whose reusable design is optimized for efficient, sustainable launches. Similarly, the Millennium Falcon's design relies on the reuse of found parts.
With long-term space travel, tech aboard a ship would occasionally break, become obsolete, etc. It might not always be possible to 3D print new items or make repairs with what is already available on a ship. Future space travelers might do what Han Solo has done and repurpose found parts to efficiently survive in the cosmos.
The Millennium Falcon boasts a seemingly endless list of gadgets and capabilities. From its oversize sensor dish to its Gigyrodyne sublight engine, thrust-pressure manifold and sensor-proof smuggling compartments, the tech aboard this ship ranges from highly plausible to entirely fictional.
So, humanity is not quite ready to build a Millennium Falcon. Still, many developing technologies could one day make onboard tech like laser cannons and invisible deflector shields a reality. Until then, we can always watch Han Solo and company zip through the galaxy on one of science fiction's most iconic ships.
Jupiter's Great Red Spot Is Spectacular (and Weird) in This Juno Photo
Jupiter's Great Red Spot Is Spectacular (and Weird) in This Juno Photo
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
NASA's Juno spacecraft captured this image of Jupiter on April 1, 2018. Citizen-scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed data from Juno's JunoCam instrument into this stunning view.
A gorgeous photo by NASA's Juno spacecraft shows Jupiter as you've probably never seen it before.
"This new perspective of Jupiter from the south makes the Great Red Spot appear as though it is in northern territory," NASA officials wrote today (May 21) in a description of the image. "This view is unique to Juno and demonstrates how different our view is when we step off the Earth and experience the true nature of our three-dimensional universe."
The newly released photo is a composite of multiple images snapped by Juno's JunoCam on April 1, during the spacecraft's most recent close flyby of the solar system's largest planet. Juno took the constituent photos from a distance of 10,768 miles (17,329 kilometers) to 42,849 miles (68,959 km) above Jupiter's cloud tops, NASA officials said.
Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran then processed the raw JunoCam data into the finished photo that was released today. (Anyone can do such processing work; to learn more, go to the JunoCam site.)
The $1.1 billion Juno mission launched in August 2011 and arrived at Jupiter in July 2016. The probe orbits on a highly elliptical path, zooming above the gas giant's poles once every 53 days.
The solar-powered Juno makes most of its scientific observations during these close approaches, gathering information about Jupiter's composition, structure and gravitational and magnetic fields. The probe's data should help researchers better understand how Jupiter, and by extension the solar system, formed and evolved, mission team members have said.
The April 1 encounter was Juno's 12th science flyby of Jupiter. The 13th will occur on Thursday (May 24).
The US Department of Defense funded a series of studies on advanced aerospace technologies, including warp drives.
The studies came out of a program that also funded research into UFO sightings.
One report describes the possibility of using dark energy to warp space and effectively travel faster than light.
However, a theoretical physicist says there's "zero chance that anyone within our lifetimes or the next 1,000 years" will see it happen.
Sometime after August 2008, the US Department of Defense contracted dozens of researchers to look into some very, very out-there aerospace technologies, including never-before-seen methods of propulsion, lift, and stealth.
Two researchers came back with a 34-page report for the propulsion category, titled "Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions."
The document is dated April 2, 2010, though it was only recently released by the Defense Intelligence Agency. (Business Insider first learned about in a post by Paul Szoldra at Task & Purpose.)
The authors suggest we may not be too far away from cracking the mysteries of higher, unseen dimensions and negative or "dark energy," a repulsive force that physicists believe is pushing the universe apart at ever-faster speeds.
"Control of this higher dimensional space may bе а source of technological control оvеr the dark energy density and could ultimately play а role in the development of exotic propulsion technologies; specifically, а warp drive," the report says, adding: "Trips to the planets within our own solar system would take hours rather than years, and journeys to local star system would be measured in weeks rather than hundreds of thousands of years."
However, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who studies and follows the topics covered by the report, had a lot of cold water to pour on the report's optimism.
"It's bits and pieces of theoretical physics dressed up as if it has something to do with potentially real-world applications, which it doesn't," Carroll said. "This is not crackpot. This is not the Maharishi saying we're going to use spirit energy to fly off the ground — this is real physics. But this is not something that's going to connect with engineering anytime soon, probably anytime ever."
James Т. Lacatski, a DIA official listed as a contact on the report, did not immediately to respond a query from Business Insider.
Where the warp-drive study came from
The Pentagon building in 2010.Mariordo Camila Ferreira and Mario Duran/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The nature of this study is still making its way to the public.
What is known is that it's an "acquisition threat support" reference document, which helps the US military anticipate or describe new enemy technologies — apparently including (very, very) notional ones. It was also one work in "а series of advanced technology reports" for something called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program.
The New York Times and Politico revealed AATIP's existence in December. The outlets said Harry Reid, the former US senator from Nevada, helped organize it and secure millions in secret government funding — sometimes called "black money" — for the effort.
A large share of this money reportedly went to Robert Bigelow, a real-estate mogul who's working to build private space stations through Bigelow Aerospace. Bigelow, a friend of Reid's, has for years funded his own UFO research.
The billionaire formed a separate entity, called Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, to secure the government funding and hired 46 researchers and "dozens of other support personnel," KLAS-TV said.
An anonymous senior intelligence official told Politico that AATIP began mostly to root out the existence of unknown Chinese and Russian military technologies. But after a couple of years, "the consensus was we really couldn't find anything of substance," the official said.
"They produced reams of paperwork," he added. "After all of that, there was really nothing there that we could find."
AAWSAP and AATIP reportedly ran out of funding in 2011 or 2012.
Scientists are also skeptical of UFOs, even after viewing spooky videos obtained by AATIP, one of which shows an undated encounter with "an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves," The Times wrote.
Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, previously told Business Insider that after 50 years of reported alien visits, "the really good evidence that we're being visited still has failed to surface."
"It is a little odd that aliens would come hundreds and hundreds of light-years to do nothing," Shostak added.
The larger program that looked into the feasibility of warp drives, wormholes, and stargates is meeting similar scrutiny from established experts.
The physics of warp drives
An illustration of a warp field generated by a theoretical device called an Alcubierre drive. A spaceship inside might be able to move faster than light by contracting the fabric of space ahead of it and expanding the fabric of space behind it with negative energy.AllenMcC/Wikipedia (CC BY-A 3.0)
In the warp-drive study, the authors laid out several well-established ideas in physics.
Those concepts include dark energy; general relativity, pioneered by Albert Einstein, that predicted some bizarre yet real phenomena in the universe, like the warping of space-time and gravitational waves; the Casimir effect, which describes the existence of a quantum "vacuum energy"; and M-theory, the idea that perhaps seven extra dimensions — which a warp drive could exploit — may be wrapped up in the four we're familiar with, including time.
It then mashes this work together to lay out a potential use of these properties that'd circumvent Einstein's cardinal rule: Nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum.
"If one is to realistically entertain the notion of interstellar exploration in timeframes of а human lifespan, а dramatic shift in the traditional approach to spacecraft propulsion is necessary," said the report, which goes on to suggest that a warp drive might be feasible.
Department of Defense via Public Intelligence
The study includes a table of various destinations and how quickly they might be reached by bending space-time to travel 100 times the speed of light.The way this might work, the report says, is by using a lot of dark energy to expand an extra dimension into a "bubble." Such a bubble would be made large enough to fit a spaceship of perhaps 100 cubic meters, roughly the size of a semitrailer truck.
A contracting region of space-time in front of the ship, plus an expanding region behind it, would then propel the bubble and ship down a sort of space-time tube without technically exceeding the speed of light.
Carroll also says the concept of a warp drive "is not crackpot" — Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist, invented the concept in 1994.
"You can't go faster than the speed of light, but what you can imagine doing is effectively twisting space-time so that it looks like you're moving faster than the speed of light," Carroll said. "If you want to go to Alpha Centauri, for example, you can ask yourself: 'Well, could I bend space-time so that Alpha Centauri is next to me, so that it takes a day to go there, rather than tens of [thousands of] years? Can I make the warping of space-time do that?' And the answer is sure, you can do that."
But Carroll says the DIA report goes too far in its analysis.
"There is something called a warp drive, there are extra dimensions, there is a Casimir effect, and there's dark energy — all of these things are true," he said. "But there's zero chance that anyone within our lifetimes or the next 1,000 years are going to build anything that makes use of any of these ideas, for defense purposes or anything like that."
The problems and perils of faster-than-light travel
An illustration of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or wormhole in the fabric of space.Shutterstock
Carrol said warp drives were so removed from plausible reality because no one knows what negative energy is, how to make it, or how to store it, let alone put it to use.
What's more, the amount of negative energy you'd need to reach a place like Alpha Centauri — the nearest star system to Earth, at 4.367 light-years away — in a couple of years with a 100-cubic-meter ship is truly astronomical.
"If you took the entire Earth and annihilated it into energy, that's how much energy you'd need, except you'd need a negative amount of that, which no one has any clue how to make," Carroll said. "We're not taking the atoms of the Earth and dispersing them like the Death Star would do — we're making them cease to exist."
Then this energy has to be captured, stored, and used with 100% efficiency.
"It's completely crazy talk," Carroll said. "It's not something like, 'Oh, we need better transistors.' This is something that is not anywhere within the realm of feasibility."
The study says its conclusions are speculative, acknowledges the negative-energy figure "is, indeed, an incredible number," and adds that "a full understanding of the true nature of dark energy may be many years away."
However, it suggests that "experimental breakthroughs at the Large Hadron Collider оr developments in the field of M-theory could lead to а quantum leap in our understanding of this unusual form of energy and perhaps help to direct technological innovations."
Nearly a decade on, none of these developments have panned out. The LHC has yet to find any evidence of particles that'd crack the mysteries of dark energy, and experiments have not really advanced M-theory.
But assuming negative energy could somehow be extracted, a planet's worth of exotic matter could be fed into a spaceship's warp-drive engines, and a suitable destination could be picked, the crew might encounter numerous show-stopping problems.
Interstellar travelers may lose control of their ship the moment they start it because of the warping of space itself. Hawking radiation, theoretically found at the edges of black holes and other highly warped regions of space, might roast passengers while shutting down their warp field. And slowing down may be deadly — several light-years' worth of cosmic dust and gas between the origin and destination might turn into a dangerous shockwave of high-energy particles and radiation upon arrival.
"It's possible in the sense that I can't actually rule it out, but I don't think it's actually possible," Carroll said of warp drives and faster-than-light travel. "I think if we knew physics better, we'd just say, 'No, you can't do that.'"
Is Pluto stiekem een gigantische komeet? 24 mei 2018Caroline Kraaijvanger7 Onderzoekers suggereren voorzichtig dat de dwergplaneet is opgebouwd uit een miljard kometen. Aan de nieuwe theorie liggen twee datasets ten grondslag. De eerste bestaat uit gegev
Is Pluto stiekem een gigantische komeet?
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Onderzoekers suggereren voorzichtig dat de dwergplaneet is opgebouwd uit een miljard kometen.
Aan de nieuwe theorie liggen twee datasets ten grondslag. De eerste bestaat uit gegevens verzameld door New Horizons. Deze ruimtesonde scheerde in 2015 langs Pluto en gaf ons de eerste close-upbeelden van de dwergplaneet en onthulde over welke elementen Pluto beschikt. Daarnaast maakten de onderzoekers gebruik van gegevens verzameld door ruimtesonde Rosetta. Deze ruimtesonde cirkelde tussen 2014 en 2016 rond komeet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (ook wel 67P genoemd).
Gletsjer In hun studie richten de onderzoekers zich met name op Sputnik Planitia, een enorme gletsjer op Pluto. New Horizons heeft onthuld dat het ijs waaruit deze gletsjer is opgebouwd bijzonder rijk is aan stikstof. Grote vraag is natuurlijk waar dat stikstof vandaan komt. Onderzoekers van het Southwest Research Institute hebben daar echter verfrissende ideeën over. “Wij ontdekten een intrigerende consistentie tussen de geschatte hoeveelheid stikstof in de gletsjer en de hoeveelheid die we zouden verwachten als Pluto ontstaan is door het samenklonteren van grofweg een miljard kometen of andere Kuipergordelobjecten die een vergelijkbare samenstelling hebben als 67P, de komeet die door Rosetta is verkend,” zo stelt onderzoeker Christopher Glein.
Koolstofmonoxide Het is een interessante theorie. Maar kan die ook verklaren waarom er zo weinig koolstofmonoxide op Pluto te vinden is? De onderzoekers denken van wel. De beperkte hoeveelheid koolstofmonoxide in de atmosfeer zou verklaard kunnen worden doordat het zit opgeslagen in ijs aan het oppervlak óf doordat het vernietigd is door blootstelling aan vloeibaar water. “Ons onderzoek suggereert dat Pluto’s oorspronkelijke chemische samenstelling – geërfd van komeetachtige bouwblokken – veranderd is door vloeibaar water, misschien zelfs een ondergrondse oceaan,” stelt Glein.
Hier zie je Sputnik Planitia: een gletsjer die onder meer rijk is aan stikstof.
Afbeelding: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI.
Andere theorie De onderzoekers verkenden ook nog een tweede theorie omtrent de totstandkoming van Pluto. Deze theorie gaat ervan uit dat Pluto is ontstaan uit heel koud ijs met een chemische samenstelling die vergelijkbaar is met die van de zon. Deze theorie bleek wat we op Pluto zien, redelijk te kunnen verklaren. Maar de theorie dat de dwergplaneet uit talloze kometen is opgebouwd biedt meer opties om de verhouding tussen koolstofmonoxide en stikstof te verklaren. Vandaar dat de onderzoekers die theorie voor nu het voordeel van de twijfel geven.
Scenario Het leidt tot het volgende scenario: kometen rijk aan stikstof en koolstofmonoxide klonteren samen en vormen Pluto. Chemische processen in een ondergrondse oceaan zorgt ervoor dat grote hoeveelheden koolstofmonoxide worden vernietigd. Grote hoeveelheden atmosferisch stikstof ontsnappen aan Pluto’s greep en duiken de ruimte in. Het stikstof aan het oppervlak – in de vorm van ijs – houdt echter moedig stand en hoopt zich door de jaren heen op in de gigantische Sputnik Planitia-gletsjer. Komeetinslagen brengen nog wat extra koolstofmonoxide op Pluto en dat mengt zich met stikstof. “Dit scenario is zeker niet de enige mogelijkheid,” zo benadrukken de onderzoekers. Maar het is wel mooi in lijn met wat we op Pluto zien.
Of Pluto echt uit een miljard kometen bestaat, zal moeten blijken uit vervolgonderzoek. De wetenschappers benadrukken in hun paper dat er nog heel wat vragen zijn die beantwoord moeten worden alvorens we met zekerheid meer kunnen zeggen over hoe Pluto is ontstaan. Sommige van die vragen kunnen we beantwoorden aan de hand van de data die door New Horizons is verzameld. Andere vragen zullen pas een antwoord krijgen als een nieuw ruimtevaartuig langs de dwergplaneet schiet.
Dino-Killing Asteroid Impact Warmed Earth's Climate for 100,000 Years
Dino-Killing Asteroid Impact Warmed Earth's Climate for 100,000 Years
By Tereza Pultarova, Space.com Contributor
An artist's rendering from 1994, illustrating the Chicxulub asteroid impact that killed off most of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.
Credit: Donald E. Davis/NASA/JPL
Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere after the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid, which ended the era of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago, warmed the Earth's climate for 100,000 years, a new study has revealed.
The study, based on an analysis of fossil records, suggested that the Earth's overall temperature increased by 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) over that time.
Scientists have long theorized that after the piece of space rock with a diameter of 6 to 9 miles (7 to 14 kilometers) smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula near today's town of Chicxulub in Mexico, the temperature of the planet first rose sharply for minutes or hours, MacLeod said. After that, it plunged down for months to decades, because the huge amount of dust and soot thrown into the atmosphere by the impact blocked the sun's rays. Eventually, however, carbon dioxide released during the impact led to global warming.
MacLeod's study is the first to present empirical evidence of how long this greenhouse gas-related global warming lasted and how substantial it was.
"We thought that we could resolve this question by looking at fossilized bits of fish teeth, scales and bones from the El Kef section in Tunisia," MacLeod told Space.com, referring to a paleontological site in northwestern Tunisia known for having one of the world's best-preserved fossil records from the period before and after the Chicxulub impact
"This place is known for having a beautiful record across the interval that we are looking at — the so called Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary — the mass extinction event following the Chicxulub impact."
The researchers looked at the concentrations of different oxygen isotopes in the fossils. These isotopes differ in the number of neutrons in the oxygen atom and, according to MacLeod, behave slightly differently from one another.
"One of the differences is, as temperature increases, the amount of the light oxygen isotope, oxygen 16, in a mineral increases relatively," MacLeod said.
"We are measuring the ratio of oxygen 16 to oxygen 18. Every 1 part per 1,000 that the ratio changes correlates to an about 4.5- to 5-degree [C, or 8.1 to 9 degrees F] change in temperature."
The researchers analyzed 40 samples taken from the site in Tunisia: 10 samples from the 50,000-year period before the impact, 20 samples from the 100,000 years immediately after the impact and additional 10 samples from the following 200,0000 years.
"We found that there was a really big difference in oxygen isotopes between these three sets of samples — unambiguous," said MacLeod.
He said he and his team now want to look at fossil samples from other parts of the world and check for similar patterns.
"It's one thing to find 5 degrees [C, 9 degrees F] of warming in North Africa. It's even more impressive to find 5 degrees of warming in North Africa and perhaps 10 degrees [C, 18 degrees F] of warming off the coast of Australia," he said. "That would really strengthen the idea that it's a global signal and a greenhouse gas-related change."
The study, MacLeod said, not only sheds more light on what happened to the Earth's systems after the devastating collision, but it also raises questions about the consequences of current human activities.
"If I were to draw a line under the lessons of this study for the modern era, it would be to contemplate the idea that what we are doing in our lifetimes will affect the Earth for the next 100,000 years, which is pretty daunting," MacLeod said.
Planetoïde-inslag die dino's fataal werd, verstoorde het klimaat sterker dan wij nu doen
Planetoïde-inslag die dino's fataal werd, verstoorde het klimaat sterker dan wij nu doen
Caroline Kraaijvanger
De aarde warmde rap 5 graden Celsius op.
Zo’n 66 miljoen jaar geleden klapte er een enorme ruimtesteen op de aarde. Het leidde tot een massa-extinctie, waarvan de dinosaurussen het bekendste slachtoffer zijn. Over de exacte oorzaken van die massa-extinctie is al veel gespeculeerd. Sommige onderzoekers denken dat de inslag leidde tot een enorme afkoeling van de aarde; de inslag zou grote branden hebben veroorzaakt waardoor roet in de atmosfeer werd geslingerd dat zonlicht tegenhield. Die afkoeling – recent onderzoek suggereert dat de temperaturen tot wel 26 graden Celsius daalden – zou een vernietigend effect hebben gehad op de aarde. Maar er zijn ook wetenschappers die stellen dat de inslag juist leidde tot opwarming. En wel doordat er na de inslag heel veel koolstof vrijkwam uit de aardkorst en ook de branden behoorlijk wat koolstof de lucht in slingerden. En die opwarming zou vervolgens heel wat plant- en diersoorten fataal zijn geworden.
Opwarming Beide scenario’s lijken heel aannemelijk. Maar er kan er maar eentje kloppen. Welke? Dat hebben Amerikaanse onderzoekers nu proberen vast te stellen. En ze komen tot de conclusie dat een rappe opwarming het meest aannemelijke scenario is.
Zuurstofisotopen Ze baseren zich op in Tunesië teruggevonden resten van vissen. Denk aan botten, maar ook tanden en schubben. De resten dateerden uit de tijd vóór en de periode na de planetoïde-inslag die onder meer de dino’s fataal werd. De onderzoekers richtten zich op de verhouding tussen twee zuurstofisotopen – zuurstof-16 en zuurstof-18 – in de dierlijke resten. Die verhouding is namelijk afhankelijk van de temperatuur en veranderingen in die verhouding kunnen dan ook wijzen op een temperatuurverandering. En jawel, na de planetoïde-inslag bleek die verhouding te veranderen, waarbij zuurstof-18 afnam. Het wijst op een temperatuurstijging van zo’n 5 graden Celsius. De resten onthullen bovendien dat de temperatuur lang hoog bleef; het duurde zeker 100.000 jaar voor de aarde weer afkoelde, zo schrijven de onderzoekers in het blad Science.
Het onderzoek geeft niet alleen meer inzicht in wat er 66 miljoen jaar geleden is gebeurd. Het heeft mogelijk ook implicaties voor de toekomst. Want net als 66 miljoen jaar geleden wordt het klimaatsysteem op dit moment flink verstoord. Niet door een inslag, maar door ons mensen. Door eerdere verstoringen in het klimaatsysteem te bestuderen, kunnen we een beter beeld krijgen van de impact die de moderne verstoring op onze planeet gaat hebben. Probleem is alleen dat de meeste historische verstoringen van het klimaatsysteem veel trager gingen dan vandaag de dag en daarom niet zo representatief zijn. Deze studie laat zien dat de klimaatverandering aan het einde van het Krijt – oftewel 66 miljoen jaar geleden – daarop een uitzondering vormt. Het is de enige klimaatverandering die sneller ging en ietsje heftiger was dan de klimaatverandering waar we nu middenin zitten. En daarmee kan deze klimaatverandering ons mogelijk een beter inzicht geven in hoe onze aarde onder invloed van onze uitstoot gaat veranderen. Erg rooskleurig lijkt het er op grond van die historische klimaatverandering – die maar liefst 100.000 jaar standhield – niet uit te zien.
By comparing data from the 1st-ever Pluto flyby and a 1st-ever comet rendezvous mission, scientists developed what they call ‘the giant comet’ model of Pluto formation.
When the New Horizons spacecraft swept past the Pluto system in July 2015, it captured this image of a glacial expanse rich in nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane ices. This is Sputnik Planitia. It forms the left lobe of the large, heart-shaped feature on Pluto’s surface.
Image via NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/SwRI.
The idea of smaller bodies in space sticking together to make larger ones isn’t new. In fact, Earth and the other major planets are thought to have formed in just that way, billions of years ago, after what astronomers call planetesimals – rocklike objects orbiting the young sun – began colliding with one another. So the idea of Pluto forming from a billion comets seems logical enough. After all, Pluto orbits in the outer solar system, where things are colder. The outer solar system is the realm of icy comets, still sometimes called dirty snowballs. Since the New Horizons spacecraft passed Pluto in July 2015, astronomers have had unprecedented data about this planet. That’s how two scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, were able to scrutinize this idea, developing what they call the giant comet cosmochemical model of Pluto formation.
The SwRI scientists used New Horizons’ data to take a hard look at Pluto’s composition. They compared what they learned about Pluto with data from a first-of-its kind comet mission, called Rosetta. In the Rosetta mission, a spacecraft accompanied a comet in its orbit around the sun for about two years.
Tombaugh Regio is the name for Pluto’s heart-shaped feature. Sputnik Planitia forms the heart’s left lobe.
Image via New Horizonsspacecraft/NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.
The SwRI scientists looked specifically at the nitrogen-rich ice in a region of Pluto called Sputnik Planitia. That is the large glacier that forms the left lobe of the bright heart-shaped feature seen in New Horizon images. Christopher Gleinof SwRI, the new study’s lead author, commented in a statement:
We found an intriguing consistency between the estimated amount of nitrogen inside the glacier and the amount that would be expected if Pluto was formed by the agglomeration of roughly a billion comets or other Kuiper Belt objects similar in chemical composition to 67P, the comet explored by Rosetta.
He added:
Our research suggests that Pluto’s initial chemical makeup, inherited from cometary building blocks, was chemically modified by liquid water, perhaps even in a subsurface ocean.
For their new study, the scientists also investigated a possible model of Pluto’s formation, in which the dwarf planet formed from very cold ices with chemical composition more closely matching that of the sun than comets. They commented:
…the solar model also satisfies some constraints. While the research pointed to some interesting possibilities, many questions remain to be answered.
New Horizons gave us our first glimpse of Pluto when it swept past the planet in 2015. It also provided information on the composition of Pluto’s atmosphere and surface. These maps — assembled using New Horizons data — indicate regions rich in methane (CH4), nitrogen (N2), carbon monoxide (CO) and water (H2O) ices. Sputnik Planitia shows an especially strong signature of nitrogen near the equator. SwRI scientists combined these data with Rosetta’s comet 67P data to develop a proposed “giant comet” model for Pluto formation.
Image via NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/SwRI.
Bottom line: By comparing data from the 1st-ever Pluto flyby and a 1st-ever comet rendezvous mission, scientists developed what they call ‘the giant comet’ model of Pluto formation.
It’s often said that if you can remember the 60’s, you probably weren’t there. A similar adage may be true about another event: If you can remember seeing the EmDrive work, you probably weren’t there. That’s because the EmDrive doesn’t work, at least according to German scientists who attempted to recreate NASA’s “successful” experiment and showed that it couldn’t have worked because it’s impossible. When in the name of Nikolas Tesla and Newton’s Third Law of Motion did that ever stop anybody?
A corollary to the aforementioned EmDrive adage is: If you can explain it, you don’t understand it. In the simplest of terms, the EmDrive is a conical radio frequency (RF) resonant cavity thruster that was said to create propellantless propulsion by shooting microwaves inside the cone which pushed against the narrow front end and propelled the craft forward … to infinity and beyond. First designed by engineer Roger Sawyer in 2001, it challenged scientists (not to mention Newton’s Third Law of Motion) until 2014 when NASA claimed its Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory (Eagleworks Laboratories) had defeated “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” and created measurable propellantless thrust.
“Bull hockey!” (or some form of that) said everyone who believed Newton’s Law was one of the things holding our fragile universe together. ‘Everyone’ includes a team in Germany led by Martin Tajmar of the Institute of Aerospace Engineering at Technische Universität Dresden. They set out to either create their own better EmDrive or prove NASA wrong and Sir Isaac right. According to their paper, presented last week at the Space Propulsion 2018 conference held in Seville, Spain, the researchers followed NASA’s design, built an EmDrive called SpaceDrive, tested it in a vacuum and measured … something. Was it propellantless thrust?
NASA’s EmDrive
Rest easy, Sir Isaac.
“First measurement campaigns were carried out with both thruster models reaching thrust/thrust-to-power levels comparable to claimed values. However, we found that e.g. magnetic interaction from twisted-pair cables and amplifiers with the Earth’s magnetic field can be a significant error source for EMDrives.”
It was the cables! Tajmar’s team determined that what NASA detected and thought to be propellantless thrust from the EmDrive was actually just a reaction between the EmDrive’s twisted-pair cables and Earth’s magnetic field. What is the German word for ‘Gotcha!’?
So German space travelers won’t be flying to infinity and beyond in an EmDrive-powered spacecraft anytime soon. However, the team made sure to point out to their investors and donors that the project was not a total loss.
“At least, SpaceDrive is an excellent educational project by developing highly demanding test setups, evaluating theoretical models and possible experimental errors. It’s a great learning experience with the possibility to find something that can drive space exploration into its next generation.”
The US Department of Defense funded a series of studies on advanced aerospace technologies, including warp drives.
The studies came out of a program that also funded research into UFO sightings.
One report describes the possibility of using dark energy to warp space and effectively travel faster than light.
However, a theoretical physicist says there's "zero chance that anyone within our lifetimes or the next 1,000 years" will see it happen.
Sometime after August 2008, the US Department of Defense contracted dozens of researchers to look into some very, very out-there aerospace technologies, including never-before-seen methods of propulsion, lift, and stealth.
Two researchers came back with a 34-page report for the "propulsion" category titled, "Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions".
The document is dated April 2, 2010, though it was only recently released by the Defense Intelligence Agency. (Business Insider first learned about in a post by Paul Szoldra at Task & Purpose.) The authors suggest we may not be too far away from cracking the mysteries of higher, unseen dimensions and negative or "dark energy" — a repulsive force that physicists believe is pushing the universe apart at ever-faster speeds.
"Control of this higher dimensional space may bе а source of technological control оvеr the dark energy density and could ultimately play а role in the development of exotic propulsion technologies; specifically, а warp drive," the authors write. "[T]rips to the planets within our own solar system would take hours rather than years, and journeys to local star system would be measured in weeks rather than hundreds of thousands of years."
However, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who studies and follows the topics covered by the report, had a lot of cold water to pour on the report's optimism.
"It's bits and pieces of theoretical physics dressed up as if it has something to do with potentially real-world applications, which it doesn't." Carroll said. "This is not crackpot. This is not the Maharajah saying we're going to use spirit energy to fly off the ground — this is real physics. But this is not something that's going to connect with engineering anytime soon, probably anytime ever."
James Т. Lacatski, a Defense Intelligence Agency official listed as a contact on the report, did not immediately to respond a query from Business Insider.
The nature of this study is still making its way to the public.
What is known is that it's an "acquisition threat support" reference document, which helps the US military anticipate or describe new enemy technologies — apparently including (very, very) notional ones. It was also one work in "а series of advanced technology reports" for something called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP.
This was a larger program that included Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program — an effort to investigate alleged UFO sightings by military personnel, according a recent story by KLAS-TV in Las Vegas.
The New York Times and Politico revealed AATIP's existence in December. The outlets said former Nevada senator Harry Reid helped organize it and secure millions in secret government funding (sometimes called "black money") for the effort.
A large share of this money reportedly went to Robert Bigelow — a real-estate mogul who's working to build private space stations through Bigelow Aerospace, is a friend of Reid's, and someone who has funded his own UFO research for years. The billionaire reportedly formed a separate entity, called Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, to secure the government funding and use it to hire 46 researchers and "dozens of other support personnel," KLAS-TV said.
An anonymous senior intelligence official told Politico that AATIP began mostly to root out the existence of unknown Chinese and Russian military technologies. But after a couple of years, "the consensus was we really couldn't find anything of substance," the official said. "They produced reams of paperwork. After all of that there was really nothing there that we could find."
Scientists are also skeptical of UFOs, even after viewing spooky videos obtained by AATIP, one of which shows an undated encounter with "an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves," the Times wrote.
Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute previously told Business Insider that, after 50 years of reported alien visits, "the really good evidence that we're being visited still has failed to surface." He added: "It is a little odd that aliens would come hundreds and hundreds of light-years to do nothing."
The larger program that looked into the feasibility of warp drives, wormholes, and stargates is meeting similar scrutiny from established experts.
The physics of warp drives
An illustration of a warp field generated by a theoretical device called an Alcubierre drive. A spaceship inside might be able to move faster than light by contracting the fabric of space ahead of it and expanding the fabric of space behind it with negative energy.
In the warp-drive study, the authors laid out several well-established ideas in physics.
Those concepts include dark energy; general relativity, which Albert Einstein pioneered and predicted some bizarre-yet-real phenomena in the universe (like the warping of spacetime and gravitational waves); the Casimir effect, which describes the existence of a quantum "vacuum energy"; and M-theory — the idea that perhaps seven extra dimensions (which a warp drive could exploit) may be wrapped up in the four we're familiar with, including time.
It then mashes this work together to lay out a potential use of these properties that'd circumvent Einstein's cardinal rule: Nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum.
"If one is to realistically entertain the notion of interstellar exploration in timeframes of а human lifespan, а dramatic shift in the traditional approach to spacecraft propulsion is necessary," said the report, which goes on to suggest that a warp drive might be feasible.
The study includes a table of various destinations and how quickly they might be reached by bending spacetime to travel 100 times faster than light.
The way this might work, the report says, is by using a lot of dark (or negative) energy to expand an extra dimension into a "bubble." Such a bubble would be made large enough to fit a spaceship of perhaps 100 cubic meters — roughly the size of a semi-trailer truck.
A contracting region of spacetime in front of the ship, plus an expanding region behind it, would then propel the bubble and ship down a sort of spacetime tube without technically exceeding the speed of light.
Carroll also said that the concept of a warp drive "is not crackpot" — Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist, invented the concept in 1994.
"You can't go faster than the speed of light. But what you can can imagine doing is effectively twisting spacetime so that it looks like you're moving faster than the speed of light," Carroll said. "If you want to go to Alpha Centauri, for example, you can ask yourself, 'Well, could I bend spacetime so that Alpha Centauri is next to me, so that it takes a day to go there, rather than tens of [thousands of] years? Can I make the warping of spacetime do that?' And the answer is sure, you can do that."
But Carroll said the DIA report goes too far in its analysis.
"There is something called a warp drive, there are extra dimensions, there is a Casimir effect, and there's dark energy. All of these things are true," he said. "But there's zero chance that anyone within our lifetimes, or the next 1,000 years, are going to build anything that makes use of any of these ideas, for defense purposes or anything like that."
The problems and perils of faster-than-light travel
An illustration of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or wormhole in the fabric of space.
Carrol said warp drives are so removed from plausible reality because no one knows what negative energy is, how to make it, or how to store it, let alone put it to use.
What's more, the amount of negative energy you'd need to reach a place like Alpha Centauri — the nearest star system to Earth, at 4.367 light-years away — in a couple years with a 100-cubic-meter ship is truly astronomical.
"If you took the entire Earth and annihilated it into energy, that's how much energy you'd need, except you'd need a negative amount of that, which no one has any clue how to make," Carroll said. "We're not taking the atoms of the Earth and dispersing them like the Death Star would do. We're making them cease to exist."
Then this energy has to be captured, stored, and used with 100% efficiency.
"It's completely crazy talk," Carroll said. "It's not something like, 'Oh, we need better transistors.' This is something that is not anywhere within the realm of feasibility."
Shutterstock
The study states that its conclusions are speculative, admits the negative-energy figure "is, indeed, an incredible number," and adds that "a full understanding of the true nature of dark energy may be many years away."
However, it suggests "that experimental breakthroughs at the Large Hadron Collider оr developments in the field of M-theory could lead to а quantum leap in our understanding of this unusual form of energy and perhaps help to direct technological innovations."
Nearly a decade on, none of these developments have panned out. The LHC has yet to find any evidence of particles that'd crack the mysteries of dark energy, nor have experiments really advanced M-theory.
But assuming negative energy could somehow be extracted, a planet's worth of exotic matter fed into a spaceship's warp drive engines, and a suitable destination picked out, the crew might encounter a number of show-stopping problems.
Interstellar travelers may lose control of their ship the moment they start it due to the warping of space itself. Hawking radiation — which is theoretically found at the edges of black holes and other highly warped regions of space — might roast passengers while shutting down their warp field. And slowing down may be deadly: Several light-years' worth of cosmic dust and gas between the origin and destination might turn into a dangerous shockwave of high-energy particles and radiation upon arrival.
"It's possible in the sense that I can't actually rule it out, but I don't think it's actually possible," Carroll said of warp drives and faster-than-light travel. "I think if we knew physics better, we'd just say, 'No, you can't do that.'"
RUSSIA DECLASSIFIED SECRET IMAGES FROM VENUS THAT SHOW EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE
RUSSIA DECLASSIFIED SECRET IMAGES FROM VENUS THAT SHOW EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE
The Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences published a series of photographs, taken by the Venera probe which allegedly show evidence of living organisms on Venus, one of the most inhospitable places for humans in the solar system. Venus, the second planet from the sun is the most similar planet in our solar system in terms of size and structure to Earth. In terms of the surface, it is anything but Earth-like.
It is the hottest planet in the solar system, mainly due to its atmosphere which is 97 percent carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.
The constant temperature on Venus is 480 degrees Celsius, a temperature which is hot enough to melt lead and it even hotter than the nearest planet to the Sun, Mercury.
According to Russian scientist Leonid Ksanfomaliti, this image, taken from a Russian probe that landed on Venus in 1982, we can see a scorpion-shaped life form
According to an explanation by Leonid Ksanfomaliti, doctor of physical and mathematical science, at the Institute for Space Research, the images taken 30 years ago reveal the movement of extremely strange objects on the surface of Venus.
NASA quickly went on to debunk the discovery. As explained, the ‘disc’ that is seen moving on the surface is a lens cap, and the ‘scorpion-like-creature’ proposed by Ksanfomaliti is actually ‘noise’ in a second-hand picture which isn’t present in the original image.
Ksanfomaliti believes that in the images, a scorpion-shaped creature, a disk and a ‘black flap’ are visible moving in front of the onboard camera of the Venera 13.
According to reports from a Russian news agency, Ksanfomaliti explained in an article for the Russian journal Solar System Research magazine: ‘They all ’emerge, fluctuate and disappear.’
‘What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus, let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living,’ he added.
But American counterparts seem to firmly disagree with Ksanfomaliti. Ted Stryk who is a photo analyst at NASA says it is more likely that the disc Ksanfomaliti is talking about could have come from the spacecraft.
‘Venera-13 had two cameras, one in front and one in back. The one image shows the front camera lens cap and the other shows the rear camera lens cap, not one lens cap that moved,’ he says, in comments on Life’s Little Mysteries.
NASA says there is no way that anything can survive on Venus today. However, scientists have not ruled out that once, in the distant past, Venus might have supported life, in a time when the planet might have had giant oceans and possibly life before the ‘greenhouse effect’ created the temperatures that rule over the planet today.
‘Current theories suggest that Venus and the Earth may have started out alike. There might have been a lot of water on Venus and there might have been a lot of carbon dioxide on Earth,’ Professor Andrew Ingersoll of Caltech said in a paper published in Astrobiology in 2004.
Images of the surface of Venus taken by the Soviet Venera-13 descent module in 1982.
The problem with science and scholars in search for extraterrestrial life is that mankind believes that for life to exist elsewhere in the solar system or universe, a planet should have a similar climate and conditions to those of Earth.
What if elsewhere, on Venus perhaps, there are living beings which need scorching temperatures in order to survive, beings that can breathe carbon dioxide and cannot survive with water or oxygen. In order to search more adequately for extraterrestrial life, we need to change the conditions and patterns of extraterrestrial life.
Pluto might not officially be a planet anymore, but that doesn’t make it’s any less interesting.
One of the most important objects of inquiry regarding the distant dwarf planet has to do with its formation. Now, thanks to unprecedented observations carried out by spacecraft like New Horizons and Rosetta, scientists are coming close to understanding how Pluto came to be. One of the craziest, but still plausible, Pluto formation theories was recently unveiled by researchers at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). They suggest that Pluto might have been formed by one billion comets that came together.
Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured a near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon. Credit: NASA.
The solar system‘s planets formed by accretion of material from enormous discs that surround the early Sun. The matter inside the rapidly spinning disk around the parent star simply gathers and forms clumps, steadily accumulating until these turn into asteroids, comets, planets, and moons.
This view of Pluto's Sputnik Planitia nitrogen-ice plain was captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby of the dwarf planet in July 2015.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
Pluto was always thought to have formed much in the same way. However, geochemist Christopher Glein and colleagues at SwRI’s Space Science and Engineering Division found it odd how the dwarf planet and the famous Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — the one where ESA landed a probe in 2014 — share so much of their chemical makeup. For instance, Pluto’s nitrogen-rich Sputnik Planitia is unnaturally similar to Comet 67P.
Just as water is the main driving force that shapes Earth’s surface, so is nitrogen for Pluto. Due to its low viscosity, nitrogen flows like glaciers on Earth, eroding the bedrock and, in the process, altering the landscape. And there’s so much nitrogen on Pluto. Earth’s atmosphere is made up of 78% nitrogen, but Pluto’s, which is far colder, is 98% nitrogen. That’s an unusual proportion of nitrogen, both at the surface and in the atmosphere, which is not easily explained by the conventional planetary formation theory. Instead, what seems to connect the dots is a huge comet frenzy.
“We’ve developed what we call ‘the giant comet’ cosmochemical model of Pluto formation,” Glein said in a statement.
“We found an intriguing consistency between the estimated amount of nitrogen inside the glacier and the amount that would be expected if Pluto was formed by the agglomeration of roughly a billion comets or other Kuiper Belt objects similar in chemical composition to 67P, the comet explored by Rosetta.”
Real photo of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Credit: NAVCAM/ROSETTA/ESA.
The researchers got their data from the Rosetta probe that reached comet 67P and NASA’s New Horizons mission, which flew by Pluto in July 2015. In the new ‘giant comet’ cosmochemical model, Pluto’s initial chemical makeup is inherited from comet building blocks but was later changed by liquid water.
But this is far from being the last word on the matter. Another competing model suggests that Pluto coalesced from cold ices with a chemical composition closer to that of the sun
“This research builds upon the fantastic successes of the New Horizons and Rosetta missions to expand our understanding of the origin and evolution of Pluto,” said Glein.
“Using chemistry as a detective’s tool, we are able to trace certain features we see on Pluto today to formation processes from long ago. This leads to a new appreciation of the richness of Pluto’s ‘life story,’ which we are only starting to grasp.”
The new study is set to appear in the journal Icarus. It is already available online on the pre-print server arXiv.
A True Story About Planet Pluto: | Passport to Pluto and Beyond
'Impossible' EmDrive Space Thruster May Really Be Impossible
'Impossible' EmDrive Space Thruster May Really Be Impossible
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
The "impossible" EmDrive engine, which purportedly generates thrust by bouncing microwaves around inside a cone-shaped chamber.
Credit: SPR Ltd./www.emdrive.com
The laws of physics have won again, it would appear.
For the past few years, researchers at NASA's Eagleworks advanced-propulsion lab have been putting a controversial and potentially revolutionary space engine called the EmDrive to the test.
The EmDrive, which was originally developed by British scientist Roger Shawyer in the early 2000s, purportedly generates thrust by bouncing microwaves around inside a conical chamber. Because the engine doesn't require any fuel, it could theoretically make spaceflight far cheaper and more efficient, opening the heavens to exploration. [Superfast Spacecraft Propulsion Concepts (Images)]
And the NASA team's work has given EmDrive enthusiasts some reason for optimism, detecting small amounts of thrust in lab tests of the device.
But now we get to the "controversial" part: The EmDrive really shouldn't work. The engine doesn't blast anything out a nozzle, so Newton's Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction — doesn't come into play. Nobody really understands how the claimed thrust could actually be generated.
And now it seems that the previously detected thrust was illusory, at least according to a team of researchers in Germany. They built their own EmDrive and tested it in a vacuum chamber, as the NASA researchers did.
The German team picked something up as well. But follow-up analysis "clearly indicates that the 'thrust' is not coming from the EmDrive but from some electromagnetic interaction," the researchers wrote in their new study, which you can read here. That interaction is likely between EmDrive power cables and Earth's magnetic field, the team concluded.
The German team, which was led by Martin Tajmar of the Institute of Aerospace Engineering at Technische Universität Dresden, also presented its results last week at the Space Propulsion 2018 conference in Seville, Spain.
The new results probably won't be the last word on the EmDrive; other researchers may want to take a crack at it as well. But if you've been counting on this impossible engine to help humanity get out among the stars, you may want to recalibrate your expectations.
Is ET trying to phone or fly home? Scientists tend to think not, but they are hoping to find out more about extremely powerful and bright radio signals in outer space.
Key points:
Search for aliens detects extremely powerful and bright radio signal
Astronomical community abuzz after discovering more mysterious blips
Scientists say extra terrestrial life theory must be considered as "a last resort"
The Breakthrough Listen project discovered what is called a Fast Radio Burst while scanning the skies from Australia as part of the biggest search for extra terrestrial life in the Milky Way and nearby stars.
Breakthrough Listen scientist Danny Price said it was exciting when the burst from billions of light years away was picked up, but it was unlikely aliens were behind it.
"There are lots of theories out there, there are some theories that they are from extra terrestrial propulsion systems; these theories you have to go to as a last resort," Mr Price said.
He said astrophysical events had to be ruled out first.
It is not the first burst to be detected, with the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope picking up the first one in 2001.
The bursts last for about a millisecond, and sound like an ambulance driving past when picked up by special receivers.
Some believe the powerful burst could be a cataclysmic event, similar to a blackhole or star exploding.
While it is not as Earth-shattering as finding signs of an intelligent alien civilisation, it has still created a buzz in the astronomical community.
"We're in on the very ground floor where a new field of radio astronomy research is opening up for us for the first time and are able to perhaps identify something new, something that we haven't observed before and that is really exciting," CSIRO scientist John Sarkissian said.
While about two dozen of the signals have been picked up in almost as many years at the Dish, there is optimism Australia will continue to help lead the way in astronomical discoveries.
"What would have taken 10 million years, now only takes one year for us to survey so it is really fantastic how quickly technology has progressed," Mr Price said.
As for finding other intelligent civilisations, we will have to wait.
"The search will never really end until we find something because we keep on getting so much better," Mr Price said.
Op de foto is het zuidelijke sterrenbeeld Centaur te zien. Er zijn meer dan 200.000 sterren te spotten.
We zien hier o.a. de rand van de Kolenzaknevel (rechtsboven) en de heldere ster Beta Centauri (linksonder). Uiteindelijk zal TESS een gebied in de gaten houden dat meer dan 400 keer groter is dan het gebied op deze foto. Het kiekje is gemaakt door één van de vier TESS-camera’s. De camera gebruikte een belichtingstijd van twee seconden.
Scheervlucht langs de maan NASA’s volgende planetenjager TESS vloog voor het weekend op een afstand van 8.000 kilometer van de maan. Op 30 mei voert het ruimtevaartuig een laatste koerscorrectie uit. Dan zal TESS zich nestelen in een hoge elliptische baan om de aarde. Iedere 13,7 dagen legt de satelliet een rondje om onze planeet af.
De tweede foto In juni maakt TESS een tweede foto, die een nog betere kwaliteit heeft. Als de kalibraties eenmaal voltooid zijn, gaat de Amerikaanse sonde beginnen met het echte werk. Naar verwachting is dit op z’n vroegst midden juni.
Wat gaat TESS doen? Het is de bedoeling dat TESS de komende twee jaar zeker 500.000 nabije sterren gaat bestuderen. NASA hoopt zeker 3000 kandidaat-planeten te vinden, waaronder ongeveer 500 planeten die net zo groot zijn als de aarde en superaardes (straal kleiner dan twee keer de straal van de aarde).
Voor het eerst een interstellaire planetoïde ontdekt die zich in ons zonnestelsel thuis voelt 22 mei 2018Caroline Kraaijvanger13 De planetoïde is er al 4,5 miljard jaar en is niet meer van plan om weg te gaan. Vorig jaar ontdekten onderzoekers de alleree
Voor het eerst een interstellaire planetoïde ontdekt die zich in ons zonnestelsel thuis voelt
Caroline Kraaijvanger
De planetoïde is er al 4,5 miljard jaar en is niet meer van plan om weg te gaan.
Vorig jaar ontdekten onderzoekers de allereerste interstellaire planetoïde: ‘Oumuamua. En nu is opnieuw een interstellaire migrant ontdekt: planetoïde (514107) 2015 BZ509. In tegenstelling tot ‘Oumuamua – die op doortocht is en zich uit ons zonnestelsel haast – heeft 2015 BZ509 zich echter in ons zonnestelsel gevestigd. Dat schrijven onderzoekers in het blad Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. Ze baseren zich onder meer op simulaties.
Retrograde omloopbaan De planetoïde (514107) 2015 BZ509 is een vreemde eend in de bijt. Observaties wijzen uit dat de ruimtesteen er een retrograde omloopbaan op na houdt. Dat betekent dat deze – ten opzichte van alle planeten en de meeste andere objecten in ons zonnestelsel – in tegenovergestelde richting rond de zon cirkelt. En dat is vreemd. “Hoe de planetoïde op deze manier kan bewegen terwijl deze de baan van Jupiter deelt, was tot voor kort een mysterie,” zo stelt onderzoeker Fathi Namouni. “Als 2015 BZ509 in ons zonnestelsel geboren zou zijn, zou deze in dezelfde richting moeten bewegen als alle andere planeten en planetoïden.” Al die planeten en planetoïden zijn namelijk voortgekomen uit een gas- en stofschijf die miljarden jaren geleden rond de jonge zon cirkelde en dus de draairichting van de objecten die deze genereerde, bepaalde.
Simulaties In een poging de retrograde baan van (514107) 2015 BZ509 te verklaren, voerden de onderzoekers simulaties uit. Ze simuleerden de locatie die de planetoïde door de tijd heen, had. Daarbij gingen ze terug tot zo’n 4,5 miljard jaar geleden: de periode waarin de planeten die ons zonnestelsel rijk is, net ‘af’ waren. En de simulaties tonen aan dat (514107) 2015 BZ509 in die tijd al in tegenovergestelde richting rond de zon cirkelde. Het kan maar één ding betekenen: de planetoïde is niet voortgekomen uit de gas en stofschijf rond de zon.
Hier zie je de stellaire kraamkamer NGC 604. In een vergelijkbare omgeving werd onze zon geboren. Sterren zitten er dicht op elkaar gepakt, waardoor ze onder meer planetoïden kunnen uitwisselen.
Afbeelding: NASA / Hubble Heritage Team (AURA / STScI).
Gestolen De onderzoekers vermoeden dat (514107) 2015 BZ509 eigenlijk in een ander systeem thuishoorde, maar door onze zon is ‘gestolen’. “Immigratie van planetoïden uit andere stersystemen vond plaats doordat de zon geboren werd in een dichtbevolkt stercluster, waar elke ster zijn eigen uit planeten en planetoïden bestaand systeem had,” aldus onderzoeker Helena Morais. “Het feit dat de sterren dicht bij elkaar stonden, zorgde er – geholpen door de zwaartekracht van de planeten – voor dat deze systemen elkaar aantrokken en planetoïden van elkaar afnamen en invingen.”
En nu hebben we dus voor het eerst zo’n van een andere stersysteem gestolen planetoïde ontdekt. Het is een waardevolle ontdekking, want (514107) 2015 BZ509 is getuige geweest van de kinderjaren van ons zonnestelsel en kan meer inzicht geven in de omstandigheden waaronder ons zonnestelsel is ontstaan. Bovendien sluiten de onderzoekers niet uit dat immigranten zoals (514107) 2015 BZ509 een cruciale rol hebben gespeeld in de evolutie van het zonnestelsel en uiteindelijk zelfs een bijdrage hebben geleverd aan het ontstaan van leven. “Aangezien elk stersysteem een onderscheidende chemische samenstelling heeft, kunnen immigrerende planetoïden zoals (514107) 2015 BZ509 ons zonnestelsel verrijkt hebben met elementen die hier van nature niet voorkwamen,” aldus Morais. “Op die manier kunnen ze hebben bijgedragen aan het ontstaan van leven op aarde.”
Dark Futures: Does Humanity Really Need a Backup Earth?
Dark Futures: Does Humanity Really Need a Backup Earth?
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
If things went south on Earth, could Mars or an exoplanet be Earth 2.0?
Credit: T. Pyle/NASA/JPL-Caltech
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has a vision: He wants to get humans to Mars as soon as possible. He already wowed the world this year, when the Falcon Heavy launched and flung a Tesla car toward the asteroid belt. And this heavy-lift rocket will be dwarfed by the boosters Musk plans for Mars exploration, which he says will carry colonists in fleets of ships to the Red Planet.
While getting to Mars is an end in itself, there's another compelling reason to go. Science fiction is full of dystopian futures for Earth if humanity remains limited to this planet. There are the asteroid strikes of the "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" films, the robot wars of the "Battlestar Galactica" TV series and "Terminator" film franchise, the medical problems and overpopulation in the "Children of Men" and "Elysium" movies, and many other disasters natural and artificial. Dark futures and colonizing other planets will be covered in "AMC Visionaries: James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction," which runs its fourth episode tonight (May 21).
Science fiction inspired the first rocket pioneers to explore beyond Earth. Robert Goddard, who pushed forward liquid rocketry in the early 1900s, was clearly a fan of the genre, because he wrote some science fiction himself, according to io9. The Apollo moon rockets of the 1960s and 1970s were designed by Wernher von Braun, who enjoyed science fiction as a child and partnered with Disney in the 1950s to create educational films about spaceflight. [Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel]
And a quick glance around the solar system shows us one real-life reason scientists — and indeed, all of us — should take a page from science fiction and be concerned about Earth's future. The moon, Mars and many of the "airless" moons around the neighborhood are littered with craters. These came from space rocks and other small worlds that slammed into the moon's and planet's surfaces over billions of years.
Lest you imagine that Earth is immune because of its thick atmosphere, think of the dinosaurs, felled about 66 million years ago when a large asteroid or comet around 10 to 15 kilometers (6.2 to 9.3 miles) in diameter slammed into the Earth. We also just passed the five-year anniversary of Chelyabinsk, when a 17-meter (56 feet) small body exploded over a town in Russia, causing many injuries and property damage from shattered glass.
NASA does have an active asteroid-search program and some plans for dealing with asteroids menacing Earth, but even preparing for those intruders isn't enough; there's another, bigger inevitable threat to our planet. In about 4 billion years or 5 billion years, the sun will swell into a red giant after it consumes all of its hydrogen and begins fusing helium. As the star expands, it will swallow up Mercury and Venus and get close to Earth. Our planet will be roasted to a crisp, thrown out of its orbit or swallowed altogether. In any of these scenarios, that's bad news for humans and life on Earth in general.
Legendary director James Cameron talks the dark futures of science fiction with director Christopher Nolan in the fourth episode of AMC Visionaries: James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction, which airs May 21, 2019.
Credit: AMC
Get your a— to Mars
One popular destination for escaping Earth in science fiction is Mars. At first, this was because people thought other beings like us may live there. In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported observing channels on Mars, but stopped short of saying whether they were natural or artificial. U.S. science popularizer Percival Lowell, however, went much further in the early 1900s, coming up with explanations as to why the channels were there. Perhaps the Martians were trying to drain water to support a dying planet, Lowell said. (The channels, or canals, were later explained as telescope artifacts when robotic missions to Mars showed the formations don't exist.)
This turn-of-the-century musing greatly influenced science fiction of the era. There was the famous "War of the Worlds" novel by H.G. Wells in 1898, which portrayed a Martian invasion of Earth. (It was recapped in a 1938 national radio broadcast, as well as a 2005 film starring Tom Cruise.) Also, Edgar Rice Burroughs published "A Princess of Mars" in 1912, kicking off a series about Mars (which he called Barsoom) full of living beings. (The widely panned 2012 movie "John Carter" was based on some of these stories.) [Film Review: 'War of the Worlds' Update Hits Home]
Robert Zubrin, founder of the human exploration advocacy group The Mars Society, told Space.com that Mars will someday be an inhabited planet as science fiction writers envisioned. As only two examples of many showing that future, there's the 2015 Matt Damon movie "The Martian" or the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Total Recall," which included the famous line, "Get your a— to Mars."
But why does science fiction make exploration look so much easier than we find in real life? Zubrin said, in part, it's because of our mindset.
"Here we are, 500 years or so after [Nicolaus] Copernicus [who said Earth orbits the sun], and most people still talk about the Earth as the world, and there's a thing above us called the sky. Most people still have this geocentric viewpoint," Zubrin told Space.com, pointing out that Earth is in space and we rarely think about that fact in our everyday lives.
Zubrin said our approach of going to Mars via low Earth orbit and the moon is incremental. This approach to space exploration, he said, is similar to telling Lewis and Clark to just go 100 miles (160 kilometers) out beyond the Mississippi River and to wait for the next group of explorers to move farther west.
"If someone asks you why space is so important, it's comparative to somebody in a small village somewhere saying, 'Why is the rest of the world important?' which is sort of an absurd question," Zubrin said. So, he advocates going elsewhere in search of resources, knowledge or a safe haven that we couldn't find on Earth. Interstellar travel would be the ultimate dream, Zubrin said, but in the meantime, we should focus on what we have at hand: Mars, which is close enough to visit using today's technology.
"The most important step is deciding that you want to do it. This is really the dramatic step that Elon Musk is taking," Zubrin said. "There are people at NASA who want to do it, but as an institution, it has been dragging its feet and providing every excuse to the political class not to embrace the challenge."
Moving to Mars — or beyond?
Zubrin's plan (which he outlined in a 1991 paper called "Mars Direct," and which he has expanded on greatly since then) advocates for a direct flight to Mars, with minimal or no on-orbit assembly of the spacecraft. Using current propulsion systems, a spacecraft could get to the Red Planet in six months — the standard rotation astronauts spend on the International Space Station, Zubrin pointed out.
The first missions would bring most of the supplies those travelers would need to live, such as food and water. But the early trips could also bring along architecture so later missions could do more "living off the land," such as greenhouses or habitats. (The first Mars voyagers may eat more meat brought with them, while future generations would be more vegetarian due to the resources on hand, Zubrin said.) He said the habitats of the Mars Society's Mars Desert Research Station and Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station are designed to preview what real Red Planet homes could look like.
The return vehicle would include propellant made from Martian carbon dioxide and water, specifically to generate the fuels methane and oxygen. Zubrin said it's the cheapest propellant combination, with only a hydrogen-oxygen mix providing better exhaust velocity.
But there's a big problem with Mars — it's not very much like Earth. Sure, people could conceivable live on it with technology to manage the risks. Its day is similar in length to Earth's day, too. But the planet has only one-third of Earth's gravity. Martian air isn't breathable. Water, if it exists at all on the surface, would be in scarce quantities. Conditions are even worse on the moon, which has one-sixth Earth's gravity, a longer day-night cycle than our home planet and no air whatsoever.
"They're not places that we are necessarily going to colonize in large numbers," Roger Launius, a retired curator from the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, told Space.com. He predicted that by the end of the century, there may be research stations at the moon or Mars, similar to what exists now in Antarctica.
But to really find another home for humanity, we'll have to follow the lead of "Battlestar Galactica" and search for another Earth. Because, otherwise, children are going to be born in lunar or Martian environments that have a lesser gravity than Earth. How this will affect their development when humans are built for Earth is an unknown, Launius said.
But quickly getting to other stars, where second Earths may exist, will be slow unless we figure out a method for faster-than-light speed, or a way to sustain a spacecraft over multiple generations, Launius said. Another possibility is to extend astronaut life spans through hibernation (as done in the movies "Alien" and "Avatar") or by becoming a sort of "Star Trek"-like Borg that would integrate robotics into the human body to extend lives.
Ant Nebula Blasts Lasers, Suggesting Hidden Double-Star System
Ant Nebula Blasts Lasers, Suggesting Hidden Double-Star System
By Samantha Mathewson, Space.com Contributor
The Ant Nebula releases a rare type of laser emission, suggesting that the nebula's core houses two stars rather than one.
Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScL/AURA)
Unusual laser emissions beaming from the Ant Nebula suggest that it is home to a hidden double-star system and that one of the companion stars is nearing the end of its life.
When stars similar to our sun start to die, they become dense white dwarf stars and then expel their outer layers to form an interstellar cloud of gas and dust known as a planetary nebula. Any lingering gas close to the center would soon fall back onto the star, leaving the surrounding area empty. However, that is not what has been observed around the Ant Nebula, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).
"When we observe Menzel 3, we see an amazingly intricate structure made up of ionized gas, but we cannot see the object in its center producing this pattern," Isabel Aleman, lead author of a new study detailing the observations and a researcher at the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil, and the Leiden Observatory, in the Netherlands,said in the statement. "Thanks to the sensitivity and wide wavelength range of the Herschel observatory, we detected a very rare type of emission called hydrogen recombination line laser emission, which provided a way to reveal the nebula's structure and physical conditions."
This image shows possible evolutionary pathways for stars of different masses. Sunlike stars can be seen swelling into red giants before releasing their outer gas, creating colorful nebulas around a collapsed core called a white dwarf.
Credit: ESA
Specifically, the new observations show that the density of the laser-emitting gas surrounding the Ant Nebula is 10,000 times higher than that of the gas seen in typical planetary nebulas. This finding suggests that the Ant Nebula is actually home to two stars, since a companion star would help capture the dense gas ejected from the dying white dwarf star, according to the statement.
"The only way to keep gas close to the star is if it is orbiting around it in a disc," study co-author Albert Zijlstra, an astrophysicist at The University of Manchester in the U.K., said in the statement. "In this case, we have actually observed a dense disc in the very center that is seen approximately edge-on. This orientation helps to amplify the laser signal. The disc suggests the white dwarf has a binary companion, because it is hard to get the ejected gas to go into orbit unless a companion star deflects it in the right direction."
Although the researchers have not yet directly detected the companion star, their observations and models support the presence of a pair of stars, and mass from the dying companion star may be ejected and then captured by the nebula's central white dwarf, helping to create the disk, according to the statement.
"We used Herschel to characterize various components of gas and dust in nebula[s] around old stars, but we were not necessarily looking for a laser phenomenon," co-author Toshiya Ueta, principal investigator of the Herschel Planetary Nebula Survey project, said in the statement. "Such emission has only been identified in a handful of objects before; this was a remarkable discovery that we did not anticipate. There is certainly more to stellar nebulae than meets the eye!"
Therefore, their findings, published May 16 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, will help astronomers refine current models of stellar evolution, the researchers said.
NASA’s Lost Satellite Just Made Its First Contact With Earth in 17 Years
NASA’s Lost Satellite Just Made Its First Contact With Earth in 17 Years
It’s official: ISEE-3, the 36-year-old satellite that NASA left for dead over a decade ago, is back in touch with humankind. This afternoon, a group of citizen scientists who raised almost $160,000 to fund the process of taking control of ISEE-3 announced that two-way contact has been established with the little satellite that could. So what’s next?
“Over the coming days and weeks our team will make an assessment of the spacecraft’s overall health and refine the techniques required to fire its engines and bring it back to an orbit near Earth,” explained the Reboot team in a triumphant comment released today. Contact was made at Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico, where scientists collaborated with a worldwide network of like-minded space fans to fund and engineer the project.
Now comes the fun part: Getting ISEE-3 back to the business of studying space. We’ll have more updates as they come.
NASA Is Letting Citizens Commandeer a Long-Lost Satellite
Yesterday evening, NASA officially granted permission to a group of scientists and enthusiasts who want to do what NASA can’t afford: Make contact with a 36-year-old satellite called ISEE-3 that’s still capable of taking directions for a new mission. It’s the first agreement of its kind—and it could hint at where the space industry is going.
So, a little back story. As our sister site io9 explained last month, ISEE-3 was launched back in 1978 to study the relationship between the Sun and Earth. It enjoyed many more missions over the next three decades, but NASA officially cut the cord in 1997. Still, ISEE-3 kept on trucking.
It wasn’t until a decade later that NASA discovered she was still at it, despite the lack of commands from her benefactors at NASA. Why not send her on a new mission? Well, that’s the trouble: We have no way of communicating. The antenna used to contact ISEE-3 had been removed.
Enter the group of scientists including SkyCorp, SpaceRef, Space College Foundation, and others. They want to use a different antenna, at Morehead State University, to contact ISEE-3. “Our plan is simple: we intend to contact the ISEE-3 spacecraft, command it to fire its engines and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission,” said Keith Cowing, a former Nasa engineer and owner of Nasa Watch, told the Guardian.
The ISEE-3, (later ICE), undergoing testing and evaluation.
Sounds good, right? Well, it’s not so simple. The group, which calls itself ISEE-3 Reboot, needs to essentially rebuild the entire software used to communicate with ISEE-3 back in the 70s. That means digging through archives to find the original commands, then recreating them. With zero funding available from NASA and only a month or two until the little satellite makes a close pass in mid-June. The technical challenges are huge:
We need to initiate a crash course effort to use ‘software radio’ to recreate virtual versions all of the original communications hardware that no longer physically exists. We also need to cover overhead involved in operating a large dish antenna, locating and analyzing old documentation, and possibly some travel.
But, the creators of the project explained in their pitch letter on R ockethub, “if we are successful it may also still be able to chase yet another comet.”
If there was any doubt about whether modern Americans were still enamored with space, the results of their crowdfunding campaign squash it. The group blew through their $100,000 goal, and are currently getting close to a $150,000 stretch goal. There are only two days left to donate—and you should—but the fact that they’ve raised so much money in so short a time is remarkable.
The ISEE-3 Reboot mission patch.
Yesterday, NASA announced it has signed an agreement with the group called a Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement (NRSAA), which is a contract it signs with its external partners to describe a collaboration. It gives the group the green light to go ahead and make its attempt at taking control of ISEE-3—it essence, it gives Skycorp the right to take over the operation of a satellite that NASA built almost 40 years ago.
Here’s what astronaut John Grunsfeld had to say about the agreement:
The intrepid ISEE-3 spacecraft was sent away from its primary mission to study the physics of the solar wind extending its mission of discovery to study two comets. We have a chance to engage a new generation of citizen scientists through this creative effort to recapture the ISEE-3 spacecraft as it zips by the Earth this summer.
It’s an incredible development—and it tells us something about where space travel and research is going. NASA and other state-funded research entities are being strangled by downsized budgets, but the push into space amongst independent scientists, engineers, and citizens is booming. As Elon Musk sues to let commercial space companies compete for government contracts, students and scientists are launching their own satellites.
Over the next few decades, plenty of other NASA-built spacecraft will begin to age—just like ISEE-3. And unless something drastic changes about NASA’s budget, it may not have the cash to keep them up. Imagine a future in which craft built by NASA in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, are inherited by independent groups of scientists and space companies who take over operations, just like Skycorp is. The privatization of space might not be so far away—and NASA might play a heavy role in its creation.
Orbits of Jupiter Moons Transformed into Mind-Bending Optical Illusions and Music
Orbits of Jupiter Moons Transformed into Mind-Bending Optical Illusions and Music
By Steve Spaleta, Space.com Senior Producer
Order has risen from the chaos of the creation of our solar system, and that systemization is on display through the gravitational push and pull of the bodies it harbors. A clear example of this is Jupiter and its four largest moons: When their orbital dynamics are converted into rhythms, musical notes and time-lapsed illusions, you'll likely be astounded by what you see and hear.
To understand how it works, you have to first break down the orbits.
After the three innermoons of the Jupiter systemwere created, they eventually settled into a simple 4:2:1 orbital resonance. In other words, it takes twice as long for Europa, Jupiter's second-closest moon, to orbit Jupiter as it does Io, the closest moon. And, in turn, the third-closest moon, Ganymede, takes four times as long as Io to orbit Jupiter. [Hear the orbits of Trappist-1 system planets turned into music]
The Galilean moons Ganymede, Europa and Io orbit at a 4:2:1 resonance.
The fourth moon, Callisto, completes the quartet of Galilean moons — which were discovered by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610 — and it is the farthest of the bunch. It orbits at a 12:5 resonance: 12 orbits of Ganymede are equal to five orbits for Callisto. Using these statistics, Matt Russo, Andrew Santaguida and Dan Tamayo of system-sounds.com have created a musical representation of the orbits. Io, Europa and Ganymede are "playing the same note but in different octaves," when the orbits are converted into musical pitches, according to an explainer on their website — the pitches metaphor is appropriate because octaves follow a similar resonance structure; to go an octave higher, you double the frequency of the sound. In the case of Callisto, the pitch occurs at an "interval of an octave plus a minor 3rd," they wrote, since its resonance differs from that of the other moons.
This graphic shows the periods of time it takes for the moons to complete an orbit around Jupiter, the closest note and frequency (hertz) used to create a musical representation of Jupiter and its four closest moons.
Credit: System-Sounds.com
The trio used the ratios of the moons' orbits, combined with an animation of Jupiter and its moons, to generate a rhythmic beat that is based on each moon's resonance, before slowly speeding it up from 30,000 to 250 million times the actual orbital speed (seen at the top of this page — turn on sound). "As [the moons] begin orbiting faster than 20 times per second (20 Hz), the repetitive beat morphs into sustained musical harmony," the explainer goes on to say — based on those octaves mentioned above.
The geometric patterns that form in the animation as it speeds up are obviously not a true representation of what the orbits look like. The patterns occur because the frame rate that the video was created with just can't keep up. The result is a stroboscopic effect, which the System Sounds website compares to a "wagon wheel" optical illusion you see when a "car wheel (is) spinning so fast that it appears to stop and start spinning backwards."
The stroboscopic effect created in a new animation of the Jupiter system makes the orbits of the gas giant's four closest moons appear as geometric shapes.
Credit: System-Sounds.com
All those factors combined turn into a mind-blowing, 70-second experience that we highly recommend you watch in full screen with a good sound system or headphones. You can even get interactive with it below — just click Play and drag NASA's Juno spacecraft to speed up the orbits; you can also turn the moons' orbits on or off by clicking on them.
To take a deeper dive into the musical details and to see some more "hypnotic" orbit animations, visit the System Sounds website.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan oliver.d.julian|@gmail.com of aan www.ufo.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER OLIVER. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 67 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
![](http://blog.seniorennet.be/<p><a href="http:/blog.seniorennet.be/stille_pagina" target="_blank"><img width="153" height="142" alt="Stille Pagina" src="http:/i58.tinypic.com/rc4w0o.jpg" border="0" /></a></p>){kind=link}
