Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
Dinsdag 21 juni 2022
Could We Use Mars as a Base for Asteroid Mining?
Could We Use Mars as a Base for Asteroid Mining?
The earliest mention of asteroid mining might be in a story from 1898 titled “Edison’s Conquest of Mars,” by Garrett Serviss. In that story, Martians attack Earth, killing tens of thousands and destroying New York City. Earth retaliates and sends an armada to Mars. While travelling, the armada comes across an asteroid that the Martians are mining. The asteroid is a rubble pile of gold nuggets.
A conversation breaks out among the crew.
“Phew! Won’t we be rich?” exclaimed a voice.
“How are we going to dig it and get it back to earth?” asked another.
“Carry it in your pockets,” said one.
“No need of staking claims here,” remarked another. “There is enough for everybody.”
Their conversation was a prescient hint of things to come.
The idea to mine asteroids incubated in the background until more modern times, when the realities of the space-faring age brought the idea into focus.
Starting in the 2000s, asteroid mining—or at least its potential—gained momentum. Private companies were starting to send spacecraft into Earth orbit, though it was tentative at first. People started to wonder about mining asteroids. Who owned them? How could it be done?
Japan’s Hayabusa brought a sample of asteroid Itokawa back to Earth in 2010. Wealthy people formed companies with the intent to mine asteroids. In 2015, the US Congress passed the Space Act that gave US companies the right to mine asteroids and other bodies in space, though it stopped short of claiming sovereignty over any bodies in space.
Companies popped up and talked about mining asteroids. They calculated the value of asteroids and started developing robotic explorers to operate on asteroids. One company called the Asteroid Mining Corporation worked with a Japanese University to develop the Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorers (SCAR-E).
An illustration of SCAR-E, the Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorers being developed by AMC and Tohoku University. Image Credit: AMC/Tohoku University.
The initial fervour of the past couple of decades has died down, but the idea is still there. And as our knowledge of asteroids grows and our space-flight capabilities advance, the idea of asteroid mining will never disappear.
There are a number of reasons why asteroid mining is desirable. The materials in asteroids represent an enormous financial value, which always attracts capitalist activities. Some materials needed for our modern technological devices are in short supply on Earth but are available on asteroids. And mining on Earth carries an environmental burden that mining on dead asteroids doesn’t.
One day asteroid mining might be possible, profitable, or even necessary. We’re not there yet, but scientists are still thinking ahead about how it could work, even though there are a whole host of obstacles in the way. We’re accustomed to spacecraft being launched on far-flung missions into the Solar System. But space travel is complicated, risky, and expensive. Even sampling asteroids is challenging.
Artist concept of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it readies itself to touch the surface of asteroid Bennu. Asteroid sampling is only in its infancy, so asteroid mining is barely past conception. Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona
How can asteroid mining be brought out of the realm of science fiction and into reality?
In a new paper, a trio of researchers suggest that some of the obstacles could be overcome by using Mars orbit as a base of operations.
NEO asteroids are not the target. Their number and their value are limited. At some point in our asteroid-mining, space-faring future, we’ll want to develop the asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. There’s nearly-immeasurable wealth and resources there. The asteroid Davida alone may be worth 27 quintillion US dollars. One calculation says there’s $100 billion dollars in mineral wealth for every person on Earth in the main asteroid belt.
This poster shows 42 of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter (orbits not to scale). The images in the outermost circle of this infographic were captured with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The asteroid sample features 39 objects larger than 100 kilometres in diameter, including 20 larger than 200 kilometres. The poster highlights a few of the objects, including Ceres (the largest asteroid in the belt), Urania (the smallest one imaged), Kalliope (the densest imaged) and Lutetia, which was visited by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. Image Credit: ESO
The main obstacle, according to the paper, is the energy required to reach the main belt and rendezvous with asteroids. In spaceflight that energy is quantified as Delta V, where V is velocity and Delta is change. Launching and maneuvering require changes in delta-v, and those changes require energy. “Most MBAs are energetically too hard to reach with present technology from low Earth orbit. An alternative is to use Mars orbit as a base from which to conduct MBA research, prospecting, and mining.”
Even the easiest-to-reach MBA is difficult to reach from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) because of the delta-v. The Near-Earth Asteroids are much easier to reach in comparison. It requires “… a minimum delta-v ~7 km s-1 to rendezvous from low Earth orbit (LEO) with the easiest to reach MBA, compared with ~4 km s-1 needed for the easiest to reach near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) from low Earth orbit.”
It follows that reaching MBAs is easier if you start from Mars orbit. The delta-v will be far lower. The difference between ~7 km s-1 and ~4 km s-1 might not sound like much, but the fuel requirements scale exponentially with delta-v.
The team wrote some code that allows them to find the delta-v needed to reach and rendezvous with any asteroid in the main belt from either Earth or Mars orbit. For Mars, they use Phobos’ orbit, which is about 9,000 km (5,600 miles) above the planet, and for Earth they used LEO. “We used PARC (Python Asteroid Rendezvous Code) to investigate whether Phobos-like orbits around Mars at altitudes of ~9000 km are more energetically favourable and useful locations from which to dispatch missions to MBAs.”
The short answer is “Yes they are.”
This figure from the paper compares the delta-v needed to reach asteroids from LEO (top) to the delta-v needed to reach asteroids from Mars Phobos Orbit (bottom.) Image Credit: Taylor et al. 2022.
The available mass in the MAB and the MC (Mars Crosser) asteroid populations dwarfs that of the NEO asteroids. So in terms of large-scale delta-v needed to reach more resources, the Phobos Mars Orbit idea wins again. “Most known MBAs + MCs are bigger than the largest NEO, (1036) Ganymed, at ~50 km diameter. Therefore, the accessible mass of MBAs + MCs increases more quickly than an equivalent number of NEOs at a given delta-v requirement.”
This figure from the study shows the distribution of accessible asteroid mass in MBAs + MCs and NEOs from LEO and PMO. Image Credit: Taylor et al. 2022.
In the figure above, the large asteroids Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta skew the results a little. They require a large delta-v to reach, though it’s still lower from PMO than from LEO. “But operationally it is the low delta-v tails that are of particular interest,” the authors write.
The authors point out that for a particular delta-v, more MAB material is accessible from PMO. In fact, it’s not even close. “We find that PMO provides access to ~7 x 1015 tonnes of material within ?v -1,” they write. Over 99.9% of that material is in MABs and MCs, while the insignificant remainder is in LEOs. On the other hand, “From LEO, only ~3 x 106 tonnes of material are accessible within ?v -1 and are entirely found in NEOs.”
Of course, there’s more to mining MBAs from Mars Phobos Orbit than just the ?v required to get there. The effort to even get equipment to MPO requires fuel and resources and time. The authors acknowledge that, and emphasize that their study is focused on reaching asteroid resources from an already established base. There are all kinds of other variables depending on the mass of the equipment sent to asteroids, where and how it’ll be processed, what will be done with the waste, and where the extracted resources will go.
The Asteroid Psyche is an m-type asteroid, meaning it contains higher proportions of metals like iron and nickel than other classes of asteroids. Its varied surface suggests a dynamic history, which could include metallic eruptions, asteroid-shaking impacts, and a lost rocky mantle. NASA’s Psyche mission should reach Psyche in 2026. Data from that mission will tell us more about the mineral value of asteroids in the MAB. Image Credit: Screenshot courtesy of NASA
One team of researchers can’t answer all these questions. Their paper simply shows how it takes fewer resources to reach the bulk of the Solar System’s asteroidal material from MPO than it does from LEO. Whether or not asteroid mining ever makes sense depends on a whole bunch of factors.
That’s where the Phobos delta-v penalty comes in. It’s the price a spacecraft pays to maneuver in and out of orbit around Mars. The planet’s gravity well extracts its own price.
“Whether the Phobos delta-v penalty is economically disadvantageous depends on the masses to be moved, both of raw and beneficiated (refined) ore, and of mining and processing equipment,” the authors explain. “If the beneficiating equipment is massive then the simplified raw material gathering spacecraft that will undertake the Phobos to asteroid journey may be of significantly lower mass.”
Mining the MAB wouldn’t happen in a vacuum (sorry.) Facilities on Mars would likely be part of the endeavour. Maybe the structural materials in the asteroids, like iron, would be used to manufacture other facilities in the MAB or in Mars orbit. But none of these considerations changes the raw fact that more MAB material is within reach from MPO than from LEO. “We find that there is a far larger population of known asteroids accessible to current technology from Phobos orbit than from low Earth orbit, by a factor of 300 in number and a factor 109 in mass for a delta-v of 4 km s-1,” the paper concludes.
Phobos itself could play an advantageous role, according to the authors.
“Phobos is a convenient site for emplacing massive ore-refining equipment. Phobos has properties that aid in extracting ore from raw asteroid material, as it provides some gravity, an inertial platform, and radiation shielding. Phobos may then serve as a useful forward operating base for the exploration and mining of the Main Belt.”
The ESA’s Mars Express Orbiter captured this image of the Martian moon Phobos. The authors of a new study suggest Phobos could be a base of operations for mining in the asteroid belt. Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
If this idea ever comes to fruition, then it’s likely that Mars itself will be a part of it. “The presence of large-scale operations in Mars orbit may also lead to routine access to Mars’ surface,” they write.
The rest is left to our imaginations. Would human beings lead the mining operation? If so, then Mars could act as a kind of lifeboat in case of problems. Evacuating a damaged mining spacecraft and landing on Mars, where we can extract oxygen, fuel, and water, and store food and other supplies, seems like a natural emergency backup plan.
Or maybe there’d be very little need for flesh and blood humans. Maybe robots could do most of the work. Robotic technology is growing in leaps and bounds and there’s no reason to think it won’t keep advancing.
Asteroid mining is really in-situ resource utilization writ large. If humanity is ever going to expand out into the Solar System, the resources in the MAB will play a role. Only time will reveal exactly what that role is.
Newly Found Black Hole Eats One Earth Per Second! - Mr. Scientific Must Video
Astronomers have detected the fastest-growing black hole. The new supermassive black hole is known as J1144. J1144 is 3 billion times more massive than the sun, it swallows up an Earth-size chunk of matter every second
Sagittarius A* is located at the center of our galaxy, it has a diameter of 44 million kilometers. J1144 is not only 500 times bigger than Sagittarius A*, but also 7,000 times brighter than our entire galaxy.
Astronomers believe that something catastrophic happened long time ago. Perhaps two big galaxies crashed into each other merging the Black holes located at their center. Also funneling a whole lot of material towards it.
New Linda Moulton Howe: Tall White Aliens Are Our Allies & Hybrid Greys & Blonde Nordics
TOPICS: Which E.T.s Claim They Are Closest Genetically to Human Descendants? US Space Force – USS Curtis LeMay – USS Hoyt Vandenberg, “tip of the spear” – USS Roscoe Hillenkoetter – Tall Nordics near Sirius A & Sirius B – Tall White Pales live near 82 G Eridani where numerous earth-like planets reside Inside US Space Force source details interactions with humans Linda’s brother Jim Moulton fallen ill, but recovering at home Highly placed source:
Original greys are very ancient race spanning millions of years Blonde Nordics are oldest race from Sirius B system Tall whites or “tall pales” working with us from “Creech Air Force Base” near Las Vegas, – Working on Security Access Protocols Hybrid greys “Our true allies are the tall whites” “Nordic types claim we humans are their closest descendants” “..directly related” “These 3 et species occupy the majority” “I don’t believe we originated from Earth” “Alliances exist…Eliminating the Trantalod insect..species”
“AI biological cloned Grey are…abducting humans and other species” “Temporal technology..used by Trantaloid species” USS Hoyt Vandenberg stationed in Procyon system USS Roscoe Hillenkoetter investigating radio signal source We have had teleportation since 1971 The main purpose of Apollo was to investigate alien sites
Secrets of The Black Knight Satellite, Its Sending a Signal & Its Been Decoded, Billy Carson via Leak Project
Awesome talk. William, Son of Cars, is such an interesting guy. His genuine enthusiasm and intelligence is really endearing, and his endless energy even gives Rex a run for his money. I gotta see this documentary. One thing confused me though – if it’s been seen to make course corrections on multiple occasions, implying it’s still functioning, then why is it sending signals to where Epsilon Bootes used to be 13000 years ago? Wouldn’t it be updating that star’s location? Or… maybe we’re wrong about our calculations? Richard Wilson
UFO Fleet Over Queens, New York On June 19, 2022, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: June 19, 2022
Location of sighting: Queens, New York, USA Source: MUFON
A person was driving along the southbound in New York when she noticed a fleet of glowing objects in the distance. UFOs do visit New York frequently. For instance on Aug 23, 1974 singer John Lennon and his wife were in the penthouse apartment patio when they noticed some strange lights hovering in place not far off. New York...it attracts all intelligent species...the biggest city in America. Even aliens want to visit.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
Traveling over Whitestone bridge southbound, ufo spotted in western sky 6-8 stationary very bright objects in a cluster. The objects would then change formation in the blink of an eye. One object moved diagonally while others stayed stationary.
Black Craft Over Parker, Colorado On June 9, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: June 9, 2022
Location of sighting: Parker, Colorado, USA Source: MUFON
A person was parked and noticed a black object moving about the sky over Colorado last week. The object was silent and moving about as if it were watching the cars on the road below. Colorado is notorious for its UFO sightings, but 95% of them are of a white sphere craft. This is highly rare in the area. Most UFOs come and go from the Rocky mountain ridges, where there are several entrances to a tunnel that leads to an underground base about 5km below the base of the mountains.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
My apologies for the camera shaking. I zoomed in on an iPhone and the sun was in my face so I was pointing my phone not knowing if I was actually capturing anything on camera. This object hovered for minutes before going straight south, then up and down. After another few minutes of hovering, it went straight west at very high speeds.
Strange phenomenon appears in the skies over US and New Zealand
On Sunday morning, June 19th, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral (0427 UT) carrying a Globalstar communications satellite. Within hours, people around the world started seeing strange things in the sky.
Almost two hours after launch, the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket deployed the Globalstar satellite; the smoke ring Wood saw was the "puff" of separation. At the time, the rocket was more than 1100 km high, so people were able to see it across much of North America.
An hour after the smoke ring, things got really strange. Sky watchers in New Zealand saw this:
Image credit: Twinkle Dark Sky Tours.
Photographer Alasdair Burns of Twinkle Dark Sky Tours on Stewart Island said to Spaceweather, "It looked like a beautiful galaxy, it was a very slowly rotating spiral that started small and gradually expanded."
There has been much discussion on the web about a covert payload hitchhiking on this Falcon 9 rocket. Analysts believe that a clandestine satellite may have been released about 10.5 minutes after launch.
Former U.S. government insiders brought together by rock star Tom DeLonge team up to reveal what the government knows about UFOs. This groundbreaking effort is led by Luis “Lue” Elizondo. See more in Season 1, Episode 1, “The UFO Insiders.”
SpaceX launches three Falcon 9 rockets in 36 hours
SpaceX has successfully completed three Falcon 9 launches in just over 36 hours, highlighting the company’s continuous push towards ever-higher launch cadences in 2022.
In February, shortly after a NASA oversight panelist revealed that SpaceX was targeting 52 launches in 2022, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the company’s goal was for “Falcon [to] launch about once a week” throughout the year. In October 2020, continuing a tradition of extremely ambitious SpaceX launch cadence targets, Musk had also tweeted that “a lot of improvements” would need to be made to achieve his goal of 48 launches – an average of four launches per month – in 2021. Ultimately, SpaceX fell well short of that target, but did set a new annual record of 31 launches in one year, breaking its 2020 record of 26 launches by about 20%. However, perhaps even more important than the new record was the fact that SpaceX was able to complete six launches in four weeks at the end of 2021.
That impressive and unexpected achievement would turn out to be an explicit sign of things to come in 2022.
SpaceX’s successful completion of three launches in 36.5 hours is merely an extension of that feat. In the same four-week period at the end of 2021, SpaceX completed three of those six launches in 69 hours. Two months later, SpaceX did it again, launching three Falcon 9 rockets from all three of its Falcon launch pads in 67 hours.
More importantly, SpaceX has also managed to sustain an average cadence of more than one Falcon launch per week throughout the first half of 2022, completing its 26th launch of the year on June 19th with another two launches planned before the end of the month. SpaceX has actually sustained that cadence for even longer. Beginning on November 24th, 2021, SpaceX has now completed 32 Falcon 9 launches in less than seven months.
The company’s latest hat-trick or triple-header began on Friday, June 17th, when Falcon 9 booster B1060 lifted off at 12:09 pm EDT from SpaceX’s NASA Kennedy Space Center LC-39A pad, helped carry another 53 Starlink V1.5 satellites into space, and became the first Falcon booster to launch and land 13 times. Starlink 4-19 was also SpaceX’s 49th dedicated Starlink launch, SpaceX’s 50th consecutively successful Falcon booster landing, and 100th successful Falcon booster reuse.
Falcon 9 B1060 lifts off for the 13th time.(Richard Angle)
22 hours later, a second Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Vandenberg Space Force Base SLC-4E pad at 7:19 am PDT, Saturday, June 18th carrying the first of three SARah radar satellites for Germany and an unspecified number of rideshare payloads. For the third time this year, booster B1071 successfully boosted back to shore and touched down at SLC-4E’s LZ-4 landing pad shortly after liftoff.
Fog made Falcon 9’s SARah-1 launch virtually invisible, but the landing was not. (SpaceX)
Finally, at 12:27 am EDT on Sunday, June 19th, a third Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station LC-40 pad carrying a single spare Globalstar-2 communications satellite and, apparently, several secret rideshare payloads. Falcon 9’s Globalstar launch occurred just over 14 hours after SARah-1, breaking SpaceX’s record time between two orbital launches.
Falcon 9’s 3rd launch in 36 hours.(Richard Angle)
Globalstar FM15 was also SpaceX’s 26th launch of 2022, averaging one launch every 6.5 days in the first half of the year. June isn’t over, however, and SpaceX still has plans to launch Starlink 4-21 on June 25th and the SES-22 geostationary communications satellite on June 28th. If both launches avoid delays, SpaceX will end the first half of 2022 with 28 successful orbital launches. Perhaps even more significantly, after another two launches in the last days of June, SpaceX will have launched 17 times in a single quarter – equivalent to 68 launches per year if sustained for four quarters. In the history of spaceflight, a single rocket family has never successfully launched more than 61 times in one year.
A week after rolling a different ‘test tank’ from its South Texas Starship factory to nearby launch and test facilities, SpaceX has moved a second test tank to the pad.
Hearkening back to a period in 2020 where SpaceX built and tested six different Starship test tanks in a period of six months, the company appears to be preparing to test another batch of tanks in the hopes of qualifying Super Hea
vy booster design changes and clearing the way for a significant upgrade to all Starship tank domes. The sequencing of the latest tank raises some questions, however.
The top of the structural test machine aka “Can Crusher” was lifted onto test tank B7.1 today.
Known unofficially as the “EDOME” tank in reference to a cryptic label on the side of one of its halves, the first new test tank’s purpose is much more cut and dry. While its steel rings appear to be unchanged from current Starship and Super Heavy prototypes, the tank’s two domes share almost nothing in common with the dozens of domes SpaceX has built and tested over the last three years of development. The new domes are much simpler and should be easier to manufacture than the domes SpaceX is familiar with. Thanks to their more spherical shape, they should also be more efficient, allowing future Starship tanks to store a bit more propellant while taking up the same amount of vertical space. SpaceX has yet to begin testing the EDOME tank since its June 8th rollout and does not appear to be much closer to starting 12 days later.
On June 16th, SpaceX rolled a second test tank to the launch site, which eventually joined the EDOME tank at a staging area that used to be a Starship landing pad. Whereas the EDOME tank is more of a generic test article, the second tank – known as B7.1 – is specifically designed to test Super Heavy booster design changes.
B7.1 is a bit like a miniature Super Heavy. Its three-ring top section is mostly similar to the top section of a booster and is reinforced with dozens of external stringers. Oddly, it is missing cutouts for grid fins, and the tank’s forward dome does not have the reaction frame those hypothetical grid fins would anchor to. On the tank’s bottom half, the same stringers are present, and the tank features a new design that squeezes four slightly shorter rings into the same height as three. The Super Heavy thrust dome those rings enclose is also a new design that expands the number of central Raptor engines from 9 to 13.
It’s unsurprising that SpaceX wants to test those significant design changes. SpaceX did technically conduct a similar test in mid-2021 with a test tank known as BN2.1, but that tank featured a thrust dome with room for 9 older Raptors that would have generated about ~1700 tons of thrust. B7.1’s testing will go a step further than BN2.1 and use a structural test stand that should allow SpaceX to simulate the compressive forces Super Heavy boosters might experience in flight, adding another dimension of stress on top of the 13 hydraulic rams that will simultaneously subject the test tank to the equivalent of ~3000 tons (~6.6M lbf) of thrust.
What is surprising, however, is the fact that SpaceX has waited so long to build and test a tank like B7.1. SpaceX has already completed an entire Super Heavy booster (B7) with all the design changes B7.1 is meant will test and recently installed 33 new Raptor 2 engines on that prototype. A second upgraded booster, B8, is also nearly finished. In that sense, B7.1 is quite unusual and feels more like a reluctant afterthought than part of a methodical development process. If B7.1 suffers an unintentional failure during testing, SpaceX could be forced to abandon two nearly-finished Super Heavy boosters, wasting months of assembly and testing and rendering prototypes that are likely worth tens of millions of dollars all but useless.
B2.1 demonstrates how the ‘can crusher’ uses giant ropes and hydraulics to apply immense compressive forces to Starship tank prototypes. (NASASpaceflight – bocachicagal)
The design changes B7.1 is meant to test are not exactly radical, but it’s still unclear why SpaceX has chosen to conduct those tests after building two entire Super Heavy boosters. Earlier on in Starship development, SpaceX regularly used test tanks to qualify significant design changes before applying those changes to full prototypes, limiting the amount of resources that could be wasted on any unproven prototype. Thankfully, Super Heavy Booster 7 may have already completed similar Raptor thrust simulation tests on the same test stand B7.1 was recently installed on, meaning that SpaceX’s confidence may have been well-placed. However, if the first use of the ‘can crusher’ stand on a Super Heavy test tank finds any problems or ends in failure, B7 and B8 could still be easily rendered unusable or incapable of flight, significantly delaying Starship’s first orbital launch attempt.
Lately, SpaceX has been focused on preparing Starship S24 and Super Heavy B7 for static fire tests that could eventually qualify the pair to support the first orbital test flight. It’s not clear if or when SpaceX will be able to set aside time and evacuate Starbase’s busy orbital launch site to test B7.1 or the EDOME tank.
Astronomers Watched a “Near-Sun” Comet Disintegrate as it Flew too Close to the Sun
Comets that venture close to the Sun can transform into something beautiful, but sometimes they encounter incineration if they get too close. Of the various types of comets that orbit close to the Sun, astronomers had never seen the destruction of the type classified as “near-Sun” comets. But thanks to a variety of telescopes on summit of Mauna Kea in Hawai?i, scientists have now captured images of a periodic rocky near-Sun comet breaking apart. They say the disintegration of this comet could help explain the scarcity of such periodic near-Sun comets.
Astronomers have certainly witnessed other types of comets disintegrating in the solar corona. For example, early this year — after putting on a spectacular show — Comet Leonard broke apart after perihelion (its closest point to the Sun) in January, 2022. Comet Leonard was considered a Sun-grazing comet, the most commonly known comets that make close passes of the Sun. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft has detected about 4,000 Sun-grazers since it launched in 1995.
But there are also near-Sun, Sun-skirters and Sun-divers. However, the nomenclature and difference between them all is not clearly defined, says Karl Battams, from the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. Battams tracks Sun-grazing comets with data from SOHO, particularly those that belong to the ‘Kreutz’ family of comets, named after Heinrich Kreutz, a nineteenth-century astronomer who calculated many of their orbits.
It’s hard to make out, but the dot in the cross-hairs is a comet streaming toward the Sun. This image is from 2015, and the comet is the 3,000th one discovered by SOHO since it was launched. Image: SOHO/ESA/NASA
“There’s no clearly defined separation between what we would classify as a near-Sun versus Sun-grazing comet,” Battams said via email. But he was part of a group of astronomers that drafted some guidelines in a 2018 survey paper.
They proposed clear definitions for comets, based on how close they get to the Sun: near-Sun comets should encompass all objects that come within the orbit of Mercury, about .3 AU. Sunskirters are defined as objects that pass within 33 solar radii of the Sun’s center, equal to half of Mercury’s perihelion distance, and the commonly-used phrase Sun-grazers to be objects that reach perihelion within 3.45 solar radii. Finally, comets with orbits that intersect the solar photosphere are termed Sun-divers.
But, says Battams, the definitions can still be confusing because all Sun-grazing comets are near-Sun comets, but not all near-Sun comets are Sun-grazing comets.
The near-Sun comet that was recently observed while breaking apart, named 323P/SOHO, is a short-period ‘near-Sun’ (but NOT Sun-grazing) comet that experienced a different environment to the Kreutz Sun-grazers.
Near-Sun object 323P/SOHO observed by the Subaru Telescope on December 21, 2020 (left) and CFHT on February 11, 2021 (right). 323P/SOHO on its way to perihelion is seen as a point source in the center of the left image; after the perihelion, the comet has developed a long narrow tail as seen in the right image. (Credit: Subaru Telescope/CFHT/Man-To Hui/David Tholen)
“Instead of plunging deep into the corona and getting ripped apart or vaporized,” said Battams, “it has been getting slowly baked with repeated passes in a toasty environment, leading to a slow-but-steady demise. Probably many of the non-Kreutz that SOHO sees are undergoing this process, but this is the first time we’ve been able to definitely say that this is what’s happening.”
Battams, who was not involved in the ground-based study of this comet, said this first- of-its-kind observations for this class of comet is an important result for telling us about the evolution and end stage of comets in that “near-Sun” region. An outstanding question is that there are far fewer observed near-Sun objects than models show there should be.
Comet 323P/SOHO was discovered in 1999 with SOHO, and is a relatively small comet, with a nucleus of only about 172 meters (560 ft) in diameter. It rotates quickly, at 0.522 hr., the most rapid rotation of every known comet in the Solar System. Its orbital period is just over four years, so it has come close to the Sun several times. Plus, on its final pass, it came perilously close to the Sun, with a perihelion of only 0.04 astronomical units. While a larger comet could perhaps survive such a close approach, smaller comets that come that close are skirting with eventual doom.
Because comets like 323P pass so close to the Sun, they are difficult to spot and observe. To study this object, an international group of astronomers from Macau, the US, Germany, Taiwan, and Canada used multiple telescopes including the Subaru Telescope, the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), the Gemini North telescope, Lowell’s Discovery Telescope, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope.
Convex shape model of the nucleus of 323P/SOHO in three orthogonal views. The left and middle panels show edge-on views of the nucleus that are 90° apart from each other, with its spin axis (the Z-axis) pointing upwards, while the nucleus is viewed in a pole-on configuration (the line of sight along the negative Z direction) in the right panel. Credit:Man-To Hui/David Tholen)
Observations with the Surbaru telescope, which has a wide field of view, marked the first time 323P/SOHO was captured by a ground-based telescope. With this data, the researchers were able to better constrain the orbit, and they knew where to point the other telescopes when 323P/SOHO started to move away from the Sun again.
To their surprise the researchers found that 323P/SOHO had changed remarkably during perihelion. In the Subaru Telescope data, 323P/SOHO was just a dot.
“However, in our post-perihelion observations, it developed a long, narrow tail mimicking a disintegrating cometary debris cloud,” the authors wrote in their paper.
They also found that 323P/SOHO’s color is unlike anything else in the Solar System. They says observations of other near-Sun comets are needed to see if they also share these traits.
The researchers said they believe that the intense radiation from the Sun caused parts of the comet to break off due to thermal fracturing, similar to how ice cubes crack when you pour a hot drink over them. This mass loss mechanism could help explain what happens to near-Sun comets and why there are so few of them.
The researchers hope to spot whatever remains of the comet on its next perihelion in order to learn more about it. But it will likely plunge into the Sun on one of the next close passes.
David Wilcock & Corey Goode: The Cosmic Secret Documentary
Author David Wilcock and an array of researchers, scientists and archaeologists offer their perspectives on humanity’s long-lost cosmic origins.
For time immemorial we have looked to the stars for answers to unlock our past. We have interpreted prophecy with the hope of predetermining our future, and yet questions remain. Who are we? Why are we here and what is our destiny? In “The Cosmic Secret,” David Wilcock & Corey Goode, along with researchers, scientists, and archeologists, try to answer these very questions.
What's Killing The Cattle In The USA? Three Theories And One Stands Out!!
What’s Killing The Cattle In The USA?
1. It is suggested heat is the cause of this, but if so, why hasn’t it happened like this before? Seems highly unlikely and unreasonable.
2. Zetatalk suggests these are methane deaths.
What would cause such a thing like this?? Maybe the cause was something like release of methane but I checked the last 9 days in that area. It hasn’t been any major earthquake around the zone. Would the zetas care to comment on this subject? [and from another] What’s killing the cattle in the USA? [and from another]
This week, temperatures reached up to 108 degrees Fahrenheit with little cooling factor from wind.
The clues as to what killed mass numbers of cows in Kansas is their behavior just before death. If overheated, they would not group together as this prevents cooling by wind. Grouping together is something the cows would do in the dead of Winter if trying to get warm. Why would a herd mass by the fence, as though trying to get away from something offensive? Methane deaths in sheep and antelope and especially fish and birds are of record during the 7 of 10 Plate Movements, and the entire Mainland of the US is being shifted westward at this time. These were methane deaths. https://zetatalk.com/ning/30ju2022.htm IITM: Now the methane theory seems more plausible, but it also FALSE! The reason being, is that the methane would have affected other animals, insects, birds etc… NO MASSIVE BIRD DIE-OFF, WHICH WOULD HAVE LIKELY HAPPENED AT THE SAME TIME. IF THE METHANE WAS LOW LEVEL, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN OTHER ANIMALS DEAD TOO. 3. What is the next theory to consider? Well… there are a few clues… i) the animals died near the fence. ii) only one species died iii) no humans died iv) there are several assaults against the food supply v) the elite want humans to eat bugs So the next reasonable theory is that this is a manmade cause of death. The military already have into use, microwave weapons, which they use to get crowds to disperse… but what if they can also use that same technology to CORRAL humans or cows into a gathered space? This event can have a two-fold purpose:
As a practice test for future events to now target cattle, as part of the food scarcity plan.
As a practice test for future events, to cattle humans into contained areas for mass disposal.
They call it ‘non-lethal’… do you believe they can’t turn up the juice?
Plane Investigates UFO Fleet And Gets Abducted! Tacoma, Washington June 17, 2022, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: June 17, 2022
Location of sighting: Tacoma, Washington, USA Source: MUFON
Guys, this just in from Washington state. An eyewitness recorded a UFO fleet appearing in the sky over the water of Narrows Channel, which means these UFOs were appearing one by one before they shot off, or went down into the water. These UFOs are huge, about the size of two 747 jets and they are waiting for the whole group to gather before they leave. They are coming from an underwater alien base, 5km below the floor of the Narrows Channel. Awesome catch, rare sighting indeed! 100% proof that aliens live on this planet with us! What really makes this a doubly rare sighting is that fact that I see an small plane pass the UFOs and disappears near a UFO! A pilot investigated them close up, but looks like a public single engine aircraft got abducted in the process. Taken to the aliens home planet for further study.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
It was 10:30 on. The Sun had set a couple hours before, much lower in the trees. The moon was behind me and it was almost a new moon (no moon.) I often watch the sunset and had watched it this night. Later, after darkness fell, I looked out of my window and noticed some blue, glowing orbs high in the sky. I got my phone and immediately went out in the deck to start filming. My 7 year old grandson came out with me to watch them. Some faded out and then began to glow again. A plane began to fly toward it, entered a small cloud and did not emerge. This is on one of the videos. The positioning of these lights would be over the water above the Narrows Channel between Tacoma, WA and Gig Harbor, WA.
Diamond looking UFO over Morro Bay, California TODAY
This bright unidentified flying object was filmed over Morro Bay, CA today (19th June 2022).
Witness report:
Thought it was a Father’s Day ballon at first then noticed how bright light reflected from object. Object seemed to elevate in altitude and was nearly impossible to find in sky until light reflected from surface.
Hey check this out. Two long metallic objects are seen on Mars sticking out off a huge rock. NASA tries to say these are metallic minerals that are visible due to the rock around them wearing away from windblown sand. However that is not the case here. What we see are two metal arms sticking out of an actual alien under that rock. I believe if you lift up this huge rock, you will find the remainder of the creature. I think something threw this huge rock on purpose to kill the alien creature attacking it. This creature has an exoskeleton...an outer skeleton like an insect would have. Thus, this is an intelligent insect species that was attacking and was killed here.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
NASA States:
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover spotted these finger-like rocks with its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, on May 15, 2022, the 3,474th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. These likely formed as groundwater trickled through rock in the ancient past, depositing mineral cements over time; many years later, when the rock was exposed to the atmosphere, wind eroded the softer material around the cemented portions. The rocks were found on Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that Curiosity has been climbing since 2014.
UFO Creates Wormhole In Sky Over Salem, Wisconsin, USA June 19, 2022, UFO Sighting News.
Below the UFO is enlarged and has added shadow to bring out the detail of the UFO.
Date of sighting:June 19, 2022
Location of sighting: Salem, Wisconsin, USA
Email report
This UFO created a glowing ring around it in the night sky which may have been a cloud, or caused by its propulsion system slowing down or speeding up to quickly...revealing the wormhole it came from or was about to shoot into. Wisconsin in near the great lakes, which is a hotspot for UFO activity and is known for having incredible depth to them...which aliens love for making their bases deep under the lakes floor to stay out of the prying eyes of humans.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
Looked like a moving star. Stopped then created a smoking ring and kept moving. Saw what looked like a moving star. It was moving then stopped for a second and saw a beam come from center and split into into two that went outward to make a partial circle and created a smoke ring and the object kept moving in almost a zig zag pattern.
Glowing Craft Seen Over Saint Michaels, Maryland On June 18, 2022, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: June 18, 2022
Location of sighting: Saint Michaels, Maryland, USA Email report
Hey this just in. An eyewitness in Maryland saw a glowing craft with three lights on holding position in the sky, then shooting away. The craft was silent as it moved. UFOs come in all shapes, sizes and colors. But one thing they all have in common, they leave us stunned after we see them. It changes us forever, changes how we see the world around us, changes how we see our own existence and that of the universe. We live in an amazing place and time.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
A large object, with 3 lights (non pulsating) appeared stationary, then began moving west/south-west in a very slow pace, before disappearing. Total observation time was under a minute. Lights may have simply turned off or object moved due South, where lights were no longer visible, however the lights were so bright, we should have been able to still make something out. It did not make noise. It did not have the traditional red or green starboard and port airline lights. 3 large solid lights only.
Meer van UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
Could We Use Mars as a Base for Asteroid Mining?
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