NASA Releases a New 3D Animation of the Lunar Gateway

To get to the Moon, NASA is building a Lunar Gateway in orbit to facilitate easier access to the Moon. With construction beginning in 2028 as part of Artemis IV there will be an ongoing programme of enhancements and additions. NASA has now released a fabulous new 3D animation of the Lunar Gateway to showcase what the final Gateway will look like. It includes modules from partner nations and an Orion lunar landers dock to carry astronauts. 

NASA’s Artemis program marks a historic return to lunar exploration following on from the Apollo era. It aims to land “the first woman and the next man” on the Moon by 2025 and heralds a new era of space exploration focused on sustainability and international collaboration. This ambitious project will use advanced technologies, including the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft, to establish a long-term human presence on the surface of the Moon. The program also aims to develop the Lunar Gateway, a space station orbiting the Moon, to support missions and serve as a staging point for future expeditions to Mars. 

Stacking SLS for Artemis 1. Credit: NASA/Cory Huston

The purpose of the Lunar Gateway is to facilitate the exploration of the many scientific mysteries of deep space with Gateway’s first lunar space station. Starting with the Artemis IV mission in 2028, the international teams of astronauts will live, conducting science, and preparing for various lunar missions to the South Pole.

NASA has released a fabulous computer generated video of the Gateway showing its exterior form in amazing detail. You can view the video here.

The propulsion and power systems are prominent in the video and with the solar array will make the most powerful solar electric spacecraft ever flown. The array will power the station’s systems and even ionise the xenon gas that will produce thrust using an ion system to maintain the spacecrafts polar orbit. 

At the hub of the spacecraft though is the Habitation and Logistics Outpost otherwise known as HALO! This element controls and commands the spacecraft and provides communication links back to Earth and the lunar surface. It has been provided by the European Space Station (ESA) and will also support life support systems, exercise equipment and science payload banks. 

Another element provided by ESA with support from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is the environmental control and life support systems. Without it, life on board simply would not survive. 

There are a whole host of other systems on bard from a refuelling capability to ensure the power and propulsion system is topped up, a crew and science airlock system, science payloads and much more. 

Source : 

• Gateway: Up Close in Stunning Detail

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Determining the Safest Martian Caves for Future Astronauts

The study mentions several other locations across Mars where pits or skylights have been observed, including Hebrus Valles, the Pavonis volcano, Ascraeus Mons, Acidalia Planitia (whose surface location was featured The Martian), and Cydonia Mensae. Additionally, the study discusses how lava channels, caves, or tubes close to sources of water ice would also prove beneficial for future astronauts, which could significantly reduce the costs of shipping and storing water on their spacecraft for the initial journey to Mars.

“The best case would be a lava tube with strong walls found next to powerful glacial structures,” the study notes. “The colony itself, most likely, will have the appearance of separate premises, with residential, engineering, elevator and greenhouse compartments. They will have to be connected to each other by small transition tunnels to control the pressure and composition of the artificially created atmosphere in them.”

Lava tubes were featured prominently in the National Geographic television series, Mars, which depicted the first astronauts to the Red Planet and their quest to survive the harsh environment. During their journey, lava tubes provided shelter from the cosmic and solar radiation while also having large deposits of water ice at their disposal which they used for drinking and rocket fuel while drastically reducing the amount of water they initially had to bring during their journey.

The reason why cosmic and solar radiation rains down on to the Martian surface daily is due to the lack of protective ozone layer and magnetic field that exists on Earth and helps deflect this deadly radiation from reaching our surface, enabling life to exist here for billions of years. While Mars might have had both mechanisms billions of years ago, the interior of the Red Planet has since cooled drastically, causing these protective features to be stripped away by the solar wind and lost to space.

This study comes as NASA plans to send humans back to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years, and eventually Mars, as part of the agency’s Moon to Mars Architecture. Therefore, adequate preparation prior to sending the first astronauts to the Red Planet would prove beneficial in increasing their chances of survival throughout the entire journey, and this study highlighted several ways lava tubes could do just that.

How will lava caves help future Mars astronauts in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

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Zijn er andere planeten zoals die van ons?

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Zijn er andere planeten zoals die van ons?
De zoektocht naar buitenaards leven houdt de wereld al tientallen jaren bezig. Terwijl telescopen naar de hemel kijken en de uithoeken van de ruimte afspeuren, leggen sondes zoals Voyager 1 ongelofelijke afstanden af in de hoop buitenaards leven te vinden. Maar waar kan zulk leven gevonden worden? Wat zijn de ideale omstandigheden voor buitenaardse wezens om in te leven? En hoe vergelijkbaar zijn hun planeten met die van ons?

LEES door deze galerij om de antwoorden te vinden die verborgen liggen in de interstellaire ruimte.

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Waar te beginnen met zoeken?
Er zijn naar schatting een septiljoen sterren in het bekende heelal (dat is een 1 gevolgd door 24 nullen!). En om elk van deze sterren kunnen wel een dozijn planeten draaien. Dus hoe kunnen we buitenaards leven vinden? De eerste stap is om het dichter bij huis te zoeken.

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De aarde en haar omstandigheden
De aarde is astronomisch gezien de perfecte plek om te leven. Het bestaan van water en een stabiele atmosfeer heeft een ideale omgeving gecreëerd waarin leven kan floreren.

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De bewoonbare zone
De afstand van een planeet tot zijn ster is cruciaal voor het begrijpen van de leefbaarheid van een planeet. De aarde bevindt zich perfect in wat de bewoonbare zone wordt genoemd, waar de omstandigheden niet te warm of te koud zijn om te kunnen leven.

©Getty Images

De 'Goldilocks zone'
De bewoonbare zone wordt in het engels ook wel de 'Goldilocks zone' genoemd, vernoemd naar het sprookje. In het verhaal kiest Goudlokje tussen drie sets van items en negeert de items die te extreem zijn (groot of klein, warm of koud), in plaats daarvan neemt ze genoegen met het item dat "precies goed" is.

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Venus
Venus, dat qua massa vergelijkbaar is met de aarde, staat te dicht bij de zon om levensvatbaar te zijn. Planeetwetenschappers denken dat Venus ooit water aan het oppervlak heeft gehad, maar dat de planeet verstikt is door kooldioxide en een temperatuur van 462°C.

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Mercurius
Mercurius staat nog dichter bij de zon dan Venus. Daarnaast is het te klein en heeft het niet eens een atmosfeer om leven te ondersteunen.

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Mogelijkheden beperken
Door de criteria voor de bewoonbare zone te begrijpen, konden astronomen achterhalen dat er zo'n 40 miljard planeten in de bewoonbare zones van de Melkweg zouden kunnen draaien.

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In de sterren geschreven
Tot nu toe hebben astronomen slechts 1.780 planeten buiten ons zonnestelsel kunnen bevestigen. En van al die planeten bevinden zich er maar 16 in hun bewoonbare zones.

©Reuters

Te groot of te klein
Maar het is niet genoeg voor een planeet om zich op de juiste afstand van een ster te bevinden. De grootte doet er ook zeker toe. Een kleine planeet kan geen atmosfeer behouden, terwijl een te grote planeet een verpletterende atmosfeer zal hebben.

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De aarde als schaal
Om de juiste atmosferische druk te hebben, moet een planeet tussen 0,1 en 10 keer de massa van de aarde hebben. Dit is een zeer smalle bewoonbare zone, zeker als je bedenkt hoeveel planeten in het heelal honderden keren groter zijn dan de aarde.

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Gliese 581c
In 2007 werd de wetenschappelijke gemeenschap verblijd met het nieuws over Gliese 581c, de eerste superaarde in de bewoonbare zone. Al snel werd ontdekt dat de omstandigheden aan het oppervlak van de planeet veel leken op die van Venus.

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Kepler-186f
In 2014 werd een exoplaneet ter grootte van de aarde ontdekt die Kepler-186f heet en in de bewoonbare zone van een rode dwergster rondcirkelt. Astronomen proberen nog steeds vast te stellen of de planeet leefbaar is.

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Proxima Centauri b
De exoplaneet die het dichtst bij de aarde staat is Proxima Centauri b. Deze planeet draait rond de ster die het dichtst bij de zon staat, op een afstand van ongeveer vier lichtjaar. Hoewel het een gouden planeet is, weten wetenschappers niet zeker of het ook een atmosfeer heeft.

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Andere belangrijke criteria
Hoewel de bewoonbare zone en de atmosfeer van een planeet belangrijk zijn om de bewoonbaarheid te begrijpen, is dat zeker niet alles. Planeten moeten aan een groot aantal andere criteria voldoen, waaronder het vermogen om vloeibaar water te bevatten.

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Mars
Mars is de enige andere planeet in ons zonnestelsel die zich binnen de bewoonbare zone bevindt. Maar de juiste atmosferische druk is alleen te vinden op de lage punten van de planeet en er is nog geen bewijs dat de planeet vloeibaar water heeft.

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Droge planeten
Hypothetisch gezien zouden droge planeten water kunnen vasthouden via oases. Dit zou betekenen dat zulke planeten dichter bij een ster en buiten de bewoonbare zone kunnen draaien.

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Oceaanplaneten
Er bestaat een theorie dat de oceanen op aarde zijn ontstaan nadat ijslichamen op onze planeet insloegen en vervolgens smolten. Er zouden nog meer van zulke planeten kunnen bestaan.

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Manen
Natuurlijke satellieten van planeten, of manen, zouden ook bewoonbaar kunnen zijn. Maar deze manen moeten zich binnen de bewoonbare zone van hun gastheerplaneten bevinden en ze moeten ver genoeg rond hun planeet draaien, zodat ze geen vulkanische planeten worden zoals Jupiters maan, Io.

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Europa
De op drie na grootste maan van Jupiter, Europa, zou een wateroceaan onder het oppervlak van de planeet bevatten, welke mogelijk buitenaards leven zou kunnen herbergen.

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Magnetische velden
Het magnetische veld van de aarde is een voorbeeld van een ander belangrijk criterium dat de levensvatbaarheid bepaalt, omdat het het oppervlak van de planeet beschermt tegen straling en kosmische stralen. Andere planeten zouden een vergelijkbaar veld moeten hebben om complex leven te kunnen laten floreren.

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Zonnetweeling
Tot op de dag van vandaag hebben astronomen nog geen ster kunnen vinden die op de zon lijkt, een fenomeen dat een zonnetweeling wordt genoemd. Dit heeft het de wetenschappelijke gemeenschap moeilijker gemaakt om buitenaards leven te vinden dat op het onze lijkt.

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Buitenaards leven
Maar welke soorten buitenaards leven zouden we kunnen vinden? Het is algemeen aangenomen dat op koolstof gebaseerde levensvormen de enige levensvatbare manieren zijn waarop leven kan bestaan.

©Getty Images

Koolstof-chauvinisme
Veel wetenschappers hebben kritiek geuit op het idee dat buitenaards leven gebaseerd moet zijn op koolstof. Hypothetisch gezien zouden buitenaardse wezens uit heel andere elementen kunnen bestaan die hen in staat stellen om op plekken te overleven die voor mensen onherbergzaam zijn.

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Titan
Titan, de grootste maan van Saturnus, bezit koolwaterstofmeren die mogelijk leven zouden kunnen ondersteunen. Titan is het enige andere object in de ruimte waarvan is ontdekt dat het oppervlak vloeistof bevat.

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Zijn we uniek, of alleen de eerste?
Natuurkundige Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) kwam met de theorie dat we nog geen buitenaards leven zijn tegengekomen omdat intelligent leven ofwel zeldzaam is, ofwel nog maar net was onstaan in het universum.

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Dicht bij het einde
Andere natuurkundigen hebben beweerd dat we nog geen buitenaards leven hebben gevonden omdat we al te laat zijn. In feite zeggen ze dat de meeste buitenaardse wezens al dood zijn en dat het heelal te ver uitbreidt om hun overblijfselen nog te kunnen vinden.

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Het Grote Filter
Veel antropologen en astronomen geloven dat de mensheid alleen is in het universum, vanwege Het Grote Filter. Dit betekent in feite dat er zoveel onwaarschijnlijke stappen nodig zijn voor leven om intelligentie te ontwikkelen, dat het onwaarschijnlijk is dat dit nog eens zal gebeuren.

©Getty Images

De 'dierentuin hypothese'
Andere wetenschappers veronderstellen dat buitenaards leven wel degelijk bestaat, maar dat ze de mensheid vermijden om ons primitieve bestaan zonder tussenkomst te laten verlopen. Hoe dan ook, de ruimte is een grote grens die heel goed buitenaards leven zou kunnen herbergen.

Bronnen:

• (National Geographic)
• (NASA)
• (Astronomy.com)
• (Earth How)
• (Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)

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UFOs spotted in Canada, video goes viral: ‘Like being in a sci-fi movie’

• The objects, described ‘as bright as the sun,’ were flying southwards above the river’s north shore before they disappeared behind a cloud.

UFOs as ’bright as the sun’ spotted over Winipeg River in Canada

(Pixabay/kalhh)

{ https://www.livemint.com/ }

BBC/Twenty Twenty Productions Ltd

The children at the Broad Haven Primary School were asked to draw what they had seen

BBC/Twenty Twenty Productions Ltd

The children reportedly drew near identical images of the UFO, which captured widespread media attention

BBC/Twenty Twenty Productions Ltd

Dr Marks says today a lot of air traffic movements are recorded using apps

{ https://www.bbc.com/ }

UAP over Baytown, Texas on 6-25-2024, UFO Sighting News. It suddenly turns left into a cloud and flies away. 

Date of sighting: 6-25-2-24

Location of sighting: Baytown, Texas, USA

 

Now this was caught on a security cam this week and it not only shows a UFO but it shows a round sphere UFO that quickly flashes a bright green light in an attempt to fake eyewitnesses out and make them believe its a meteor. However the UFO then makes a hard left into the clouds and shoots away. Such maneuvers are impossible for meteors. The evidence is right there on security cam footage. 

Scott C. Waring

 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Could A Mound of Dust and Rock Protect Astronauts from Deadly Radiation?

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Mars is Bombarded by Meteoroids At More Frequent Rates than Previously Thought

Current impact rates at Mars could be 2-10 times higher than previously estimated, depending on the size of the meteoroids, according to new research.

Mars; the center of the scene shows the entire Valles Marineris canyon system.

Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

“It’s possible Mars is more geologically active than we thought, which holds implications for the age and evolution of the planet’s surface,” said Brown University’s Dr. Ingrid Daubar.

“Our results are based on a small number of examples available to us, but the estimate of the current impact rate suggests the planet is getting hit much more frequently than we can see using imaging alone.”

Dr. Daubar and colleagues used the highly sensitive seismometer onboard NASA’s InSight lander to identify eight new impact craters from meteoroids not previously seen from orbit.

The frequency of these cosmic collisions challenges existing notions about how often meteoroids hit the surface of Mars and suggests a need to revise current Martian cratering models to incorporate higher impact rates, especially from smaller meteoroids.

The findings could ultimately reshape current understandings of the Martian surface — as batterings from small meteoroids continue to sculpt it — and the impact history of not just Mars, but other planets.

“This is going to require us to rethink some of the models the science community uses to estimate the age of planetary surfaces throughout the entire Solar System,” Dr. Daubar said.

Six of the craters the researchers detected were near the site where the stationary InSight set down.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

The two distant impacts they identified from the data were the two biggest impacts ever detected by scientists, even after decades of watching from orbit.

The larger impacts, each leaving a crater roughly the size of a football field, came just 97 days apart, underscoring the higher frequency of these types of geological events.

“This size impact, we would expect to happen maybe once every couple of decades, maybe even once in a lifetime, but here we have two of them that are just over 90 days apart,” Dr. Daubar said.

“It could just be a crazy coincidence, but there’s a really, really small likelihood that it’s just coincidence.”

“What’s more likely is that either the two big impacts are related, or the impact rate is a lot higher for Mars than what we thought it was.”

“Planetary impacts are happening all across the Solar System all the time.”

“We’re interested in studying that on Mars because we can then compare and contrast what’s happening on Mars to what’s happening on the Earth,”

“This is important for understanding our Solar System, what’s in it and what the population of impacting bodies in our Solar System looks like — both as hazards to the Earth and also historically to other planets.”

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

• The study appeared today in the journal Science Advances.
• Ingrid J. Daubar et al. 2024. Seismically detected cratering on Mars: Enhanced recent impact flux? Science Advances 10 (26); doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adk7615

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50-Minute Global UFO Sightings Compilation: Explore the Unexplained

Explore an incredible collection of UFO sightings from around the world! This 50-minute compilation features stunning videos and photos that capture mysterious objects in the sky. Witness firsthand accounts and unexplained phenomena that have intrigued and puzzled experts for decades. Dive into the unknown and join the quest to uncover the truth about UFOs!

• https://youtu.be/BT6xqxkNOMQ

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

NASA benadrukt dat astronauten Starliner niet geblokkeerd zitten in ISS

NASA benadrukt dat astronauten Starliner niet geblokkeerd zitten in ISS

© Aangeboden door Belga

De twee astronauten die met de Boeing-ruimtecapsule Starliner drie weken geleden aankwamen in het internationale ruimtestation ISS, zitten daar "niet geblokkeerd". Dat heeft het Amerikaanse ruimteagentschap NASA vrijdag benadrukt. De terugkeer van de Starliner naar de aarde is ondertussen herhaaldelijk uitgesteld en zal er nu pas komen na nieuwe tests.

NASA benadrukt dat astronauten Starliner niet geblokkeerd zitten in ISS

© Aangeboden door Belga

De terugvlucht was aanvankelijk ten laatste op 26 juni gepland. NASA gaf geen nieuwe datum, maar liet eerder al weten dat de terugkeer van de Starliner met de twee astronauten Butch Wilmore en Suni Williams niet meer voor juni zou zijn.

Onderweg naar het ISS had de Starliner te maken gekregen met talrijke technische problemen. Er waren bijvoorbeeld heliumlekken opgetreden. Na problemen met de motoren slaagde het ruimteschip er pas bij de tweede poging in om aan te meren bij het ISS.

"Butch en Suni zijn niet geblokkeerd in de ruimte", benadrukte Steve Stich, een hoge verantwoordelijke van NASA, vrijdag tijdens een ongewoon gespannen persconferentie. De twee astronauten zouden aanvankelijk slechts iets meer dan een week in de ruimte blijven. In Amerikaanse media werd dan ook de vraag gesteld of de astronauten nog wel konden terugkeren naar aarde.

"We kunnen Starliner op elk moment terughalen", benadrukte Mark Nappi, een hoge verantwoordelijke bij Boeing. De eerste bemande vlucht van de Starliner was de ultieme testvlucht van de Boeing-ruimtecapsule, alvorens er reguliere vluchten mee uitgevoerd kunnen worden van en naar het ISS.

De Starliner, ontwikkeld en gebouwd door de Amerikaanse vliegtuigbouwer Boeing, maakte zijn eerste succesvolle onbemande vlucht in 2022.

NASA benadrukt dat astronauten Starliner niet geblokkeerd zitten in ISS

© Aangeboden door Belga

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De terugvlucht was aanvankelijk ten laatste op 26 juni gepland. NASA gaf geen nieuwe datum, maar liet eerder al weten dat de terugkeer van de Starliner met de 2 astronauten Butch Wilmore en Suni Williams niet meer voor juni zou zijn. 

Onderweg naar het ISS had de Starliner te maken gekregen met talrijke technische problemen. Er waren bijvoorbeeld heliumlekken opgetreden. Na problemen met de motoren slaagde het ruimteschip er pas bij de tweede poging in om aan te meren bij het ISS.

De capsule kon pas bij een tweede poging aanmeren bij het ISS

© Foto: AP

"Butch en Suni zijn niet geblokkeerd in de ruimte", benadrukte Steve Stich, een hoge verantwoordelijke van NASA, vrijdag tijdens een ongewoon gespannen persconferentie. De 2 astronauten zouden aanvankelijk slechts iets meer dan een week in de ruimte blijven. In Amerikaanse media werd dan ook de vraag gesteld of de astronauten nog wel konden terugkeren naar aarde.

"We kunnen Starliner op elk moment terughalen", benadrukte Mark Nappi, een hoge verantwoordelijke bij Boeing. De eerste bemande vlucht van de Starliner was de ultieme testvlucht van de Boeing-ruimtecapsule, alvorens er reguliere vluchten mee uitgevoerd kunnen worden van en naar het ISS.

De Starliner, ontwikkeld en gebouwd door de Amerikaanse vliegtuigbouwer Boeing, maakte zijn eerste succesvolle onbemande vlucht in 2022.

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Typically ranging from 5 to 500 micrometers in size and anywhere from a couple of million years to over 500 million years old, these tiny fossils are found mostly in sedimentary rocks, making them invaluable both to geologists and paleontologists. They help determine the age of rock layers, reconstruct past environments, and understand the evolutionary history of life on Earth. For instance, the presence of certain microfossils can indicate whether a rock layer was formed in a marine or terrestrial environment, providing insights into past climate conditions and geological events. Simply put, they offer a glimpse into what a specific area was like all those years ago.

Fossil specimen (left) and diagram (right) of Gangtoucunia aspera preserving soft tissues, including the gut and tentacle. Image credit: Luke Parry and Guangxu Zhang.

Credit: Luke Parry and Guangxu Zhang.

Fossil specimen of Gangtoucunia aspera preserving soft tissues, including the gut and tentacles (left and middle). The drawing at the right illustrates the visible anatomical features in the fossil specimens. Image credit: Luke Parry and Guangxu Zhang.

Credit: Luke Parry and Guangxu Zhang.

According to the researchers, Gangtoucunia would have looked similar to modern scyphozoan jellyfish polyps, with a hard tubular structure anchored to the underlying substrate. The tentacle mouth would have extended outside the tube, but could have been retracted inside the tube to avoid predators. Unlike living jellyfish polyps however, the tube of Gangtoucunia was made of calcium phosphate, a hard mineral that makes up our own teeth and bones. Use of this material to build skeletons has become more rare among animals over time.

Corresponding author Dr. Luke Parry, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, said, "This really is a one-in-million discovery. These mysterious tubes are often found in groups of hundreds of individuals, but until now they have been regarded as 'problematic' fossils, because we had no way of classifying them. Thanks to these extraordinary new specimens, a key piece of the evolutionary puzzle has been put firmly in place."

The new specimens clearly demonstrate that Gangtoucunia was not related to annelid worms (earthworms, polychaetes and their relatives) as had been previously suggested for similar fossils. It is now clear that Gangtoucunia's body had a smooth exterior and a gut partitioned longitudinally, whereas annelids have segmented bodies with transverse partitioning of the body.

The fossil was found at a site in the Gaoloufang section in Kunming, eastern Yunnan Province, China. Here, anaerobic (oxygen-poor) conditions limit the presence of bacteria that normally degrade soft tissues in fossils.

Ph.D. student Guangxu Zhang, who collected and discovered the specimens, said, "The first time I discovered the pink soft tissue on top of a Gangtoucunia tube, I was surprised and confused about what they were. In the following month, I found three more specimens with soft tissue preservation, which was very exciting and made me rethink the affinity of Gangtoucunia. The soft tissue of Gangtoucunia, particularly the tentacles, reveals that it is certainly not a priapulid-like worm as previous studies suggested, but more like a coral, and then I realized that it is a cnidarian."

Although the fossil clearly shows that Gangtoucunia was a primitive jellyfish, this doesn't rule out the possibility that other early tube-fossil species looked very different. From Cambrian rocks in Yunnan province, the research team have previously found well-preserved tube fossils that could be identified as priapulids (marine worms), lobopodians (worms with paired legs, closely related to arthropods today) and annelids.

Co-corresponding author Xiaoya Ma (Yunnan University and University of Exeter) said, "A tubicolous mode of life seems to have become increasingly common in the Cambrian, which might be an adaptive response to increasing predation pressure in the early Cambrian. This study demonstrates that exceptional soft-tissue preservation is crucial for us to understand these ancient animals."

The paper "Exceptional soft tissue preservation reveals a cnidarian affinity for a Cambrian phosphatic tubicolous enigma' will be published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Nov. 2.

Traditionally, the classification of microfossils has been a manual, time-consuming process requiring expert knowledge, with scientists staring into a microscope or at a computer screen for hours at a time. Given the sheer volume of data—potentially billions of microfossils from numerous slides—manual classification is tedious work, and attempting to classify all these microfossils is an insurmountable and impossible task. There are just too many of them, hence the advantage of letting AI assist in that process.

Spearheaded by a team from the University of Tromsø, The Arctic University of Norway, researchers have developed a novel method to automate the classification of microfossils. 

The study introduces a two-stage AI-driven pipeline to automate the detection and classification of microfossils from microscope images. 

The first stage involves using a pre-trained object detection model, YOLOv5, to identify and extract individual microfossils from high-resolution slide images. This model efficiently generates bounding boxes around each microfossil, a task that would be labor-intensive if done manually.

In the second stage, the researchers employ self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques to train models that can extract features from the detected microfossils. SSL is particularly advantageous in scenarios with limited labeled data, as it allows the model to learn useful representations from unlabeled data. The study compares two SSL frameworks, SimCLR and DINO, and finds that both significantly improve classification performance.

An image of the same slide of microfossils. On the left, the Machine learning approach. On the right, the pipeline of standard image processing methods. As the study notes, more fossils are separated with the machine learning approach as it is better able to differentiate the various fossil types.

(Image: Artificial Intelligence in Geosciences)

Basically, the AI is able to differentiate between different fossils and classify them. According to the study, this method is fast and computationally light, making it feasible to process and classify millions of microfossils efficiently. This scalability is crucial for handling the vast datasets typical in geological research. Moreover, as the AI classifies more fossils, it labels them and learns from its data, continuously adding to its own knowledge base. 

“This work shows that there is great potential in utilizing AI in this field,” explained Iver Martinsen, one of the study’s authors, in a press statement. “By using AI to automatically detect and recognize fossils, geologists might have a tool that can help them better utilize the enormous amount of information that wellbore samples provide.”

The ability to automate microfossil classification has profound implications for earth sciences. It can accelerate research in subsurface exploration, aiding in oil and gas exploration and carbon capture and storage projects. Moreover, the insights gained from microfossil analysis can contribute to broader scientific inquiries, such as studying past climate changes and mass extinction events. Understanding these historical patterns is essential for predicting future environmental changes and developing strategies to mitigate their impacts.

Close up photograph of the mouth region of Gangtoucunia aspera showing the tentacles that would have been used to capture prey. Image credit: Luke Parry and Guangxu Zhang.

Credit: Luke Parry and Guangxu Zhang.

“We are very happy with our results,” Martinsen concluded. “Our model exceeds previous benchmarks available out there. We hope that the present work will be beneficial for geologists both in industry and academia.”

• MJ Banias covers space, security, and technology with The Debrief. You can email him at mj@thedebrief.org or follow him on Twitter @mjbanias.

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

https://phys.org/ }

The new research, undertaken by scientists with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), reveals the problems posed by warm seawater. This water seeps into the lower portions of ground-based ice, thereby accelerating not only ice melt but also its movement into the surrounding ocean.

Additionally, the results could help climate researchers develop a clearer picture of how Antarctic ice melt contributes to rising sea levels and other changes that could impact far-reaching areas around the world in the years ahead.

BAS researcher Alex Bradley, who specializes in ice dynamics and served as lead author of the new study, says his team has identified what they believe could be “a new tipping point in Antarctic ice sheet melting.”

 “This means our projections of sea level rise might be significant underestimates,” Bradley recently warned in a statement.

CHILLING DISCOVERIES WITHIN THE GROUNDING ZONE

Bradley and his team’s study focuses on the grounding zone, which describes an area beneath the Antarctic ice sheet where the ground-based ice on the continent meets the sea.

Land-based ice in Antarctica moves gradually over long periods, making its way into the ocean, where it begins to melt once it meets the seawater. However, over time, climate change has been accelerating both the movement of the ice sheets and warming the surrounding seawater. Such processes are identified as major contributors to sea level rise, which can affect coastlines all around the world.

This process of speeding along the movement of Antarctica’s ice is further quickened by the presence of warmer seawater.

“Ice sheets are very sensitive to melting in their grounding zones,” Bradley recently said, adding that grounding zone melt he and his colleagues have observed “displays a ‘tipping point like’ behaviour, where a very small change in ocean temperature can cause a very big increase in grounding zone melting, which would lead to a very big change in flow of the ice above it.”

When warm water begins to seep into the grounding zone, cavities open up, allowing additional water into the area, precipitating the melt. Even a small increase in water temperature would likely significantly impact the amount of melting that occurs.

“Our results point towards a stronger sensitivity of ice-sheet melting,” Bradley and his co-author write in their recent study, emphasizing that such dynamics contribute to “higher sea-level-rise contribution in a warming climate” than scientists had previously been able to discern from past studies.

Satellite image of the ice surface from Radarsat with the valleys and ridges of the buried ancient mountains mapped.

(Supplied: Stewart Jamieson, Durham University)

ABSENT FROM EXISTING MODELS

Given that such factors are currently absent from models scientists rely on to determine the amount of melt that can occur, it seems likely that warm seawater and its impact on ice within the grounding zone can account for some of the accelerated shrinkage of ice sheets observed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and others. This would also relate to ice sheets in other parts of the world apart from Antarctica such as Greenland, where similar ice melt has been observed to occur at rates faster than scientists expected based on existing models.

Bradly called the new data “missing physics” that, while remaining absent from current models, prohibits scientists from accurately projecting the potential impact of ice melt in the Earth’s polar regions.

“They don’t have the ability to simulate melting beneath grounded ice, which we think is happening,” Bradley says, adding that he and his colleagues are “working on putting that into our models now.”

This illustration shows what Antarctica would look like if the ice sheet were lifted from the continent. Highland A is a series of three hills in the East Antarctic.

(Supplied: Stewart Jamieson, Durham University)

Bradley and his team’s findings were detailed in a new study, “Tipping point in ice-sheet grounding-zone melting due to ocean water intrusion,” co-authored with Ian J. Hewitt and published in the journal Nature Geoscience on June 25, 2024.

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

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

Scientists were eager to analyze the 4.3-ounce (121.6-gram) sample, and now, less than a year after its arrival on Earth, a new study published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science has revealed the discovery of vital prebiotic compounds and minerals on Bennu’s rocky surface.

Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a co-author of the new paper, said the OSIRIS-REx mission “gave us exactly what we hoped: a large pristine asteroid sample rich in nitrogen and carbon from a formerly wet world.”

The asteroid’s composition, represented in the samples retrieved by OSIRIS-REx, offers scientists a look into the formation of the solar system and the components that may have played a role in the formation of life on Earth.

The analysis is key to confirming carbon and nitrogen-rich dusts and organic compounds essential for life. However, the sample also revealed a few surprises, including the presence of magnesium-sodium phosphate, which had not been detected in data obtained from the asteroid through remote sensing.

This significant finding points to the likelihood that Bennu may have its origins in a small, primitive ocean world since magnesium-sodium phosphate is a water-soluble phosphate that plays a crucial role in Earth’s biochemistry. The detections made in the Bennu samples were also very pure and of a size that set them apart from similar phosphates found in asteroid samples retrieved by JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission.

Although it seems likely, based on the new data, that Bennu has a history involving interactions with water, the asteroid is still relatively chemically primitive, and somewhat paradoxically, researchers compare the elements it possesses to those of the Sun.

Confirming the presence of carbon and nitrogen in the asteroid samples obtained from Bennu’s surface allows researchers to glean new insights into environments where those elements formed, as well as how they became complex molecules over time. These processes would have once occurred early in Earth’s history, also a process that would have been fundamental in the formation of life.

Retrieving the samples directly from the surface of an asteroid also offered NASA scientists access to a veritable “time capsule” where the materials remained preserved for billions of years. Given their low density, such materials are destroyed when asteroids collide with Earth’s atmosphere, burning up during reentry.

Studying the preserved samples retrieved by OSIRIS-REx has already provided new insights toward understanding the intricate processes of solar system formation and prebiotic chemistry, but researchers involved in the ongoing analysis believe there will likely be more surprises in the near future.

“Each week, analysis by the OSIRIS-REx Sample Analysis Team provides new and sometimes surprising findings,” said Harold Connolly, co-lead author of the new study and OSIRIS-REx mission sample scientist at Rowan University.

Connolly said the ongoing discoveries Bennu’s samples are revealing “are helping place important constraints on the origin and evolution of Earth-like planets.”

The new paper by lead-author Dante Lauretta and colleagues, “Asteroid (101955) Bennu in the laboratory: Properties of the sample collected by OSIRIS-REx,” was published on June 26. Additional information about NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission can be found on its official web page.

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

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

Trump Claims He Has Access To UFO Files. Here's What Experts Say

Donald Trump suggested in a recent interview with celebrity influencer Logan Paul that he has access to UFO files after being asked about what information he had about the existence of alien life.

The former president, appearing on Paul's ImPaulsive podcast, was asked what files or documents he was privy to on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)—the term used by defense officials referring, in part, to sightings of what are colloquially called UFOs.

Trump's conversation comes amid heightened interest in the topic, following the Pentagon's release of declassified documents detailing instances reported to it by airmen and other service personnel.

Donald Trump recently claimed he had received briefings about alien life and UFOs while in office. The president was pressed during an interview with celebrity influencer Logan Paul. 

REUTERS/GETTY IMAGES

Last summer, 36-year-old Air Force veteran David Grusch caused a media storm after he said that a top-secret U.S. military program had found the wreckage of several fully intact unidentified aerial craft, claiming some of which contained dead nonhuman pilots.

A 2023 report from the Office for the Director of National Intelligence found that there were 510 UAP sightings in 2022, higher than the 366 seen in 2021. Of these, 171 were considered to "appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis."

During the podcast, when asked about aliens, Trump said he had spoken to Air Force personnel who had claimed to see aircraft "round in form, going like four times faster than my super jet fighter plane."

"I have met with people that are serious people that say there are some really strange things they see flying around out there," he added.

Pressed whether he had access to information on alien life and UAPs, Trump replied, "I have access...and I speak to people about it, I've had actually meetings on it, and they will tell you there's something going on.

"When they say things, things are going four times faster than my beautiful top-of-the-line airplane that goes, you know, real fast, Mach 2, right?"

Newsweek has contacted media representatives for Donald Trump via email for comment.

Newsweek has also spoken to experts on what access Trump may have and if that privileges him to any information about UFOs while he is no longer in office.

What can Trump access?

The answer to this has been addressed, in part, through the discussion that followed Trump's handling of confidential documents, claiming that he had the authority as a former president to hold on to papers—a claim that Newsweek has previously explored.

President Joe Biden has restricted Trump from some information, specifically intelligence briefings, arguing the former president could reveal sensitive information. Speaking to CBS Evening News in February 2021, Biden said the decision had been motivated by Trump's "erratic behavior, unrelated to the insurrection."

Asked what his worst fear was if Trump continued to receive the briefings, Biden said: "I'd rather not speculate out loud."

"I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefing," he added.

"What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?"

While this restricts some documentation, these briefings are usually only offered as a courtesy and, in any case, are unlikely to contain information about UAPs unless they present an immediate or near-future security risk.

However, under the Presidential Records Act, Trump can only access material that originated in his four years as president per the archivist's approval, according to Gail Helt, a former CIA official and a professor of political science at King University.

"These would be documents that originated inside his White House, not the intelligence community or DOD," Helt told Newsweek.

"He would have no continued access, nor the right to such continued access, to any classified documents that originated with the CIA, FBI, DOD, etcetera, at all. Those are not his property; those belong to the intelligence community (IC) or, rather, to the nation, which trusts the IC to keep them secret."

Helt added that "if he wanted a briefing on a particular national security issue, or to access the classified intelligence record on UAPs from his four years in office, he would need to request that access from the White House."

There has been no suggestion that the documents found at Mar-a-Lago contained any information on UAPs.

Though Helt said, "I don't think that the fact that classified documents related to UAPs were not mentioned as having been present in the Mar-a-Lago stash suggests that they were not there.

"We don't know exactly what was in that trove of documents, and given the sensitivity of the topic of UAPs generally, I doubt anyone would call out the existence of such documents even in vague terms.

So what's left?

Based on the descriptions given to experts about Trump's privileges, and the fact that the only papers he could access would be those created in the White House while he was in office—and not from security agencies that are coordinating investigations into UAP sightings—it is not entirely clear what information he could have, if any.

In 2023, Trump told podcast host Hugh Hewitt that he had been briefed about UAPs while in office, saying that he interviewed "a couple of people from the Air Force" without elaborating. This could be the information he may be referring to, but what more those briefings would have revealed beyond the reports that have already been declassified and investigated by the Pentagon isn't clear.

In December 2020, Trump signed a $2.3 trillion government funding bill that also compelled intelligence services to provide Congressional committees with an unclassified report about UAPs, helping the topic's popularity to skyrocket. However, that effort was engineered by Congress, not the president, and Trump was out of office for more than a year by the time it was released.

While it's feasible that Trump may have held notes or information that passed through the White House at some point, when pressed for detail Trump has remained vague.

Considering what little he has said, his limited access to White House documents, no access to Pentagon documents, and the fact that the great deal of Congressional and Washington attention to UAPs has occurred during the Biden presidency, it seems unlikely that Trump is holding on to any wild truths or information not already revealed through committee hearings and Pentagon reports. That does not mean he has nothing, but in all likelihood, whatever he possesses may be pretty slim and inconsequential.

{ https://www.newsweek.com/ }

Originally discovered among the wreckage of a shipwreck along the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, the mysterious mechanism has long intrigued modern scientists and engineers, primarily because it appears to be a singular invention, with no other similar devices from this period known to exist.

Now, researchers with the University of Glasgow have employed statistical modeling techniques originally developed for analyzing ripples in spacetime to determine how many holes likely existed in one of the famous Antikythera mechanism’s broken rings.

At the time of its discovery, the Antikythera mechanism was in a highly eroded state, having spent close to two thousand years amidst the wreckage of a ship that sank near the Aegean Island of Antikythera, the device’s namesake.

Roughly the size of a shoebox, the device features an array of intricately tooled gears that are surprisingly complex for any innovation from the second century BCE. Over the decades, studies of the device have revealed that it likely functioned as a hand-operated computer that would have allowed its operator to predict the arrival of eclipses, as well as calculate the positions of planets over time.

Fast forward to 2020, when X-ray images of one of the device’s components, which researchers identify as its calendar ring, unveiled new features that included a series of regularly spaced holes beneath the ring. Given its highly eroded state, the presence of rings could be discerned, although the number remained unclear, with estimates suggesting anywhere between 347 and 467 of the holes having once existed along this damaged portion of the device.

Now, in new research published in the Horological Journal, Glasgow researchers outline their use of a pair of statistical techniques in a new effort to refine the previously estimated number of holes that once existed in this region of the Antikythera mechanism. Applying Bayesian analysis and, notably, new techniques from gravitational wave research, the team determined that the ring likely contained 354 holes.

This is significant since the 354 holes on the device would have perfectly aligned with the Greek lunar calendar, as opposed to the Egyptian calendar’s 365 holes. Based on the new analysis, the presence of 354 holes is hundreds of times more probable than the previously considered 360-hole count.

Professor Graham Woan, a co-author of the paper, explained that he became interested in the problem after being introduced to data by YouTuber Chris Budiselic, who was creating a replica of the calendar ring.

“Towards the end of last year, a colleague pointed to me to data acquired by YouTuber Chris Budiselic, who was looking to make a replica of the calendar ring and was investigating ways to determine just how many holes it contained.”

Woan said Budiselic’s conundrum “struck me as an interesting problem, and one that I thought I might be able to solve in a different way during the Christmas holidays.” Woan then went to work employing statistical techniques to see if a definitive answer could be obtained.

Dr. Joseph Bayley, a colleague of Woan’s at the University’s Institute for Gravitational Research, further refined the research by adapting techniques used in analyzing LIGO gravitational wave data to study the calendar ring. Their combined approaches, including Markov Chain Monte Carlo and nested sampling, confirmed the probability of 354 or 355 holes with a precision of about 1/3 mm.

Additionally, the new analysis also reveals the extraordinary accuracy of the holes’ placement, with an average radial variation of just 0.028mm. According to Bayley, the use of these dual approaches to resolving the lingering questions about the Antikythera mechanism showcases the truly remarkable skill employed by the device’s mysterious builder(s).

“It’s given me a new appreciation for the Antikythera mechanism and the work and care that Greek craftspeople put into making it,” Bayley said. “[T]he precision of the holes’ positioning would have required highly accurate measurement techniques and an incredibly steady hand to punch them.”

Professor Woan says using contemporary techniques to study an ancient device designed to track celestial events will enhance the research community’s appreciation of ancient technological achievements like the Antikythera mechanism, which represents a singularly unique and innovative construction.

“We hope that our findings about the Antikythera mechanism, although less supernaturally spectacular than those made by Indiana Jones, will help deepen our understanding of how this remarkable device was made and used by the Greeks,” Woan said in a statement.

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

By KAMAL SULTAN

A couple were left stunned after they spotted UFOs 'as bright as the sun' hovering above a river in Canada.

Justin Stevenson and his wife Danielle Daniels-Stevenson were driving through Fort Alexander on May 14 when they saw the bright lights above the Winnipeg River.

Kennedy News and Media

He pulled over at a clearing where Danielle, 32, filmed two 'sun-like' balls of light floating above the tree line without making a sound.

Justin, 49, can be heard declaring 'I think we're seeing some aliens' as another two appear 'from nowhere' and begin moving downwards.

Other clips show two UFOs continuing to hover while the bemused pair sit in their vehicle for half an hour to watch them.

Observers called the footage a “strange anomaly” and “a clear shot of UFOs.

”Kennedy News & Media

Justin, previously a sceptic of extraterrestrial life, said the experience felt 'like he was in a sci-fi movie' and it's given him 'proof there's something out there other than humans'.

Danielle posted one of the clips on Facebook later that night where it's been viewed more than 650,000 times with users calling it a 'strange anomaly' and 'a clear shot of UFOs'.

Others have claimed they're helicopters, drones or flares dropped from planes but mechanic Justin disagrees and is adamant there's no explanation for the sighting.

Justin, from Manitoba, Canada, said: 'My wife saw lights and we were confused at what they were so we drove to a clearing where we could see properly.

'There were two really bright lights above the river almost like the sun shining but the sun had set by this time. They were super bright like a fire in the sky.

'They were sitting above the tree line for the longest time then they started to move down and then two more popped up right out of nowhere.

'There were six all together and they didn't even make a sound.

'I just thought 'what the f**k?'. That's when I realized it wasn't a fire and I questioned if it was aliens.

He pulled over at a clearing where Danielle, 32, filmed two 'sun-like' balls of light floating above the treeline without making a sound

Justin, 49, can be heard declaring 'I think we're seeing some aliens ' as another two appear 'from nowhere' and begin moving downwards

'It was pretty surreal and it felt like we were in a sci-fi movie.

'I was skeptical before I saw this but now this has given me the proof I need that there's something out there other than humans.

'There's no explanation so we posted it because we wanted people to describe for themselves what that is.

'The naysayers can have their opinion but I disagree.'

Danielle's post read: 'We saw this just a few mins ago. What is it? It lasted like half an hour.'

One social media user commented: 'Oh wow!! You're brave to record this. I would've taken off.'

A second wrote: 'Oh my word! What is that? Pretty scary that it's so close to home, yikes!'

A third added: 'That is one strange anomaly.'

A fourth said: 'UFO that's a nice clear shot ... Wow.'

However some disagreed and wrote: 'Looks like helicopters.'

Another commented: 'It could be flares that planes drop.'

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Australia discussed 'UFO collection planning' with US in secret meeting

{ https://www.northweststar.com.au/ }

NASA Release 3D Visualization of ‘Pillars of Creation’

Using images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have produced a new 3D visualization of the Pillars of Creation, three towers of gas and dust within the Eagle Nebula.

The Pillars of Creation are three towers of gas and dust located some 6,500 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens.

They are a fascinating but relatively small feature of the Eagle Nebula (also known as Messier 16), which was discovered in 1745 by the Swiss astronomer Jean-Philippe Loys de Chéseaux.

The Pillars of Creation are approximately 4-5 light-years long, while the nebula is 55-70 light-years wide.

They arise when immense, freshly formed blue-white O- and B-type stars give off intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds that blow away less dense materials from their vicinity.

“By flying past and amongst the pillars, viewers experience their 3D structure and see how they look different in the Hubble visible-light view versus the Webb infrared-light view,” said Dr. Frank Summers, principal visualization scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

“The contrast helps them understand why we have more than one space telescope to observe different aspects of the same object.”

“The four Pillars of Creation, made primarily of cool molecular hydrogen and dust, are being eroded by the fierce winds and punishing ultraviolet light of nearby hot, young stars.”

“Finger-like structures larger than the Solar System protrude from the tops of the pillars. Within these fingers can be embedded, embryonic stars.”

“The tallest pillar stretches across 3 light-years, three-quarters of the distance between our Sun and the next nearest star.”

A mosaic of visible-light (Hubble) and infrared-light (Webb) views of the same frame from the Pillars of Creation visualization.

Image credit: Greg Bacon / Ralf Crawford / Joseph DePasquale / Leah Hustak / Christian Nieves / Joseph Olmsted / Alyssa Pagan / Frank Summers, STScI / NASA’s Universe of Learning.

The movie takes visitors into the 3D structures of the Pillars of Creation.

“The Pillars of Creation were always on our minds to create in 3D,” said Dr. Greg Bacon, also from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

“Webb data in combination with Hubble data allowed us to see the Pillars in more complete detail.”

“Understanding the science and how to best represent it allowed our small, talented team to meet the challenge of visualizing this iconic structure.”

The new visualization helps viewers experience how two of the world’s most powerful space telescopes work together to provide a more complex and holistic portrait of the pillars.

Hubble sees objects that glow in visible light, at thousands of degrees. Webb’s infrared vision, which is sensitive to cooler objects with temperatures of just hundreds of degrees, pierces through obscuring dust to see stars embedded in the pillars.

“When we combine observations from NASA’s space telescopes across different wavelengths of light, we broaden our understanding of the Universe,” said Dr. Mark Clampin, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters.

“The Pillars of Creation region continues to offer us new insights that hone our understanding of how stars form.”

“Now, with this new visualization, everyone can experience this rich, captivating landscape in a new way.”

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

{ https://scientias.nl/ }

James Webb zoomt in op een ‘saai’ stukje Jupiter – maar dat blijkt helemaal niet zo saai te zijn

Vivian Lammerse

De telescoop tuurde naar het gebied boven de beroemde Grote Rode Vlek van Jupiter en ontdekte een reeks nieuwe, nog nooit eerder waargenomen kenmerken.

Jupiter is zonder twijfel een van de meest opvallende objecten aan de nachtelijke hemel. Bovendien is de enorme gasreus op een heldere nacht eenvoudig te aanschouwen. Afgezien van de heldere noorder- en zuiderlichten in de poolgebieden van de planeet, is de gloed van Jupiters bovenste atmosfeer zwak, waardoor het moeilijk is om met aardse telescopen details te zien. Maar gelukkig hebben we de James Webb-telescoop, die dankzij zijn infraroodgevoeligheid in staat is om de bovenste atmosfeer van Jupiter direct boven de Grote Rode Vlek met ongeëvenaarde precisie te bestuderen.

Meer over Jupiter’s Grote Rode Vlek
Planeet Jupiter staat bekend om zijn kleurrijke banden en reusachtige, wervelende stormen. De bekendste storm is – misschien zelfs de bekendste in het hele zonnestelsel – de Grote Rode Vlek; een gigantische anticycloon die al heel wat jaren op de gasreus woedt. De Grote Rode Vlek is een immense atmosferische wervelwind, zo is hij bijna net zo groot als de aarde in diameter. Aan zijn buitenranden razen de winden met snelheden tot 450 kilometer per uur. De rode kleur ontstaat door chemische reacties in de atmosfeer, wat een opvallend contrast vormt met de bleke wolken van de gasreus. De Grote Rode Vlek heeft generaties van wetenschappers gefascineerd. Dat heeft onder andere met zijn omvang te maken, maar ook met het feit dat de storm zelfs zichtbaar is met kleine telescopen. Afgelopen week werd nog bekend dat de Grote Rode Vlek toch jonger is dan gedacht. Hoewel de immense storm met een respectabele leeftijd van 190 jaar nog altijd de langstlevende wervelwind in het zonnestelsel is, blijkt hij niet dezelfde te zijn als die astronoom Giovanni Cassini in 1665 waarnam.

De bovenste atmosfeer van Jupiter is de overgangslaag tussen het magnetisch veld van de planeet en de onderliggende atmosfeer. In dit gebied zijn de heldere en levendige noorder- en zuiderlichten te zien, aangedreven door vulkanisch materiaal dat wordt uitgestoten door Jupiters ‘pizzamaan’ Io. Dichter bij de evenaar wordt de structuur van deze atmosfeer beïnvloed door het binnenkomende zonlicht. Omdat Jupiter slechts 4 procent van het zonlicht ontvangt dat de aarde bereikt, dachten astronomen dat dit gebied vrij uniform zou zijn.

Saai
In juli 2022 werd Jupiters Grote Rode Vlek geobserveerd met Webb’s Near-InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec), waarbij de Integral Field Unit van het instrument werd gebruikt. Het doel was om te bestuderen of het gebied direct boven de beroemde wervelstorm echt zo saai is als wetenschappers vermoedden. Maar tot hun verrassing hebben ze nu ontdekt dat de bovenste atmosfeer een verscheidenheid aan ingewikkelde structuren bevat, waaronder donkere bogen en heldere vlekken, zo valt er te lezen in Nature Astronomy. “We gingen er misschien wat naïef vanuit dat dit gebied echt saai zou zijn,” zegt teamleider Henrik Melin. “Maar het blijkt eigenlijk net zo interessant te zijn als de noorderlichten, zo niet interessanter. Jupiter blijft ons altijd verrassen.”

Links: infraroodbeeld van Jupiter. De gasreus schittert in verschillende kleuren, vooral bij de polen en op de Grote Rode Vlek, die zich als een ronde storm rechtsonder op de planeet bevindt. De Grote Rode Vlek wordt omgeven door een scherp rechthoekig kader. Rechts: een close-up van dat gebied in verschillende kleuren. De blauwere tinten vertegenwoordigen de lagere hoogtes in de atmosfeer van Jupiter, terwijl roder aangeeft dat het om hogere hoogtes gaat. Afbeelding: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, Jupiter ERS Team, J. Schmidt, H. Melin, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

Zwaartekrachtsgolven
Kortom, het gebied dat vroeger als onopvallend werd beschouwd, blijkt nu dus een diverse verzameling van complexe structuren en activiteiten te bevatten. Hoewel de lichtuitstraling van dit gebied wordt veroorzaakt door zonlicht, suggereert het team dat er een ander mechanisme moet zijn dat de vorm en structuur van de bovenste atmosfeer beïnvloedt. “Een manier om deze structuur te veranderen is door zwaartekrachtsgolven,” legt Henrik uit. “Dit is vergelijkbaar met golven die op een strand breken en rimpelingen in het zand veroorzaken. Deze golven ontstaan diep in de turbulente lagere atmosfeer rondom de Grote Rode Vlek. Ze kunnen omhoog bewegen naar hogere lagen, wat leidt tot veranderingen in de structuur en uitstoot van de bovenste atmosfeer.” Dergelijke atmosferische golven kunnen soms ook op aarde worden gezien, maar ze zijn veel zwakker dan die waargenomen op Jupiter door Webb.

Jupiter’s atmosphere around the Great Red Spot (NIRSpec image)

Vervolgonderzoek
Het team hoopt in de toekomst vervolgonderzoek te doen met Webb naar Jupiters complexe golfpatronen. Zo willen ze bijvoorbeeld achterhalen hoe deze patronen zich in de bovenste atmosfeer van de planeet bewegen. Ook willen ze meer inzicht krijgen in de energiebalans in dit gebied en bestuderen hoe de kenmerken ervan in de loop van de tijd veranderen.

Juice
Maar dat niet alleen. Deze ontdekkingen kunnen ook van belang zijn voor de ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice), die op 14 april 2023 werd gelanceerd. Juice zal uitgebreide waarnemingen doen van Jupiter en zijn drie grote manen met oceanen – Ganymedes, Callisto en Europa (lees hier meer over de missie). De missie heeft tot doel deze manen te karakteriseren, terwijl het ook Jupiters complexe omgeving in detail zal onderzoeken.

Dankzij de nieuw opgedane kennis van de atmosferische processen en dynamiek op Jupiter, krijgen we een steeds beter beeld van deze nog altijd raadselachtige planeet en zijn manen. En hopelijk zal dit niet alleen ons begrip van ons eigen zonnestelsel vergroten, maar ook bijdragen aan onze kennis van gasreuzen en hun manen elders in het universum.

LEES OOK

• NASA: thuiswereld van Spock gaat ook in het echt in rook op

• Alsof het nooit anders is geweest: wetenschappers geven mensen een extra duim - en die wennen daar vervolgens bizar snel aan

• Sterke aanwijzingen gevonden dat er ergens tussen 1990 en 1992 op Venus een vulkaan is uitgebarsten

Bronmateriaal

• "Jupiter’s upper atmosphere surprises astronomers" - ESA
  
• Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: GustavoAckles van Pixabay (via Canva Pro)

{ https://scientias.nl/ }

Beeld uit de film 'The Martian', waarin acteur Matt Damon vooral veel aardappelen kweekt om te overleven op Mars.  © The Martian

Tot daar dan die kolonisatie? Bijna dagelijks vallen meteorieten op Mars, die stevige kraters maken

Redelijk relevant nieuws voor toekomstige missies naar Mars: de planeet krijgt haast dagelijks te maken met inslagen door meteorieten. Uit onderzoek van Zwitserse en Britse wetenschappers blijkt dat de planeet zelfs ruim vijf keer meer inslagen kent dan eerder geschat. De meteorieten laten kraters achter met een diameter van minstens acht meter.

ADN 

Bron: Belga

Een internationaal team wetenschappers van de ETH in Zürich en het Imperial College in Londen heeft een nieuwe kijk op de zaak gebracht door geluiden in kaart te brengen. “Het lijkt efficiënter om te luisteren naar het geluid van de inslagen om te bepalen met welke frequentie ze gebeuren”, klinkt het bij Gareth Collins, mede-auteur van het artikel dat in ‘Nature Astronomy’ is verschenen.

De zogenaamde SEIS-seismograaf, een instrument geproduceerd onder toezicht van het Franse CNES (National Centre for Space Studies), werd in november 2018 op Mars geïnstalleerd dankzij de InSight-lander van NASA. Die seismograaf wordt nu gebruikt om de inslagen te meten op basis van hun geluid.

Jaarlijks tussen 280 en 360 meteorietinslagen

Uit het onderzoek blijkt dat Mars jaarlijks tussen 280 en 360 meteorietinslagen te verwerken krijgt, die een krater van minstens acht meter diep nalaten. Dat is vijf keer meer dan wat eerst werd gedacht. Elke maand zou de planeet getroffen worden door een meteorietinslag die een krater van dieper van dertig meter nalaat. Bijna dagelijks wordt Mars getroffen door meteorieten ongeveer zo groot als een basketbal. Kleinere inslagen meten is moeilijk aangezien de planeet te maken heeft met zandstormen die de minder diepe kraters vaak bedekken en onzichtbaar maken.

Archiefbeeld van de InSight-lander op Mars.  © Photo News

“Omdat inslagen met hoge snelheid explosiezones creëren die nog eens vaak minstens 100 keer groter zijn dan de krater, is het voor de veiligheid van missies - nu met robots, maar in de toekomst ook met mensen - belangrijk om het exacte aantal inslagen te kennen”, aldus de onderzoekers.

“De studie is de eerste in haar soort die seismologische gegevens gebruikt om de frequentie van meteorietinslagen te berekenen. Met de resultaten moet rekening gehouden worden bij het inplannen van toekomstige missies naar Mars”, beklemtoont professor Domenico Giardini van ETH Zürich.

KIJK OOK. 

• https://youtu.be/O1AtaSCyqJI

• https://youtu.be/37VMwfVhpRY

Zo heeft Curiosity op acht november een opname gemaakt van zonsopgang tot zonsondergang.

Beelden van de voorkant van de rover.

Credit: NASA

Beelden van de achterkant van de rover.

Credit: NASA

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Happy Asteroid Day! Schweickart Prize Spotlights Planetary Defense

“It’s a very interesting proposal that we hope gets picked up,” Rusty Schweickart said.

DeMartini’s concept for what he calls the Sunward NEO Surveillance and Early Twilight detection collaboration — or SUNSET for short — was judged the top entry in the competition for the Schweickart Prize. The award, which is a program of the California-based B612 Foundation, recognizes graduate students who come up with innovative ideas for planetary defense. As the prize winner, DeMartini will receive a $10,000 cash prize and a trophy topped by an authenticated meteorite during a ceremony on June 29 at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, Calif.

“The thing that actually got me to put my idea forward was the meteorite fragment,” said DeMartini, who’s earning his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. “I saw that and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I really want that.’ But maybe that’s just me being an asteroid nerd.”

DeMartini said the idea behind SUNSET came out of discussions he had with a colleague about the asteroid that sparked the Chelyabinsk blast. “The reason we didn’t have any warning was because it came from the direction of the sun, and we can’t look in the direction of the sun,” he said. “That got me thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a region we should really monitor.'”

It turns out that the Rubin Observatory is looking into conducting just such a monitoring effort after it gets up and running next year. DeMartini suggests that the SUNSET network could augment the sightings made at the Rubin Observatory, and confirm the precise orbits traced by sunward NEOs.

“If these other telescopes know where to point in advance, then they can follow up on anything that Rubin discovers in a night, and then we can get these confirmations more easily,” he said.

The current focus of DeMartini’s research actually has to do with a different topic: numerical simulations of asteroid surfaces and interiors, and how close encounters with Earth might change those values. But when his faculty adviser told him about the Schweickart Prize, DeMartini decided to enter the competition.

It should come as no surprise that Rusty Schweickart himself was one of the judges. In his post-NASA career, he has focused on the challenges of asteroid threat detection and mitigation. He’s the founder and past president of the Association of Space Explorers, which took up the NEO threat as one of its causes. He’s also a co-founder of the B612 Foundation, which raises awareness about planetary defense, and a co-founder of Asteroid Day as well.

“What we’re talking about here in planetary defense is having the capability to ever so slightly, but critically, reshape the solar system to enhance the future of life on Earth,” Schweickart said. “To prevent this existential threat — that is what I’ve dedicated the last 20 years of my life to bringing about.”

Thanks in part to a congressional mandate, more than 90% of the biggest near-Earth asteroids, exceeding a kilometer (0.6 mile) in diameter, are thought to have been identified and are being tracked. That’s the kind of asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs roughly 66 million years ago. “But it’s the ones that are the city-killers — the 40- to 50-meter-diameter guys — that you can’t see until they’re pretty close to the Earth,” Schweickart said. “That means looking interior [to Earth’s orbit] is going to be more productive than looking exterior.”

DeMartini’s proposal was selected as the winner because it addresses one of the biggest gaps in asteroid monitoring, and because it takes advantage of advances in observational firepower.

The Rubin Observatory’s Survey Cadence Optimization Committee, or SCOC, says doing the kind of twilight sky survey that DeMartini discusses in his SUNSET proposal would be “scientifically compelling.” It recommends starting such a survey soon after the telescope begins science operations next year.

“We currently are simulating the effect of adding low-solar-elongation observations during the start and end of twilight, spending about 15 to 20 minutes of the start and end of about a quarter of the survey nights observing at high airmass toward the sun,” Lynne Jones, an astronomer who’s part of the Rubin team, said in an email. “This gives us the opportunity to detect asteroids interior to the Earth, even down to parts of the sky which are closer than 40 degrees from the sun.”

This time-lapse simulation illustrates how the Rubin Observatory could focus on twilight zones at the start and end of a survey night.

Credit: Lynne Jones / Aerotek / Rubin Observatory.

DeMartini said the Rubin Observatory’s twilight survey campaign would be “step one” in his vision for the SUNSET collaboration. “The next bit, I suppose, would be networking. Hopefully, this event that I’ll be going to when I’m receiving the prize will be a good opportunity for that. And that’s something that B612 can really help with,” he said.

“If it takes off, I don’t know what it looks like in 10 years. But my hope is that we’re safer because of it,” DeMartini added.

Randy Schweickart, who is one of Rusty’s sons and the chair of the prize program’s judging committee, said he and other family members are committed to funding the Schweickart Prize for at least five years. “The hope is that — similar to the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, which has expanded tremendously from its beginnings — there would be support from other sources as we move in time and are able to get more of the word out,” he said.

Rusty Schweickart said that the prize is meant for more than astronomers. “The really toughest problems related to planetary defense are the governance issues — the non-technical, geopolitical and legal issues,” he said. “So, in the future, what we want to do is move more in that direction, and get law students, economics students, public-safety people, emergency-response people to be involved in this. Because in the end, they’re going to be very critical.”

Schweickart, who’ll turn 90 next year, hopes the prize will carry on his legacy when he’s “pushing up daisies.”

“It seems to me that that we have, as human beings, a special responsibility to do whatever we can to see that this evolutionary experiment that we’re having here on planet Earth continues,” he said. “I’m not quite sure why that’s the responsibility, but I think it is. And if so, I feel obligated to do what I could.”

Scores of events have been scheduled around the world to mark Asteroid Day, including a two-day festival in Luxembourg. The award ceremony for the Schweickart Prize will take place at 3:30 p.m. PT June 29 at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, Calif. The event will feature a presentation by Rusty Schweickart, plus comments from NASA astronauts Steve Smith and Nicole Stott, and from YouTube space commentator Scott Manley. Click to purchase tickets.

Founding Sponsors who have funded the Schweickart Prize program include Anousheh Ansari, Barringer Crater Company, B612 Foundation, Future Ventures, Geoffrey Notkin, Jurvetson Family Foundation, Meteor Crater, Randy Schweickart and Michelle Heng, and Rusty B. Schweickart and Joanne Keys.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

Could We Detect an Alien Civilization Trying to Warm Their Planet?

“Atmospheric pollutants such as chlorofluorocarbons and NO₂ have been proposed as potential remotely detectable atmospheric technosignature gases,” the authors write in their paper. “Here, we investigate the potential for artificial greenhouse gases, including CF₄, C₂F₆, C₃F₈, SF₆, and NF₃, to generate detectable atmospheric signatures.”

The first three are perfluorocarbons, potent and long-lived greenhouse gases (GHGs.) SF₆ is Sulfur hexafluoride, and NF₃ is Nitrogen trifluoride. They’re both greenhouse gases with global warming potentials 23,500 times greater and 17,200 times greater than CO₂ over a 100-year period.

These artificial GHGs could be a technosignature of a civilization actively trying to warm their planet. They’re long-lived, have low toxicities, and have low false-positive potential. They also occur only in small amounts naturally. Their presence indicates industrial production.

“For us, these gases are bad because we don’t want to increase warming. But they’d be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise-uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars,” said UCR astrobiologist and lead author Edward Schwieterman.

These chemicals could persist in an atmosphere for up to 50,000 years, making them near ideal for a civilization facing a freezing future. “They wouldn’t need to be replenished too often for a hospitable climate to be maintained,” Schwieterman said in a press release.

Unlike CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), which damage the ozone layer, these chemicals are largely inert. Any civilization smart enough to engineer their atmosphere would avoid CFCs. CFCs also don’t last long in an oxygen atmosphere and wouldn’t be great technosignatures.

“If another civilization had an oxygen-rich atmosphere, they’d also have an ozone layer they’d want to protect,” Schwieterman said. “CFCs would be broken apart in the ozone layer even as they catalyzed its destruction.”

But from our ETI-seeking viewpoint, the best thing about the chemicals the researchers are studying is their prominent infrared signatures at extremely low concentrations.

“With an atmosphere like Earth’s, only one out of every million molecules could be one of these gases, and it would be potentially detectable,” Schwieterman said. “That gas concentration would also be sufficient to modify the climate.”

To understand these chemicals and their detectability, the research team simulated the atmosphere of TRAPPIST 1-f. This well-studied rocky exoplanet is in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star about 40 light-years away, making it a realistic observational target at that distance.

This study is based on the potential results of the LIFE telescope, which is still a concept. Its purpose is to examine the atmospheres of dozens of warm, terrestrial exoplanets. LIFE builds on telescope concepts from a couple of decades ago, like the European Space Agency’s Darwin spacecraft. Darwin wasn’t built, but the idea behind it was two-fold: to both find Earth-like exoplanets and to search for evidence of life.

Darwin was conceived as an interferometer, and so is LIFE. LIFE would have four separate space telescopes acting as one.

With LIFE, the GHGs would be easier to see than other standard biosignatures like O₂, O₃, CH₄, and N₂O. But unlike these chemicals, which can give false positives without a planetary context, the GHGs are more akin to technosignatures, which can be understood more independently from atmospheric chemistry. “In contrast to biosignatures, many technosignatures may provide greater specificity (less “false positive” potential), as many putative technosignatures have more limited abiotic formation channels when compared to biosignatures,” the authors explain in their research.

One desirable aspect of the search for these technosignature GHGs is that astronomers can find them as part of a general effort to study atmospheres.

“You wouldn’t need extra effort to look for these technosignatures, if your telescope is already characterizing the planet for other reasons,” said Schwieterman. “And it would be jaw-droppingly amazing to find them.”

This is not a futuristic scenario awaiting the development of new technology. We have the capability to do this soon, according to Daniel Angerhausen. Angerhausen is from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology/PlanetS, a collaborating organization on LIFE.

“Our thought experiment shows how powerful our next-generation telescopes will be. We are the first generation in history that has the technology to systematically look for life and intelligence in our galactic neighborhood,” said Angerhausen.

“While all technosignature scenarios are speculative, we argue that it is unlikely fluorine-bearing technosignature gases will accumulate to detectable levels in a technosphere due only to inadvertent emission of industrial pollutants (or volcanic production),” the authors write.

They also explain that before individual GHG technosignatures were identified, anomalous MIR or NIR absorption signatures “… would be consistent with the presence of artificial greenhouse gases in a candidate technosphere.”

In their conclusion, they say that GHGs are viable technosignatures that can be found during routine exoplanet characterizations. “Both positive or negative results would meaningfully inform the search for life elsewhere,” they conclude.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

That’s No Planet. Detecting Transiting Megastructures

One of the easiest ways to find exoplanets is using the transit method. It relies upon monitoring the brightness of a star which will then dim as a planet passes in front of it. It is of course possible that other objects could pass between us and a star; perhaps binary planets, tidally distorted planets, exocomets and, ready for it…. alien megastructures! A transit simulator has been created by a team of researchers and it can predict the brightness change from different transiting objects, even Dyson Swarms in construction. 

51 Pegasi-b was the first exoplanet discovered in 1995 and it sparked the development of numerous ground-based and space-based instruments. The launch of the Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2018 popularised the transit method, leading to the discovery of over 4,000 exoplanets. As instruments have become increasingly sensitive and precise, research has progressed from simply detecting exoplanets to studying their detailed characteristics.

Illustration of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Transit photometry has uncovered signatures of many interesting phenomena beyond the detection of exoplanets and eclipsing binaries. This technique has been instrumental in identifying features such as star-spots, and signatures of tidal interactions between host stars and exoplanets leading to significant growth in the sub-field of Asteroseismology

The study of transiting exoplanets and their timing variations has led to many discoveries. Non-transiting planets in distant solar systems have been found, orbital decay, disintegrating planets, exocomets and exomoon candidates has all been identified. Additionally, and perhaps of particular interest is that transit photometry has detected signals that have sparked interest in the search for technosignatures for the evidence of advanced civilizations.

It is important to note that no technosignatures have been confirmed yet but such signatures would not arise form natural processes and would demonstrate the presence of intelligent life. The signatures would come from a wide range of astroengineering projects like Dyson Spheres (a theoretical shell surrounding a star to capture its energy output) or the newly conceptualised Dyson Swarms (habitable satellites and energy collectors that orbit the star in formation. 

The research team led by Ushasi Bhowmick from the Indian based Space Application Centre has reported that they have developed a transit simulator that can not only generate light curves for exoplanets but also for any object of any size or shape! The simulation uses the Monte-Carlo technique that predicts all possible outcomes of an uncertain event. In this instance it can predict the light curve when an object of any shape or size transits across the disk of star. 

When the simulation was tested against actual exoplanet systems such as Trappist-1 it nicely predicted the light curve. It can also be used to model tidal distortions in binary star systems and even predict the light curve of non-natural objects such as the alien megastructures. The simulator has shown itself to be an invaluable method for understanding a wide range of transit phenomena. 

Source : 

• A General-Purpose Transit Simulator for Arbitrary Shaped Objects Orbiting Stars

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

A Single Robot Could Provide a Mission To Mars With Enough Water and Oxygen

The RASSOR 2.0 prototype had several design goals, but it’s probably most helpful to walk through a use-case scenario. According to the soil samples collected by Curiosity and other rovers, around 2% of the regolith on Mars is water, even in the relatively “dry” regions outside the poles. Collecting that water could help refuel rockets and supply settlements with drinking water, radiation shielding, or water for agriculture.

NASA commonly uses a mission structure involving four astronauts on a journey to Mars. In a paper describing the 2.0 version of the robot back in 2016, the authors, including Robert Mueller, the founder of the Swamp Works facility and a doyen of ISRU research, describe a mission structure that would see RASSOR mining 1,000,000 kg of Martian regolith per year and supplying 10,000 kilograms of oxygen to the mission.

To do so, it would utilize a lander with processing capabilities for separating the useful parts from the chaff and would trek from the lander site to the regolith collection site about 35 times a day. With a charging cycle that would take about 8 hours a day, that would leave upwards of 16 hours to continuously mine the surface of Mars for these valuable materials.

The paper goes on to describe the design process for the RASSOR’s various subsystems, including the powerful actuators that make up the majority of the weight of the system. They also used 3D-printed titanium to make the bucket drum excavating tools, which required some ingenious machining by Swamp Work’s machinists. 

But in the end, they did make a working prototype. They tested it with improvements like a 50% drop in weight and an autonomous mode that utilizes simple stereo-vision cameras. The team believes this project is ready to move on to the next phase, taking a step closer to making it a reality.

That paper, however, was published eight years ago. A relatively detailed internet search doesn’t produce any results for RASSOR 3.0 other than a brief mention at the end of the 2.0 paper. So, for now, it seems the project is on hold. However, another NASA project, the Lunabotics Challenge, keeps university teams working toward effectively mining regolith for us in ISRU systems. Maybe one of those teams will pick up where the RASSOR team left off – or come up with a completely new design. We’ll have to wait and see.

Learn More:

• Mueller et al. – Design of an Excavation Robot: Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR) 2.0
• UT – Japan Tests Robotic Earth-Moving Equipment in a Simulated Lunar Jobsite
• UT – NASA Wants to Learn to Live Off the Land on the Moon
• UT – What is ISRU, and How Will it Help Human Space Exploration?

Lead Image:

• CAD model of the RASSOR 2.0 excavating robot.
  Credit – Mueller et al.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

Can We Use An Asteroid’s Own Dust to Deflect It?

The next step would be to complete a full 3D model of the asteroid’s surface, followed by using a high-powered laser to force the dust off the surface and into a storage tank. In the storage tank, the dust would be pulverized even more, with a thruster motor pushing the dust out from the rover in a direction that causes thrust against the asteroid’s surface, thereby changing its orbit.

The dust thrust deflection would be monitored from Earth, and an orbiting probe would be used to close the loop. If necessary, several other autonomous rovers could make their way along the asteroid’s surface, coordinating their thrusting efforts to increase the deflection force. 

All this requires a lot of new technologies, coordination, and testing to become a reality. The authors suggest a potential test case to be ready for the close approach of Apophis in 2029. However, even if a lander is prepared and ready for that time, it could take upwards of 20 years for a perceptible deflection to happen – assuming that nothing goes wrong with the system in that time frame. Any engineer will tell you that having a system operate non-stop for 20 years is almost unheard of, though admittedly, some space probes are the exception to that.

One major advantage of this technique, though, would be its dual use as a proof of concept for asteroid deflection and mining. Many of the technologies would overlap, and there would be an incentive for governments and non-profits to invest in a potentially world-saving technology—at least more so than for them to invest in an as-yet unproven mining technology.

For now, this idea remains on the drawing board. But, if there is ever a real push to try out different methods of asteroid redirection, it could crop up again, especially if it’s supported by one of the major space agencies. And humanity might even get the benefit of a fully functional asteroid miner out of it.

Learn More:

• Santos et al. – Conceptual Design for Deflecting a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid with a Space Duster
• UT – How to Deflect an Asteroid with Today’s Technology
• UT – Asteroid Detection, Deflection Needs More Money, Report Says
• UT – If You’re Trying to Prevent an Asteroid Impact, the Technical and Political Challenges are Staggering

Lead Image:

• Artist’s conception of the mission architecture, including the asteroid space duster (ASD).
  Credit – Santos et al.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

Your Body Is Awash In Microplastics — Should You Be Worried?

Microplastics are all around us. The real question is what harm do they actually do?

BY MICHAEL RICHARDSON, MEIRU WANG AND THE CONVERSATION

Kinga Krzeminska/Moment/Getty Images

When plastic trash is dumped in a landfill or the sea, it breaks down very slowly. Sunlight and waves cause the surface of the plastic to become brittle, and particles are shed into the environment. Collectively known as “small plastic particles,” they range in size from five millimeters or smaller (microplastics) to less than one-thousandth of a millimeter (nano plastics). The smallest can only be detected with special scientific instruments.

It remains unclear how microplastics and nanoplastics get inside living things, but several entry points have been suggested. For example, they might pass through the gut from food or drink contaminated with small plastic particles. Or they may be breathed in, or absorbed through the skin.

Our research suggests that, for some animals, nanoplastics are bad news. We injected plastic nanoparticles into chicken embryos. We found that the particles traveled quickly in the blood to all tissues, especially the heart, liver, and kidneys. They were also excreted by the embryonic kidneys.

We noticed, too, that plastic nanoparticles tend to stick to a certain type of stem cell in the embryo. These cells are essential for the normal development of the nervous system and other structures. Any damage to stem cells could put the development of the embryo in jeopardy.

We suspect that the chicken embryo stem cells have substances on their surface called “cell-adhesion molecules,” which stick to the polystyrene nanoparticles that we used. We are following up on this finding because when nanoplastics stick to cells and get inside them, they can cause cell death and even serious birth defects in chickens and mice.

Similar studies cannot, of course, be carried out on people, so it is not yet possible to say what the implications of our animal research are for humans. What we know is that nanoplastics are found in the blood of human beings, in other bodily fluids, and in several major organs and key body tissues.

In recent years, microplastics and nanoplastics have been found in the brains, hearts, and lungs of humans. They have been discovered in the arteries of people with arterial disease, suggesting they may be a potential risk factor for cardiovascular disease. And they have been detected in breast milk, the placenta, and, most recently, penises.

Chinese researchers reported earlier this year that they had found microplastics in human and dog testes. More recently, another Chinese team found microplastics in all 40 samples of human semen they tested. This follows an Italian study that found microplastics in six out of ten samples of human semen.

Our fear is that microplastics and nanoplastics might act in a similar way to deadly asbestos fibers. Like asbestos, they are not broken down in the body and can be taken up into cells, killing them and then being released to damage yet more cells.

Nanoplastics have even been found in breastmilk. 

Dzmitry Kliapitski / Alamy Stock Photo

REASSURING, FOR NOW

But there is a need for caution here. There is no evidence that nanoplastics can cross the placenta and get into the human embryo.

Also, even if nanoplastics do cross the placenta and in sufficient numbers to damage the embryo, we would expect to have seen a big increase in abnormal pregnancies in recent years. That is because the problem of plastic waste in the environment has been growing enormously over the years. But we are not aware of any evidence of a corresponding, large increase in birth defects or miscarriages.

That, for now, is reassuring.

It may be that microplastics and nanoplastics if they cause harm to our bodies, do so in a subtle way that we have not yet detected. Whatever the case, scientists are working hard to discover what the risks might be.

One promising avenue of research would involve the use of human placental tissue grown in the laboratory. Special artificial placenta tissues, called “trophoblast organoids,” have been developed to study how harmful substances cross the placenta.

Researchers are also investigating potentially beneficial uses for nanoplastics. Although they are not yet licensed for clinical use, the idea is that they could be used to deliver drugs to specific body tissues that need them. Cancer cells could, in this way, be targeted for destruction without damaging other healthy tissue.

Whatever the outcome of nanoplastics research, we and many other scientists will continue trying to find out what nanoplastics are doing to ourselves and the environment.

• This article was originally published on The Conversation by Michael Richardson and Meiru Wang at Leiden University. Read the original article here.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

Why the World of Humanoid Robots Is on Fire Right Now

It’s not just you — there’s a robot renaissance upon us.

BY JAMES PERO

 

Figure

THAT [OPTIMUS] IS SO HOT RIGHT NOW

A glut of humanoid robots was not on my 2024 bingo, but here we are. Every time I scroll through X, there’s something — for instance, a new partnership, an exciting demo, or whatever this is.

There are a lot of humanoid bots now and a lot more seemingly on the way — Figure’s AI robot, Unitree’s speed demon, Agility’s workhorse — but arguably most important of all is Tesla’s Optimus.

I don’t mean that Optimus is necessarily more advanced than the rest of the aforementioned — in fact, Tesla’s competition is pretty fierce right now — but Optimus has something that the other robots don’t: clout.

As some of you may already know, Elon Musk, despite Optimus’ nascency, has been bullish on the robot’s future. In fact, this year, Musk went as far as to suggest that Optimus could make Tesla a $25 trillion company. I know, I know...

If you’re rolling your eyes, you’re justified. Musk is often (and not infrequently wrongly) optimistic about future technologies. But his carnival barking is a huge asset, not just for Tesla, but for the prospects of functional, real-world humanoid robots writ large.

What I mean is that, for better or worse, since Tesla awkwardly introduced Optimus on stage last year with a weird interpretive dance, a lot has happened. When Tesla and Musk talk, people, regardless of their opinion of the pair, listen. If Musk says robots are on the way, maybe they actually are, and that added confidence gives other non-Tesla upstarts more opportunities as well.

While Musk and Tesla have paved the way with their own fuel to the humanoid robot fire, AI is an equally powerful hype train that is doing the same thing concurrently.

AI, specifically large language models (LLMs) like the ones that power ChatGPT, is opening up a world of possibilities for what people think humanoid robots are capable of. That means making them more collaborative, helping them understand commands more easily, and maybe more importantly, making them feel more human.

Take Figure’s robot, for example — in lots of ways, it functions like every other humanoid robot of its ilk. But when paired with ChatGPT, things start to look truly futuristic.

It’s crucial to take Figure’s demo with a grain of salt. Right now, chatbots have a way of making things look functional on the surface, but in practice, the results are rocky. But even as a proof of concept, it’s clear AI has a place in the humanoid robot future and there’s interest in figuring out what that place is.

And sure, being conversational isn’t as important as say, making a robot with the fine motor skills to fold a shirt properly, but if these things are going to be in your home, they better have some manners, right?

READY FOR THE SBOTLIGHT

There are obviously a lot more factors than just Tesla and AI at play when it comes to the popularity of humanoid robots. Research paved years ago by companies like Boston Dynamics and the prospect of bots’ applications in factories have been equally pivotal.

But this time around, humanoid robots feel as though they’ve found themselves in front of an even bigger and brighter spotlight; it’s not just Tesla that’s putting them there. Nvidia is getting in on the game, providing its own expertise with systems like GR00T which is meant to help robots train themselves. Similarly, OpenAI seems to be interested in the robotics game and there’s a job opening as proof.

It’s hard to say what will come of all the attention, but if history is an example, money and hype usually mean progress. And if that means I don’t have to haul my own dirty clothes to the laundromat, then consider me a humanoid robot truther.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

While the Earth is often called “the Pale Blue Dot” thanks to its bountiful oceans, most of the planet’s land masses are dominated by the color green. Plants use chlorophyll (which absorbs red and blue light but, reflects green light) to captures solar energy, and use carbon and water to make food through a process known as photosynthesis. While this fourth grade biology lesson outlines the predominant way plant life thrives on our planet, life on other Earth-like exoplanets (especially those orbiting red dwarf stars) could use a different method entirely—one that would turn the whole world purple.

Scientists from Cornell University analyzed how alien plants that rely on infrared radiation for photosynthesis might transform the hues of alien worlds. These kinds of bacteria, which include phototrophic anoxygenic bacteria and photoheterotrophic bacteria, could emit a distinctive “light fingerprint” that could be detectable by upcoming observatories, including the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope. The results of the study were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“Purple bacteria can thrive under a wide range of conditions, making it one of the primary contenders for life that could dominate a variety of worlds,” Cornell University Ph.D. student Lígia Fonseca Coelho said in a press statement. “They already thrive here in certain niches… just imagine if they were not competing with green plants, algae and bacteria: A red sun could give them the most favorable conditions for photosynthesis.”

To understand the color and chemical signature such a world would emit, Coelho and her colleagues gathered 20 specimens of purple sulfur and purple non-sulfur bacteria from various places around the world—including hydrothermal vents and even ponds near Cornell’s campus. These bacteria rely on low-energy red and infrared right for a photosynthesis-like process, and while purple bacteria might be a biological niche today, some scientists theorize that an ancient Earth was likely much more purple than it is today.

A 2022 study from the University of Maryland explored why plants reflect the color green when technically the Sun emits the most light in the blue-green spectrum. The scientists argued that a light-sensitive molecule called retinal (which first appeared on Earth before chlorophyll) absorbed green light and reflect red and violet—which, to the human eye, would’ve looked purple.

When the molecule chlorophyll evolved on Earth—thanks in no small part to a rise in oxygen levels—the Sun’s green light was already being absorbed by retinal-leveraging plants. So, instead, the molecule absorbed all other available light. Even though the Sun emits less light in that spectrum, chlorophyll were part of a more advanced, efficient system at producing photosynthesis, and Earth’s green hue began to take shape.

But on oxygen-poor exoplanets orbiting cool, red dwarf stars, things might be drastically different. Coelho developed various models of Earth-like planets across a range of wet and dry environments, and many of the simulated “light fingerprints” came back purple.

“If purple bacteria are thriving on the surface of a frozen Earth, an ocean world, a snowball Earth or a modern Earth orbiting a cooler star,” Coelho said in a press statement. “We now have the tools to search for them.”

So, when aliens finally do reach Earth, don’t count on “little green men.” As for flying purple people-eaters... well, now we’re on to something.

{ https://www.msn.com/en-us/ }

Space is a big place.

But despite our diminutive size among the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way (which is itself among hundreds of billions of galaxies), scientists have slowly pieced together a long list of all the strange stuff we might encounter throughout the cosmos. However, sometimes humanity’s collection of orbital space telescopes, ground-based arrays, and interplanetary spacecraft come across something that’s a bit of a head-scratcher.

Meet the latest one—the millimeter ultra-broad-line object, or the MUBLO for short.

Identified in a new paper published last week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the object in question lies near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which the researchers describe as containing “tens of millions of solar masses of gas, a supermassive black hole, a tenth of our Galaxy’s ongoing star formation, and an extensive graveyard of stellar remnants.”

Although it’s a cosmic mess, it’s among this interstellar chaos where new celestial objects will be discovered, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) interferometer is one of the most powerful tools in humanity’s star-gazing arsenal. Composed of 66 radio telescopes, this array (as its name suggests) can analyze electromagnetic radiation emanating from space at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths.

While gazing at our galaxy’s center, researchers stumbled upon a compact source subsequently labeled “G0.02467–0.0727,” otherwise known as the MUBLO. Made of cold dust and fast-moving gas, the MUBLO also exhibited another strange behavior—it only emitted microwave radiation. Adam Ginsburg, the lead author on the paper, and his team went through the long list of celestial explanations and came up short.

“We consider several explanations for the [MUBLO], including protostellar outflow, explosive outflow, a collapsing cloud, an evolved star, a stellar merger, a high-velocity compact cloud, an intermediate-mass black hole, and a background galaxy,” the paper reads. “Most of these conceptual models are either inconsistent with the data or do not fully explain them. The MUBLO is, at present, an observationally unique object.”

According to Nature, the gas molecules are also not traveling in a simple ring, which could point to having been blown away by a stellar explosion. But the MUBLO lacks certain chemicals that would be tell-tale signs of such an event.

Among the various celestial phenomena examined in the paper, the authors point out two that could explain the MUBLO—a stellar merger or an intermediate-mass black hole (IMHO). However, neither of these hypotheses are perfect. While the stellar merger idea is compelling, the MUBLO has “dust mass is substantially larger, by more than an order of magnitude, than observed toward any other merger remnant.” As for the IMHO suggestion, it “does not explain all of the observed features of the MUBLO.”

To understand this new phenomenon—or, perhaps, a well-disguised known object— uture millimeters and mid-infrared studies will need to analyze the MUBLO and discern previously unseens features that, hopefully, will point toward what it is.

For now, add another galactic mystery to the list.

• https://youtu.be/8tnozMn4rWY

{ https://www.msn.com/en-us/ }

Nu in Las Vegas * Mythische en mysterieuze monoliet duikt weer op: toeval of niet?

In de natuur bij Las Vegas is er weer eentje verschenen: een zilveren monoliet. Zo reflecterend, dat de zuil bijna opgaat in het landschap eromheen. De afgelopen jaren doken zulke zuilen al vaker op, dus echt nieuw zijn ze niet meer. Hoe komt het dat we deze voorwerpen in de vrije natuur dan toch nog ervaren als mysterieus?

2001: A Space Odyssey

{ https://www.rtl.nl/ }

Een mysterieuze monoliet is verschenen in de woestijn van Las Vegas: niemand weet hoe hij daar is gekomen

 Door Janine

LVMPD/X

Een mysterieuze monoliet is verschenen in een bergketen in de buurt van Las Vegas, Nevada, maar niemand kan verklaren hoe hij daar is gekomen. Laten we er meer over te weten komen.

Monoliet ontdekt bij Las Vegas: waar komt hij vandaan?

LVMPD/X

De mysterieuze monoliet die in de bergen van Las Vegas is gevonden, stak uit de rotsen, maar zijn verschijning moet nog worden verklaard. Monolieten zijn solide geologische structuren die meestal uit één steen of rots bestaan en die door erosie aan het licht komen. De herkomst van het object in kwestie is echter onbekend.

Lokale autoriteiten hebben besloten om de formatie te verwijderen. Op de X-pagina van de Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department staat in een bericht van 21 juni 2024: "Velen van jullie hebben vragen gesteld over de mysterieuze monoliet die onlangs is gezien in het noorden van Las Vegas. Gistermiddag hebben we geassisteerd bij het verwijderen van het object omwille van de openbare veiligheid en het milieu." De politie heeft bekendgemaakt dat "het onbekend is hoe het object op zijn locatie is gekomen of wie er verantwoordelijk voor zou kunnen zijn." De afmeting van de monoliet is 19,5 meter.

Monolieten over de hele wereld, een mysterie begonnen in 2020

Meteen na de ontdekking werd de monoliet weggehaald, maar het bracht een mysterie aan het licht dat teruggaat tot 2020, toen deze vreemde lichtgevende objecten over de hele wereld begonnen op te duiken. De monoliet in kwestie werd gevonden door het zoek- en reddingsteam van de politie van Las Vegas in de buurt van Gass Peak, dat deel uitmaakt van het uitgestrekte Desert National Wildlife Refuge.

Momenteel is dit de laatste verschijning van deze mysterieuze gespiegelde zuilen. In november 2020 verscheen een soortgelijke monoliet in de rode rotswoestijn van Utah, Mountain West, VS. Daarna zijn er monolieten gezien in Californië, New Mexico, Roemenië en zelfs in het centrum van Las Vegas op Fremont Street. Het gemeenschappelijke kenmerk is dat ze plotseling verschenen en net zo snel weer verdwenen. Nick Street, de luitenant van het Utah Department of Public Safety, verklaarde: "Dit ding komt niet van een andere wereld".

Waarom de monoliet van Las Vegas werd verwijderd

LVMPD/X

De formatie in Utah was ingebed in de rotsen in een gebied dat zo verspreid lag dat de locatie aanvankelijk verborgen werd gehouden, om te voorkomen dat mensen erop uit zouden trekken om ernaar te zoeken en het risico liepen te verdwalen. De coördinaten werden echter ontdekt en veel nieuwsgierige toeristen gingen er met de auto naartoe, waarbij ze de natuur beschadigden en veel afval achterlieten. De reden waarom de autoriteiten besloten de monoliet uit Las Vegas te verwijderen, is om te voorkomen dat dezelfde dynamiek zich herhaalt.

Het Desert National Wildlife Refuge, een federaal gebied, is een enorm natuurreservaat waar dikhoornschapen, schildpadden en zeldzame planten leven, allemaal soorten die hier beschermd zijn. Op dit moment bevindt de monoliet, die bestaat uit een plaat reflecterend metaal gemodelleerd naar een prisma en gelast met betonijzer en beton, zich na uit de grond te zijn getrokken waar het een diep gat achterliet, in een geheime opslagplaats, in afwachting van een beslissing van de autoriteiten over de beste manier om zich ervan te ontdoen.

{ https://www.curioctopus.nl/ }

In this interview from the Vetted podcast, Ron James, Director of Media Relations for MUFON and filmmaker of "The Accidental Truth," shares shocking new UFO evidence. xxx 

Discover the latest findings from MUFON's upcoming symposium, including mysterious metals received by a Russian experiencer, the compelling 1955 Oregon UFO shootdown case, and a cryogenically frozen alien. 

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is set to reveal findings from a study on alleged UFO material. In a surprising announcement, MUFON has declared that it will present "the most important UAP-related presentation it has ever made" at a live event on July 13th. 

The presentation will focus on alleged UAP material received from a Russian UFO investigator, which was reportedly part of an attempted cover-up. According to the press release, the material was tested in Russia and at a U.S. lab, with both investigations concluding it is "of unknown origin." 

Some samples of the material were allegedly stolen from a U.S. Post Office Box before MUFON Investigator Robert Spearing could retrieve them. The investigation into the theft was hindered by tampered CCTV cameras. 

"This is typical with evidence of this nature," said MUFON Media Relations Director Ron James. "We believe that this material was deliberately taken by someone who could hack into a locked Post Office Box to prevent further testing. Who did it is anybody's guess." 

According to MUFON: "The evidence that supports this story, and others that we will share at the Symposium, could make this the biggest UFO-related news event of the year. We have physical materials and more evidence of non-human technology." 

But, I wouldn't hold out much hope for anything coming from this. 

For example the UAP material received from a Russian UFO investigator: One commenter @FAA-DPE on Chris Letho's YouTube channel stated: I recognize that material from years of working in petrochemical plants. Shell Norco LA, Union Carbide Taft LA, etc. And it's IDENTICAL to the byproduct of "Fluid Coking" Hydrocarbons. It makes a very unique and strange byproduct material that does not exist in nature and would confuse most of today's lab techs. if they were not given some idea. 

About the photo previewed by Ron James on the podcast of the supposedly shot down disk, commenter @zimzimma5688 on Chris Letho's YouTube channel stated: It took all of about 24 hours before that photo previewed by Ron James on the podcast of the supposedly shot down disk in the woods with the two "army men" retrieving it that was going to be a centerpiece at this Mufon conference, was shown to be fake. The two blurry army men exactly match a set of toy figurines. The disk is obviously a model of some sort. 

A lot of people in the community consider Mufon to be a compromised organization as well, essentially it functions as a tool for those responsible for the cover up/psy op. That I don't know to be true, but it would not surprise me. 

Here's the interview from the Vetted podcast. Be cautious about what you choose to believe.

  

{ https://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

Unveiling the Unknown: Extraordinary Extraterrestrial Encounters You’ve Never Heard Of

Throughout history, the possibility of extraterrestrial life has fascinated humanity. While mainstream narratives often focus on well-known incidents like Roswell, there exists a myriad of lesser-known encounters that provide intriguing glimpses into potential interactions with beings from beyond our world. This article delves into some of these extraordinary, yet obscure encounters that defy conventional explanation and challenge our understanding of reality.

1. The Tarento Encounter

On a clear evening between March and April, Mr. Johan Franco Maroi and his son experienced an encounter that would change their lives. As they drove from Tarento to Mount Bernady, they noticed a bright, morphing light in the sky. This light, shifting from white to orange to red, eventually descended behind a nearby hill. Driven by curiosity, Maroi stopped the car and ventured towards the light.

Upon reaching the hilltop, Maroi encountered a tall, luminous being clad in a suit resembling medieval armor, but more advanced and meshed with light-emitting wires. As they approached each other, Maroi experienced a sudden vision of a spaceship, highlighting a technology that seemed to utilize light as energy. This vision was interrupted when sparks flew from the being’s hand, affecting Maroi’s hand in return. The encounter left him with severe, mysterious burns that healed only after he received an anonymous package containing a miraculous ointment. The incident, compounded by subsequent visits from mysterious men in black, left Maroi with lasting physical and psychological scars.

2. The Franco-Belgian Frontier Incident

In January 1974, on the Franco-Belgian frontier, Monier X experienced a bizarre encounter with mechanical-like beings. After his car malfunctioned, Monier noticed an unusual object in a nearby field. This object, initially appearing as a haystack, turned out to be a structured craft emitting patches of light. Two figures emerged, moving in a mechanical manner, wearing peculiar helmets and holding a device resembling a revolver.

These beings communicated through modulated sounds that bypassed normal sensory pathways, causing Monier to feel a faint shock. The beings abruptly retreated to their craft, which ascended and vanished. The arrival of another car, whose driver also witnessed the beings, added credibility to Monier’s account, marking this as one of the more corroborated yet mysterious encounters.

3. The Castal Encounter

In 1974, in Castal, Italy, Signoria Giovanna Seni witnessed a hovering figure while tending to her farm animals. This figure, seated in a swinging box-like structure, wore a multicolored suit and appeared to control the box with a rod emitting a humming sound. Despite her initial fear, Giovanna observed the figure and a subsequent bright light moving across the sky.

The figure and light circled a nearby cemetery before disappearing. Although Giovanna’s mother dismissed the phenomenon, Giovanna remained convinced of the extraordinary nature of the encounter. This event, marked by the figure’s unusual attire and behavior, contributed to the rich tapestry of unexplained sightings in rural Italy.

4. The Montville Encounter

In 1978, in Montville, New Jersey, three young boys witnessed a hovering, square-shaped object emitting lights and a red beam. The object remained stationary for several minutes before moving away. The boys then observed strange figures in yellow suits with hawk-like features. These figures, displaying stiff, mechanical movements, were accompanied by a woman who could disappear and reappear mysteriously.

The boys’ account was thoroughly investigated by UFO researchers, who found no conclusive explanation. The incident left the boys deeply shaken, adding to the credibility of their experience and highlighting the persistent enigma of such encounters.

5. The Bendini Encounter

In 1979, in Bendini, Brazil, Orlando Grado Santos experienced a series of encounters with various unidentified crafts and beings. While separated from his hunting group, he photographed a descending craft resembling a telephone booth. Subsequently, he witnessed other crafts and was eventually approached by helmeted humanoids.

These beings communicated with Orlando, assuring him of their peaceful intentions. Inside their craft, Orlando observed advanced technology and human-like figures operating unfamiliar machinery.

"On the evening of 28 July 1979, security guard Antonio Carlos Ferreira was allegedly abducted from his workplace - a furniture factory in Mirassol, São Paulo. According to his own accounts, he was approached by three humanoid figures who tranquilized and took him aboard a small ship which ferried him to a larger craft further away. There, he said he was positioned in front of a large television-like device and presented with a variety of images before being forced to mate with a female alien, after which he was tranquilized again and returned to the ground. Ferreira described the creatures as being approximately 1.2 metres (3.9 ft; 120 cm) tall with pointed ears, slanted eyes and human-like mouths. They lacked eyebrows or eyelashes and spoke in a language that superficially resembled Japanese. Some were said to have dark skin and red curly hair, while others had light skin and straight black hair. The ship was spherical with three undercarriage-like legs protruding from the bottom, with the interior lit by bright red and green lights. Ferreira states that he encountered the aliens again in 1982, with the craft supposedly landing close enough for him to see the female alien and a childlike alien observing him from a distance. He said he experienced a third encounter later in 1982 in which he was taken into the hangar of an alien craft via a green beam of light before being injected with a yellow substance. He said he was then taken to meet the two aliens once more, the younger of whom he was led to believe was his own child. Other encounters are said to have followed, to a total of 16 or 20 between 1979 and 1989 ''

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

CYBELE MAYES-OSTERMAN  USA TODAY

Asteroid moonlet Dimorphos as seen by NASA's DART spacecraft 11 seconds before the impact that shifted its path through space, in the first test of asteroid deflection.

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/NASA

Scientists and experts say there's work to be done.

When NASA posed the hypothetical scenario, devised by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, to a group of nearly 100 government representatives, they found their plan to combat an asteroid hurtling towards Earth had several "high-level gaps," according to a NASA slide presentation. Space officials have "limited readiness to quickly implement needed space missions," and methods to keep the public informed about a looming disaster are not fully developed.

Of the participants, from federal agencies like the State Department and international bodies like the U.N.'s Office for Outer Space Affairs, 33% said humanity was not prepared to launch a space mission to prevent an asteroid from impacting the planet, and 19% said "reconnaissance missions" were not ready.

Kelly Fast, NASA's acting planetary defense officer, said the exercise helped government agencies to plan out how they would work together to prepare for a future asteroid strike.

"In the unlikely event we ever face a scenario like this, it won't be the first time that anybody's talked about how to treat this," she said.

In the scenario posed by NASA, humanity has 14 years to face an asteroid with a 72% chance of hitting Earth.  

STEFANI REYNOLDS, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

More: 

• Scientists probe a space mystery: Why do people age faster during space travel?

NASA runs fifth test to gauge asteroid preparedness

The exercise, designed to test government readiness for an asteroid headed towards Earth, was organized by NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency at an April meeting at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, according to a news release. It marked the fifth test to gauge whether authorities are prepared to defend Earth from space. This year's exercise was the first to include "international collaborators on planetary defense."

In the hypothetical scenario, an asteroid collides with the Earth in 2038. The collision would have a 47% chance of affecting more than 1,000 people, and an 8% chance of affecting more than a million. It could strike a swath of cities across the U.S., Europe, and Africa, including Washington, Dallas, Madrid, and Algiers.

In the scenario, participants weren't told "the asteroid’s size, composition, and long-term trajectory," according to the news release. Further observations about the asteroid would also hypothetically have to be delayed by at least seven months as the asteroid passed behind the Sun – "a critical loss of time."

Even with years to prepare, agencies would still have to work efficiently to respond to an approaching asteroid, Fast said. "When you talk about planning a mission, any kind of spacecraft mission, it doesn't happen on a dime," she said.

"Even though 14 years sounds like a long time, it actually might not be when you think of developing missions," Fast added.

Space officials have only one tested method of heading off an asteroid on its way toward Earth – "kinetic impact," or crashing a spacecraft into the asteroid to change its trajectory. In 2022, NASA crashed a spacecraft into Dimorphos, a small "moonlet" orbiting the asteroid Didymos around 6.8 million miles from Earth, successfully shortening the moonlet's orbit by 32 minutes, according to NASA.

Fast said scientists would need to tailor a space mission to respond to a particular asteroid collision scenario.

"It all depends on the asteroid," she said. "A single kinetic impactor might work for a smaller asteroid but not for something much larger."

Some participants were also skeptical that enough federal funding would be available to deal with the threat, according to the presentation. The decision-making process was "unclear," it said.

Authorities would also have a limited ability to gather more information about the incoming asteroid by flying a spacecraft close to it, evaluators concluded.

The presentation also warned that coordinating the release of information to the public about an asteroid flying towards the planet would pose problems. "Misinformation and disinformation would have to be dealt with," they wrote.

"Maintaining trust at the start of this event is critical and that means talking early – probably earlier than the scientists and lawyers are comfortable with," another unnamed participant said.

Fast said it would be important to "turn information into something that is understandable to the public, and not to be overly technical and jargon-y."

View |12 Photos

NASA successfully crashes DART spacecraft into asteroid

NASA successfully crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid Monday, marking a win for the agency's plan for when a devastating asteroid should ever threaten humanity.

The latest exercise, which used data from the test, recommended more tests on the new technology

Fast said people should be reassured that scientists and agencies are coming together to map out strategies in the unlikely event of an asteroid collision.

The scenario was "just a chance to continue to explore these possibilities and our own readiness, and to identify how we can do better in the future."

"This is actually a good thing, to be talking through this," she said.

• https://youtu.be/h_-RaILKeEI

{ https://eu.usatoday.com/news/ }

Fly Through the Pillars of Creation in this New Visualisation Made from Webb and Hubble Data

I remember April 1995 very well. It was the month that the stunning and iconic image that has been called ‘Pillars of Creation’ was released. It was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope but now the James Webb Telescope is getting in on the act. Webb snapped images of the Eagle Nebula (home to the ‘pillars’) early on but now astronomers have combined the data form Hubble and Webb to create an amazing 3D animation flight through the nebula. 

The Pillars of Creation are composed mostly of cool molecular hydrogen and dust. They are being worn away by strong winds and ultraviolet radiation emitted by nearby hot, young stars. The pillars, which resemble great big cosmic fingers have additional protrusions, that are larger than the solar system, extending from their tops. Embedded within these fingers are young hot stars. The tallest of the pillars measures three light-years from top to bottom.

Eagle Nebula Pillars of Creation as seen by Hubble Space Telescope in 2005. (Credit NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (ASU)

The stunning new 3D movie takes viewers on a journey through the structures of the pillars, relying on real observational data from a scientific study led by Anna McLeod, an associate professor at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom. The video allows viewers to get a glimpse at how the two space telescopes can collaborate 

The new visualisation allows viewers to understand how two of the world’s most powerful space telescopes collaborate to deliver a more detailed view. Hubble captures objects glowing in visible light at thousands of degrees, while Webb’s infrared camera is sensitive to cooler objects at just hundreds of degrees and can penetrate the dust to reveal stars embedded within.

The movie does more than just create a fabulous video. It helps viewers to explore a number of different areas and stages of star formation. The central pillar for example is approached and can be observed with an infant protostar embedded at its top. It can be seen glowing bright red in the infrared image. Near the top of the left pillar is a diagonal jet of material that has been ejected from a newborn star. The hot young star cannot be seen but the jet gives away its presence. Finally at the tip of one of the left pillar’s protrusions is a brand new star that is shining brightly. 

Another wonderful benefit of the new 3D visualisation is the creation of a 3D printable model of the Pillars of Creation. The information has been converted into an STL file format that can be downloaded and printed at home using 3D printers. Not only will this be of fabulous interest to fellow geeks but it will also be of immense educational value to schools. 

The videos of the creation can be seen here

Source : 

• Pillars of Creation Star in New Visualisation from NASA’s Hubble and Webb Telescopes

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

How Commercial Satellites Could Track Spy Balloons and Other UFOs

In a 2023 video, CBS News recaps lessons learned from the Chinese spy balloon’s flight:

The demonstration is described in a research paper written by Harvard University’s Eric Keto and Wellesley College’s Wesley Andres Watters, who proposed their image analysis technique in an earlier study. The new study was posted to the ArXiv pre-print server last week and has been submitted to the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation for review.

Keto and Watters started out with multispectral imagery captured by Planet’s SuperDove satellites during last year’s balloon flights. Such imagery isn’t captured all at once. Instead, the satellite’s sensors record a succession of exposures that reflect different spectral bands. That means an aerial object would be seen at a slightly different location in each of the images that are combined to produce a multispectral view, due to the parallax effect created by a moving satellite.

The researchers said the spy balloons were ideal subjects for their study. “High-altitude balloons are advantageous targets, because the motion of the balloon itself can be ignored in the analysis,” they said.

The aim of their study was to create a baseline for interpreting spectral-band images. The researchers conducted a detailed analysis of imagery that was acquired over British Columbia, Missouri and Colombia — and made a few educated guesses about the relative velocities involved. They took a variety of factors into account, including shifts in the background terrain and the potential effects of atmospheric distortion. (The British Columbia imagery wasn’t that useful, because snow and ice covered up the features that would typically be used for ground reference.)

The analysis not only provided a baseline for tracking moving objects using SuperDove satellite imagery, but also made it possible for the researchers to provide estimates for the altitudes of the balloons. They said one balloon flew over Missouri at a height of about 21,200 meters (69,500 feet), while the other balloon’s altitude was about 21,500 meters (70,500 feet) when it was spotted over Colombia.

Keto and Watters aren’t the only ones looking into how commercial satellite data could be used to track anomalous aerial objects. A team of researchers at RAIC Labs (formerly known as Synthetaic) used Planet’s data archive and RAIC Labs’ AI-based image analysis program to trace the infamous Chinese balloon’s route backward from the U.S. to its point of origin near Hainan.

A 2023 video focuses on how Planet and Synthetaic / RAIC Labs tracked the Chinese balloon:

Such techniques could be used to detect phenomena that are even more exotic than Chinese spy balloons: The study conducted by Keto and Watters is part of Harvard University’s Galileo Project, which is aimed at finding ways to collect high-quality data that could be useful in the search for objects of extraterrestrial origin.

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who heads up the Galileo Project, said last year in a blog posting that his team has been searching through Planet’s data archive for signs of unusual objects.

“Extraterrestrial equipment can be distinguished from a terrestrial object, not just by resolving unusual bolts or labels imprinted on its hardware but also based on its motion,” Loeb explained. “As mentioned in the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] reports in 2021 and 2022, unusual flight characteristics can serve as an indicator of an extraterrestrial origin.”

Will satellite data analysis become a standard tool for detecting anomalous aerial phenomena? Stay tuned: We’ve reached out to Loeb, Keto and Watters, and we’ll update this report with any additional information we can pass along.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

A 2-Mile Wide ‘Planet Killer’ Asteroid Is Headed Towards Earth At 58,000 MPH

BY DOUGLAS CHARLES

ISTOCKPHOTO

Mountain-sized “planet-killer” Asteroid 2011 UL21 is headed towards Earth this week and during its trip it will be making a very close approach to our planet.

The asteroid, classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) by NASA, is supposed to go zooming by Earth at 58,000 mph on June 27th.

Asteroid 2011 UL21 is also classified as a near-Earth object (NEO), which means that its orbit can move the space rock within 1.3 astronomical units (AU) of the sun. An AU is the average distance between Earth and the Sun, or about 93 million miles.

VIA NASA-JPL

This asteroid is no tiny space rock either. According to SpaceReference.org, it is comparable in size to Mount Everest – Earth’s highest mountain above sea level – and is between 1.1 and 2.4-miles wide.

Needless to say, a 2-mile wide rock traveling at 58,000 mph would definitely “kill” our planet.

Thankfully, the asteroid will only pass Earth at a distance of around 4.1 million miles. Still, that is the closest it will have come to Earth in the past 110 years, at least.

And while 4.1 million miles may sound like a great distance, in terms of space it isn’t so much. By comparison, Mars is 245.22 million miles from Earth.

According to Gianluca Masi, astrophysicist and director of the Virtual Telescope Project, “There is absolutely no risk for our planet.”

“The term ‘Potentially Hazardous Asteroid’ (PHA) is a precise formal definition, referring to minor planets larger than approximately 140 meters that can come within 7.5 million km from the Earth,” said Masi. “In other words, only the largest asteroids capable of approaching close enough to our planet are flagged as PHAs, which does not mean they are going to hit the Earth, but they nonetheless warrant a better monitoring.”

That being said, there is always the possibility that the gravitational tug of Earth could alter the “planet killer” asteroid’s orbit (called the Yarkovsky Effect). And if that were to ever occur there isn’t much we could do to stop it.

{ https://brobible.com/ }

Researchers Believe They Will Find UFO, Alien Secrets In The Vatican Archives

BY DOUGLAS CHARLES

ISTOCKPHOTO COMPOSITE

Researchers believe a search of the Vatican’s historic archives will reveal key insights into aliens, UFOs and other previously unexplained paranormal activity.

Sorting through the massive amounts of documents located in the Vatican Apostolic Archives (its official name) will be no easy task, however.

According to the archive’s website, the files are stored on over 85 linear kilometers of shelving. That’s almost 53 linear miles worth of documentation, covering over twelve centuries.

A recent article published on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website explains that “a group of scientists and researchers are seeking access to the Vatican Apostolic Archives to uncover information about UFOs and the paranormal.”

The reason for this has ties to Air Force veteran and Pentagon whistleblower David Grusch’s testimony last year in which he claimed the “Vatican was involved” in the first-ever mission of the United States’ alleged secret UFO retrieval program.

“1933 was the first recovery in Europe, in Magenta, Italy,” Grusch told NewsNation. They recovered a partially intact vehicle, and the Italian government moved it to a secure airbase in Italy until around 1944-1945.

“The Pope back-channeled that and told the Americans what the Italians had and we ended up scooping it.”

Following Grusch’s statements, researcher Roberto Pinotti also came forward with a claim that he has proof that a UFO crash occurred in Italy on June 13, 1933, 14 years before the Roswell incident.

“The historical record is filled with these kinds of events,” Diana Walsh Pasulka, a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, told Catholic News Service. “The people at the Vatican, they don’t even know where to look; it’s in their basements.”

“[The Vatican’s archivists are in a] mad rush to digitize what they have; they have to prioritize what they think is most important. They aren’t really prioritizing orbs that are bothering nuns in the 1800s.”

{ https://brobible.com/ }

Take a deep dive into UFO history in 'After the Flying Saucers Came' by Greg Eghigian (exclusive)

Eghigian credits this newest wave of mania as erupting from a New York Times article in December 2017 regarding a secret government program to study UFOS.

"When that dropped, then subsequent films, photos and more stories, that's when it all exploded," he tells Space.com. "As a mainstream media phenomenon, UFOs were kind of dead for a good long period of time and that’s really the thing that ushered it in. The veteran ufologists refer to people as 'seventeeners,' those people who believe that all UFO stuff started in 2017 and have no idea about the past. 

"For me, I began this project around 2013. I grew up on UFOs and loved this stuff as a kid but lost interest in it when I went off to college. I had some time in the summer and I started digging around a digital archive and found all this stuff. No professor of history had written on the subject since 1975, I thought this seemed like it might be worth a revisit. I knew it was going to be a deep dive, and know there were a lot of rabbit holes but I wasn’t completely ready for just how many there were out there." 

Giving the book a solid foundation in history was an important aspect to this comprehensive UFO exploration for Eghigian as he discovered myriad false accounts, unreliable witnesses and semi-established truths.

"What we do in history is ask ourselves how did we get to where we are? And that happens through choices that are made, but also choices that aren't made. There are lots of different forks in the road at various places in time and institutions and people do things for a variety of reasons. So you excavate that whole complicated history of the choices made and not made that inform how things got framed the way they are now. And the extent to which that's reflective of something that represents the reality on the ground versus the image we have of it. 

"What was really missing from the way people talk about UFOs was somebody who approached it from the outside looking in who had no skin in the ontology game. I'm not here to referee or debunk. I'm going to take people seriously here, but I'm not going to just take their word for things."

Eghigian was most unsettled by many of the more outlandish and imaginative explanations out there that all attempt to explain the true nature of these mysterious phenomena.

"I think some of the bigger rabbit holes that I recall are actually the alternative, speculative theories about where the UFOs are coming from," he notes. "The big ones of course are really the two variations: If these things are real they’re secret technology of the United States or, back then, the Soviet Union. Or they're from another planet. But there's lots of other theories that start to come out of the woodwork pretty quickly. These go from that they are ultra-terrestrials from some other kind of space-time continuum or dimension, they are maybe dead people and that they're a variation on ghosts, to arguments about these are beings that live inside the Earth or live underwater. 

"And then there are people who start to see this in Christian theological ways as demons of Satan. I realized if I started to go too far down that road that the book was never going to get completed, so I largely put my focus solely on the extraterrestrial argument.  

"UFOs don't make history. People make UFOs make history. They are a phenomenon beyond just something that is seen. It's a social phenomenon. It's all the different people and institutions who get involved that try to make this thing important, to try to argue that this matters, and that includes debunkers and irrational people who try to use UFOs as opportunities to make spurious arguments that undermine science." 

According to Eghigian, the fact that military intelligence has declared that there's something real there, and not just the result of computer glitches feels like confirmation for a lot of UFO faithful.

"The UFO world is awash in rumor. This stuff has legs within different segments of academia," he adds. "There are serious people like me who are saying, 'Be ready if you really want us to look into this stuff. Because we academics are slow and we are very, very skeptical. It's the way we operate. So just be careful what you wish for. If we do get into this stuff it's likely not going to play out in the way that a lot of people imagine it playing out.

"It's cooling down a bit but there's still a lot of people excited and enthused about it so I don't think it's going away anytime soon."

 { https://www.space.com/ }

Study: Active, Seafloor Hydrothermal Systems on Small Ocean Worlds Could Support Life

Ocean worlds are planetary bodies that have a liquid ocean, often under an icy shell or within the rocky interior. In our own Solar System, several moons of Jupiter and Saturn are ocean worlds. Some ocean worlds are thought to have hydrothermal circulation, where water, rocks, and heat combine to drive fluids in and out of the seafloor. Hydrothermal circulation would impact the chemistry of the water and rock of ocean worlds, and could help life to develop deep below the icy surface. In a new study, planetary researchers used computer simulations of hydrothermal circulation, based on a well-understood system on Earth, to measure the influence of lower gravity at values appropriate for ocean worlds smaller than our home planet. The simulations with ocean world (lower) gravity result in fluid circulation much like that occurring on and below Earth’s seafloor, but with several important differences. Lower gravity reduces buoyancy, so fluids don’t become as light when heated, and this reduces flow rates. This can raise temperatures in the circulating fluid, which could allow more extensive chemical reactions, perhaps including those that sustain life.

This graphic illustrates how Cassini scientists think water interacts with rock at the bottom of Enceladus’ ocean, producing hydrogen gas.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Southwest Research Institute.

Rock-heat-fluid systems were discovered on Earth’s seafloor in the 1970s, when scientists observed discharging fluids that carried heat, particles, and chemicals.

Many vent sites were surrounded by novel ecosystems, including specialized bacterial mats, red-and-white tubeworms, and heat-sensing shrimp.

In the new study, University of California, Santa Cruz’s Professor Andrew Fisher and colleagues used a complex computer model based on hydrothermal circulation as it occurs on Earth.

After changing variables like gravity, heat, rock properties and fluid-circulation depth, they found that hydrothermal vents could be sustained under a wide range of conditions.

If these kinds of flows occur on an ocean world, like Jupiter’s moon Europa, they could raise the odds that life exists there as well.

“This study suggests that low temperature — not too hot for life — hydrothermal systems could have been sustained on ocean worlds beyond Earth over timescales comparable to that required for life to take hold on Earth,” Professor Fisher said.

The seawater-circulation system that the researchers based their computer models on was found on a 3.5 million-year-old seafloor in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, east of the Juan de Fuca Ridge.

There, cool bottom water flows in through an extinct volcano (seamount), travels underground for about 30 miles (48.3 km), then flows back out into the ocean through another seamount.

“The water gathers heat as it flows and comes out warmer than when it flowed in, and with very different chemistry,” Kristin Dickerson, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“The flow from one seamount to another is driven by buoyancy, because water gets less dense as it warms, and more dense as it cools,” Professor Fisher added.

“Differences in density create differences in fluid pressure in the rock, and the system is sustained by the flows themselves — running as long as enough heat is supplied, and rock properties allow enough fluid circulation. We call it a hydrothermal siphon.”

“While high-temperature vent systems are driven mainly by sub-seafloor volcanic activity, a much larger volume of fluid flows in and out of Earth’s seafloor at lower temperatures, driven mainly by background cooling of the planet.”

“The flow of water through low-temperature venting is equivalent, in terms of the amount of water being discharged, to all of the rivers and streams on Earth, and is responsible for about a quarter of Earth’s heat loss.”

“The entire volume of the ocean is pumped in and out of the seafloor about every half-million years.”

Many previous studies of hydrothermal circulation on Europa and Enceladus have considered higher temperature fluids.

“Cartoons and other drawings often depict systems on their seafloors that look like black smokers on Earth. Lower-temperature flows are at least as likely to occur, if not more likely,” said Dr. Donna Blackman, also from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The findings show that, under very low gravity — like that found on the seafloor of Enceladus — circulation can continue with low to moderate temperatures for millions or billions of years.

This could help to explain how small ocean worlds can have long-lived fluid-circulation systems below their seafloors, even though heating is limited: the low efficiency of heat extraction could lead to considerable longevity — essentially, throughout the life of the Solar System.

The scientists acknowledge the uncertainty of when the seafloors of ocean worlds will be directly observed for the presence of active hydrothermal systems.

Their distance from Earth and physical characteristics present major technical challenges for spacecraft missions.

“Thus, it is essential to make the most of available data, much of it collected remotely, and leverage understanding from decades of detailed studies of analog Earth systems,” the authors concluded.

• Their paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

• A.T. Fisher et al. 2024. Sustaining Hydrothermal Circulation with Gravity Relevant to Ocean Worlds. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 129 (6): e2023JE008202; doi: 10.1029/2023JE008202

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

I found a face on Mars in the center of a crater. UFO Sighting News. Video!

Date of discovery: June 26, 2024

Location of discovery: Mars

Source Photo: 

http://viewer.mars.asu.edu/planetview/inst/ctx/F21_043858_1485_XI_31S285W#P=F21_04

3858_1485_XI_31S285W,F21_043810_2049_XN_24N062W,F23_044646_2186_XN_38N205W

,F22_044206_1678_XN_12S068W,Invalid+Record,Invalid+Record,Invalid+Record,Invalid+Re

cord,Invalid+Record,Invalid+Record,Invalid+Record,Invalid+Record,F01_035992_1653_XI_1

4S108W,F02_036378_1411_XN_38S202W&T=15

Knowing what alien species exist out there is of utter most importance, because if we can see their face, we will fear them less knowing already that they exist. I am only trying to help humanity erase the fear that the movies and TV shows try to grow in us all. 

SCW

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

New Mexico’s History Of UFO Sightings

New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment, holds a unique and significant place in the annals of UFO history. The state is home to some of the most famous and intriguing UFO sightings and incidents in the world, drawing both skeptics and believers. From the legendary Roswell incident to the lesser-known yet equally perplexing Hobbs burn case, New Mexico’s UFO history is rich and varied.

The Roswell Incident

The Roswell incident of 1947 is perhaps the most iconic UFO event in New Mexico’s history. Something undeniably crashed on a ranch near Roswell, leading to the recovery of mysterious debris by the military. Initial press releases claimed the recovery of a “flying disc,” only to be retracted the next day in favor of a weather balloon explanation. Over the years, theories have ranged from top-secret military projects like Project Mogul to extraterrestrial spacecraft. Despite the controversy and lack of definitive evidence, the Roswell incident remains a cornerstone of UFO lore and has significantly influenced popular culture.

The Farmington Armada

In March 1950, the town of Farmington witnessed a remarkable series of events known as the Farmington Armada. Over three days, hundreds of residents reported seeing numerous flying objects in broad daylight. Descriptions varied from silver discs to elliptical shapes, often seen in formation. This mass sighting involved credible witnesses, including police officers and business leaders, adding to its legitimacy. The sheer number of objects and the duration of the sightings make the Farmington Armada one of the most substantial UFO events in New Mexico.

Kirtland Air Force Base Incidents

Kirtland Air Force Base has been the site of several significant UFO sightings. On November 4, 1957, military radar operators tracked an unknown object that violated the base’s perimeter. This object exhibited capabilities far beyond conventional aircraft, such as hovering and rapid acceleration. Another notable event occurred in September 1959, when multiple radar stations across New Mexico tracked an object moving at unprecedented speeds, clocking in at around 2,200 miles per hour. These incidents highlight the potential national security implications of unidentified aerial phenomena.

The Hobbs Burn Case

One of the more obscure yet fascinating cases is the Hobbs burn incident of 1964. An eight-year-old boy in Hobbs was reportedly burned by a UFO. According to contemporaneous news accounts, a black, top-shaped object emitted a column of fire that set the boy’s hair on fire and caused severe burns. The FBI was involved in the investigation, and samples of the boy’s shirt, hair, and skin were sent to FBI labs for analysis. Despite extensive investigations, no conventional explanation was found. This case, like many others, underscores the enigmatic nature of some UFO reports.

Historical Preservation and Research

David Marler, Executive Director of the National UFO Historical Records Center, has dedicated his life to preserving the history of UFO sightings. His center holds the largest collection of UFO materials in North America, including civilian and military case files, original Air Force documents, and interviews with credible witnesses. Marler’s approach is not to promote belief in extraterrestrial visitors but to preserve and document the historical record. His efforts ensure that future generations can access and study these phenomena with an objective, evidence-based approach.

Technological and Scientific Context

New Mexico is also home to significant technological and scientific facilities that have contributed to UFO research. The Very Large Array, a radio telescope facility west of Socorro, is used by astronomers to observe natural radio waves from space. Radar technology, infrared sensors, and satellites have all played roles in detecting and analyzing unidentified aerial phenomena. These tools provide objective measures that can corroborate eyewitness reports, adding a layer of scientific credibility to the study of UFOs.

VIDEO:

• New Mexico’s History Of UFO Sightings

New Mexico’s history with UFO sightings is both rich and complex. From the well-known Roswell incident to the mysterious Hobbs burn case, the state has been a focal point for UFO activity for decades. Through the efforts of researchers like David Marler and the preservation of historical records, the stories of these sightings continue to intrigue and inspire curiosity. Whether one is a skeptic or a believer, the UFO history of New Mexico offers a fascinating glimpse into the unknown and a reminder of the enduring human quest to understand our place in the universe.

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

NASA Doesn't Know When Starliner Will Return From Orbit

After helium leaks and thruster problems with Boeing’s Starliner capsule, NASA has been pushing back the return date from the International Space Station. On Friday, the agency announced they no longer had a planned return date. Instead, they will keep testing the capsule, trying to understand its issues, and seeing if they can make any fixes. Plenty of supplies are on the station, so there’s no urgent need to bring the two astronauts back to Earth.

Another reason NASA decided to cancel the planned departure of Wednesday, June 26 is because of conflicting timelines with a series of planned spacewalks on the ISS, set for today (Monday, June 24), and Tuesday, July 2. The delay also allows mission teams time to review propulsion and system data.

Boeing’s CTS-100 Starliner taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 5th, 2024. Credit: NASA

After years of delays and two recent scrubbed launch attempts, Starliner finally launched on June 5, 2024 with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board. Although two of the spacecraft’s thrusters failed during the flight, the spacecraft managed to reach the ISS and delivered 227 kg (500 lbs) of cargo. Additionally, five small leaks on the service module were also detected, and the crew and ground teams have been working through safety checks.

“We are taking our time and following our standard mission management team process,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program in a NASA blog post. “We are letting the data drive our decision making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking. Additionally, given the duration of the mission, it is appropriate for us to complete an agency-level review, similar to what was done ahead of the NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 return after two months on orbit, to document the agency’s formal acceptance on proceeding as planned.”

Safety and gaining a better understanding of the issues with Starliner are NASA and Boeing’s motivations for the delay in returning the spacecraft and crew back to Earth.

This first crewed flight of Starliner was supposed to validate the spacecraft as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP), with the hope of it working alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to make regular deliveries of cargo and crew to the ISS. This mission is the second time the Starliner has flown to the ISS and the third flight test overall. During the first uncrewed test flight (OFT-1), which took place back in December 2019, the Starliner launched successfully but failed to make it to the ISS. After making 61 corrective actions recommended by NASA, another attempt was made (OFT-2) on May 22nd, 2022. That flight successfully docked to the ISS, staying there for four days before undocking and landing in the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Wilmore and Williams are now  working with the Expedition 71 crew, assisting with station operations as needed and completing add-on in-flight objectives for NASA’s certification of Starliner.

Stich said that despite all the issues, Starliner is performing well in orbit while docked to the space station.

“We are strategically using the extra time to clear a path for some critical station activities while completing readiness for Butch and Suni’s return on Starliner,” he said, “and gaining valuable insight into the system upgrades we will want to make for post-certification missions.”

Mission managers will evaluate future return opportunities for Starliner and NASA said they will host a media telecon with mission leadership following a readiness review. NASA added that Starliner is actually cleared for return in case of an emergency on the space station that would require the crew to leave orbit and come back to Earth.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

China’s Chang’e-6 Probe Drops Off Samples From Moon’s Far Side

“The Chang’e-6 lunar exploration mission achieved complete success,” Zhang Kejian, director of the China National Space Administration, said from mission control. Chinese President Xi Jinping extended congratulations to the mission team, the state-run Xinhua news service reported.

Chang’e-6 followed a flight plan similar to the one used for Chang’e-5, a mission that brought back samples from the moon’s Earth-facing side in 2020. After entering lunar orbit, the spacecraft sent a lander down to the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin region.

The lander used an onboard drill and robotic arm to collect and store samples on its ascent stage. It also gathered data about its surroundings with a radon detector, a negative-ion detector and a mini-rover. Data and telemetry were relayed between Chang’e-6 and Earth via China’s Queqiao-2 satellite.

On June 4, Chang’e-6’s ascent stage lifted off for a rendezvous with the orbiting spacecraft. The samples were transferred to a re-entry capsule, and the spacecraft left lunar orbit several days ago for the trip back to Earth. The re-entry capsule was released as the spacecraft sped about 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) over the South Atlantic Ocean, CNSA said in a mission update.

After an initial round of processing at the landing site in China’s Inner Mongolia region, the capsule is due to be airlifted to Beijing, where the mission’s precious cargo will be removed for distribution to researchers.

The samples are expected to include volcanic rock and other materials that could shed fresh light on the moon’s origins and compositional differences between the near side and the far side. Scientists may also learn more about resources in the moon’s south polar region. That region is of high interest because it’s thought to harbor deposits of water ice that could be used to support future lunar settlements.

NASA is targeting the south polar region for a series of robotic missions — leading up to a crewed landing during the Artemis 3 mission, which is currently scheduled for 2026. China has its own lunar ambitions, including plans for sending astronauts to the lunar surface by 2030.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

Do We Now Have an Accurate Map of Nearby Stars?

If all stars shone as brightly as main sequence stars like our Sun do, it would be easy to catalogue the stars in our neighbourhood. But they don’t. Some are so small and dim that they’re considered failed stars. We call them brown dwarfs or substellar objects.

When we look up at the night sky with the unaided eye, our view is dominated by main sequence stars and giant stars, many of which are far beyond our stellar neighbourhood. Many stars are too dim to see, like red dwarfs and brown dwarfs. In fact, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf and our nearest neighbour, wasn’t discovered until the early 20th century.

In the early days of astronomy, measurements of proper motions showed that some stars that appear fixed in place are closer than other stars. All stars move and have proper motion; it’s just not always noticeable in the span of a single lifetime. High proper motion surveys of stars led to the selection of certain stars for measurements of their parallax, which helped locate more stars correctly in space. Then, in the early 20th century, as astronomy and photography were used in conjunction, photographic astrometry triggered a wave of discoveries of our solar neighbours. Those efforts showed that our nearest neighbours are red dwarfs (M dwarfs).

In the 1990s, as technology advanced, infrared sky surveys found more dim stars. “A second wave of discoveries started in the late 1990s with the advance of infrared sky surveys,” the authors write. Missions like the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) gave us a new, unprecedented look at the sky. It found M dwarfs, brown dwarfs, and substellar objects like L, T, and Y types, and even minor planets in the Solar System. (Definitions of brown dwarfs and other substellar objects overlap.) By the year 2,000, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey came online, strengthening our catalogue of the sky.

In 1997, Henry et al. published an important paper on the solar neighbourhood titled “The solar neighborhood IV: discovery of the twentieth nearest star.” It showed that the discovery of LHS 1565, about 3.7 pc from Earth, spelled trouble for our census of the neighbourhood. “It ranks as the twentieth closest stellar system and underscores the incompleteness of the nearby star sample, particularly for objects near the end of the main sequence,” Henry et al. wrote. “Ironically, this unassuming red dwarf provides a shocking reminder of how much we have yet to learn about even our nearest stellar neighbours.”

Since about 1997, there’s been a burst of discoveries of stars within the Sun’s neighbourhood. The authors say that these seem to have filled in the gaps in our 10 pc neighbourhood. But some of the knowledge was still based on two assumptions. The first was that the survey out to 5 parsecs was complete, and the second was that the density was uniform out to 10 parsecs. “The first of these is not true, and the second is in question,” the authors write.

Where does that leave us? Up to 90 star systems could still be missing.

“Using all neighbours the luminosity and mass functions and the star-to-brown dwarf (BD) number ratio can be studied,” the authors state. Astronomers don’t fully understand the ratio of brown dwarfs to other stars, but two recent papers (1,2), in particular, have continued the work to better understand and catalogue our stellar neighbourhood’s dim members.

Earlier this year, Kirkpatrick et al. published a study claiming that a complete survey of nearby stars is possible, largely thanks to Gaia data. They found 462 objects (including the Sun) in 339 systems within 10?pc. of the Sun.

In previous work, the authors of this new paper added 16 more stars to the list. These were late M-dwarfs, some of the coolest and dimmest main sequence stars, and brown dwarfs. They also discovered a new white dwarf companion to an existing M dwarf.

But how complete is this newest survey?

The problem lies in the difficulty of detecting dim stars like brown dwarfs and late M-dwarfs. The further we look, the more difficult they are to detect. They’re also more difficult to detect in the direction of the galactic plane.

The authors say that our neighbourhood stellar catalogue is still likely missing 93 stellar systems, “… corresponding to a deficit of ?21.5%,” they write. In terms of individual stars, it’s not much better: “…138 missing objects corresponding to a deficit of ?23.0%,” they write.

They broke it down even further to individual star types. We’re probably missing 28.1% of AFGK stars, -31% of white dwarfs, and ?27.8% of M-dwarfs. There’s also a higher deficit for late M-dwarfs. These deficits are higher than expected. What does it mean?

“The estimated deficits of systems and individual objects within 10?pc exceed expectations, in particular for the well-known AFGK stars,” the authors write. They conclude that the general assumption of a constant stellar density in the solar neighbourhood is incorrect. They say that small-scale density fluctuations can at least partly explain the deficits.

“Our statistical estimates show that the probability of these discrepancies being caused by random fluctuations is around 40%,” the authors conclude.

We clearly have more work to do.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

By ADRY TORRES FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

A bizarre, ring-shape UFO that appeared in the skies above Venezuela was recorded by a pair of stunned friends.

The now-viral video shows the dark, circular spot hovering in the clouds over Valencia, a city in the northern Venezuelan state of Carabobo.

'A flying saucer,' one of the young men shouts as they drove down a rode on a sunny afternoon.

He then asks one of his pals for the time on the clock to document the recording.

'Bro, look here: 4:54 pm on the 17th of June in 2024,' he says. 'Look at what is here in the sky in Valencia, Carabobo.' 

A bizarre, ring-shape UFO that appeared in the skies above Venezuela was recorded by a pair of stunned friends

Pictured: A poster for Jordan Peele's Nope released in 2022

The excited man then asks one of his friends to share the video with another person.

Although Venezuelan authorities have not made any public statements, local meteorologist Luis Vargas rained on their parade with several theories that ruled out a possible UFO sighting.

'This could be a smoke vortex or black ring that occurs after an explosion through a circular structure such as an industrial chimney or something similar,' he wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

He also indicated that the circular shape may have been produced by a volcano.

'They are also more common in volcanic activities as can be seen … and are known as ring clouds,' Vargas said.

Venezuelan meteorologist Luis Vargas downplayed a video filmed in the northern city of Valencia on June 17 that showed a ring-shaped UFO figure in the sky and took to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, to share two pictures (left and right) explain that it was most like smoke that was produced by an explosion from a chimney

The meteorologist also mentioned that circular shape that was spotted in the sky may have been produced by volcanic activity (seen here)

One user on X linked the odd-looking shape to military exercises that had taken place at a camp ahead of Monday's commemoration of the Battle of Carabobo, the 1821 fight for independence between fighters led by Venezuela General Simón Bolivar and the Spanish. 

The victory at Carabobo led to the independence of Venezuelan and the creation of the Republic of Gran Colombia. 

Another social media user linked the ring-shaped clouds to smoke from a cigar.

'It was me who was smoking a cigar, and I started making figures with the smoke,' José Pérez said. 'But yes, his explanation is the most coherent and valid. I don't think UFOs will arrive in Valencia, because we never have electricity, water and there are always lines for gasoline.'

Another joked that the UFO arrived ahead of next month's presidential election to remove President Nicolás Maduro and his regime.

'It is a UFO hired to search for those who leave on July 28,' Alba Ferrero said.

Wilmer Palacios joked: 'Those from Valencia are the chose ones.'

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }