Tag Archives: NASA

Scientists Are Preparing To Drill Into The Site Of The Impact That Killed Off The Dinosaurs

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This month, in the Gulf of Mexico, a drilling site will be constructed. Typically, these sites are built for oil extraction, but this one is for a more valiant pursuit. Scientists plan to drill into the site, known as the Chicxulub crater, where 66 million years ago an asteroid impacted and killed off the dinosaurs and many other life forms on Earth. The goal is to discover rock cores that will potentially give insights into how life rebounded after such a devastating event. They believe the crater could have been a breeding ground for microbial life that then evolved into the life forms of today.  Continue reading →

NASA Admits There’s ‘A Chance’ That Asteroid 2013 TX68 Could Smash Into Earth

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NASA has dramatically changed its mind about the risks posed by asteroid 2013 TX68 , a 100ft-wide rock which is currently heading towards Earth. It said there was “a chance” it could plough into our planet next year when it makes another flyby. However, we are glad to report that NASA thinks the odds of a collision on September 28, 2017, are “no more than 1-in-250-million”. If it did hit the planet, the asteroid would probably explode in the atmosphere, unleashing as much energy as a powerful nuclear bomb and wiping out anything unlucky enough to be beneath it. “The possibilities of collision on any of the three future flyby dates are far too small to be of any real concern,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for near earth orbit studies . “I fully expect any future observations to reduce the probability even more.”  Continue reading →

Flat Earth Hoax: Began As a Ridiculous Farce to See How Gullible People Would Be

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Cosmic Convergence Research Group

CCRG Editor’s Note:
If ever the CIA and/or Tavistock Institute wanted to test out a new mind-control program, the Flat Earth Theory would be the perfect theme for the program.  As most know by now, the CIA has been running covert mind-control experiments on various segments of humanity for decades.  With the internet being a global platform, the opportunities for the intelligence agencies to advance their mind-control agenda, as well as test their techniques and technologies, have increased and intensified considerably.  Continue reading →

A Mysterious Object Will Sweep Past Earth In 2017 – Scientists Have No Idea What It Is

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A mysterious object will sweep past Earth in 2017 and Scientists have no idea what it isIs this an Alien probe? The mysterious object was spotted for the first time in 1991 by Astronomer James Scotti from the University of Arizona and is referred to as 1991 VG.

The mysterious object was spotted for the first time in 1991 by Astronomer James Scotti from the University of Arizona and is referred to as 1991 VG.  Continue reading →

How Can Anyone POSSIBLY Still Believe The Earth Is Flat?

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The Earth isn’t flat. This presumably doesn’t come as news to you, and why should it? Earth’s roughly spherical nature has been known about since the time of the Ancient Greeks. It’s bewildering, then, to see various “celebrities” declaring online that Earth is indeed flat, claiming that NASA has been keeping this secret from us for decades. So what exactly is going on here?  Continue reading →

Meet Planet Nine, The Newly Discovered Ninth Planet In Our Solar System

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There’s some debate over just how many planets our solar system has because Pluto never gets a break. But the argument is about to get a lot weirder with the announcement of a potential new planet circling the sun. Meet Planet Nine, the planet we didn’t know existed.  Continue reading →

Secret Files Hidden From The Public For Decades, Detailing Every UFO Account, Are Now Available To The Public

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A global effort has begun — Secret files hidden from the public for decades, Detailing every UFO account, are now available to the public. We are about to uncover The truth behind these classified documents. Find out what the government doesn’t want you to know. Exposing the biggest secret on planet earth. Join us as the secrets of alien technology are unsealed.
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Authentic Enlightenment Radio -Ep#103 - Return of Planet X -w/Guest Marshall Masters

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Authentic Enlightenment Radio is Tuesday and Thursday night at 9pm EST

Thursday June 4 @ 9:00pm EST – Ep#103 – The Return of Planet X with Guest Marshall Masters 

CLICK HERE FOR LIVE SHOW

Marshall Masters is a former CNN Science Features news producer, freelance writer, television analyst and the publisher of YOWUSA.COM. He spent three years researching Nibiru flyby-related topics including: catastrophic earth changes, crop circles, impact events and future technologies.

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Possible Planets Beyond Pluto… Is It Nibiru (Planet X)?

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According to new calculations by scientists in Spain and the UK, there could possibly be two planets beyond the planet Pluto. Recently the Authentic Enlightenment team interviewed researcher Bob Fletcher and from his studies he believes that this could be true, and could possibly be Nibiru (Planet X). Below you will find the entire interview, in which we found rather interesting to say the least. If Mr. Fletcher’s calculations are correct, Nibiru could start showing by the end of the year 2015. He also talks about underground cities being built from government black budgets along with seed banks and more.

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Powerful Before and After GIFs Show How Bad the California Drought Really Is

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(Mic)The largest agriculture-producing state in the country continues its battle with the worst drought it’s ever seen.

Conditions have gotten so bad that, on April 1, California Gov. Edmund G. Brown issued an executive order to prevent excessive or unnecessary water use. It’s an attempt to curtail any further drought-amplifying moves from Californians, both at the company and residential level.

“Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow. This historic drought demands unprecedented action,” said Brown, according to the governor’s press office. “Therefore, I’m issuing an executive order mandating substantial water reductions across our state. As Californians, we must pull together and save water in every way possible.”

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Flat Earth Theory And Why It’s Not Real

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“The Flat Earth model is an archaic belief that the Earth‘s shape is a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD) and China until the 17th century. It was also typically held in the aboriginal cultures of the Americas, and a flat Earth domed by the firmament in the shape of an inverted bowl is common in pre-scientific societies.” -Wikipedia Continue reading →

NASA Confirms: Salt Water Ocean On Jupiter’s Moon With More Water Than Earth

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The size of our universe is unfathomable, and it is equally difficult to contemplate the idea of things like multiple universes, parallel realities, multiple dimensions, and more. Scientists estimate that billions of Earth-like planets already exist, and that’s only in our galaxy. Think about all of the billions, if not trillions, of habitable worlds that exist within the billions, if not trillions of galaxies that are floating through space. Now contemplate the idea that not all worlds have to be “Earth-like” in order to harbour some form of extraterrestrial life – be it microbial or intelligent. Continue reading →

NASA Mars Orbiter Images May Show 1971 Soviet Lander

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Could This Be the Mars Soviet 3 Lander?

 

Hardware from a spacecraft that the Soviet Union landed on Mars in 1971 might appear in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

While following news about Mars and NASA’s Curiosity rover, Russian citizen enthusiasts found four features in a five-year-old image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that resemble four pieces of hardware from the Soviet Mars 3 mission: the parachute, heat shield, terminal retrorocket and lander. A follow-up image by the orbiter from last month shows the same features.

The Mars 3 lander transmitted for several seconds after landing on Dec. 2, 1971, the first spacecraft to survive a Mars landing long enough to transmit anything.

Images of the possible Mars 3 features, taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are available at http://uahirise.org/ESP_031036_1345 andhttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA16920 .

“Together, this set of features and their layout on the ground provide a remarkable match to what is expected from the Mars 3 landing, but alternative explanations for the features cannot be ruled out,” said HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Further analysis of the data and future images to better understand the three-dimensional shapes may help to confirm this interpretation.”

In 1971, the former Soviet Union launched the Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions to Mars. Each consisted of an orbiter plus a lander. Both orbiter missions succeeded, although the surface of Mars was obscured by a planet-encircling dust storm. The Mars 2 lander crashed. Mars 3 became the first successful soft landing on the Red Planet, but stopped transmitting after just 14.5 seconds for unknown reasons.

The predicted landing site was at latitude 45 degrees south, longitude 202 degrees east, in Ptolemaeus Crater. HiRISE acquired a large image at this location in November 2007. This image contains 1.8 billion pixels of data, so about 2,500 typical computer screens would be needed to view the entire image at full resolution. Promising candidates for the hardware from Mars 3 were found on Dec. 31, 2012.

Vitali Egorov from St. Petersburg, Russia, heads the largest Russian Internet community about Curiosity, athttp://vk.com/curiosity_live . His subscribers did the preliminary search for Mars 3 via crowdsourcing. Egorov modeled what Mars 3 hardware pieces should look like in a HiRISE image, and the group carefully searched the many small features in this large image, finding what appear to be viable candidates in the southern part of the scene. Each candidate has a size and shape consistent with the expected hardware, and they are arranged on the surface as expected from the entry, descent and landing sequence.

“I wanted to attract people’s attention to the fact that Mars exploration today is available to practically anyone,” Egorov said. “At the same time we were able to connect with the history of our country, which we were reminded of after many years through the images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.”

An advisor to the group, Alexander Basilevsky, of Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, Moscow, contacted McEwen suggesting a follow-up image. HiRISE acquired the follow-up on March 10, 2013. This image was targeted to cover some of the hardware candidates in color and to get a second look with different illumination angles. Meanwhile, Basilevsky and Erogov contacted Russian engineers and scientists who worked on Mars 3 for more information.

The candidate parachute is the most distinctive feature in the images. It is an especially bright spot for this region, about 8.2 yards (7.5 meters) in diameter. The parachute would have a diameter of 12 yards (11 meters) if fully spread out over the surface, so this is consistent. In the second HiRISE image, the parachute appears to have brightened over much of its surface, probably due to its better illumination over the sloping surface, but it is also possible that the parachute brightened in the intervening years because dust was removed.

The descent module, or retrorocket, was attached to the lander container by a chain, and the candidate feature has the right size and even shows a linear extension that could be a chain. Near the candidate descent module is a feature with the right size and shape to be the actual lander, with four open petals. The image of the candidate heat shield matches a shield-shaped object with the right size if partly buried.

Philip J. Stooke from the University of West Ontario, Canada, suggested the direction of search and offered helpful advice. Arnold Selivanov (one of the creators of Mars 3) and Vladimir Molodtsov (an engineer at NPO Lavochkin, Moscow) helped with access to data archives.

HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson. The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project and Curiosity are managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For more information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been studying Mars from orbit since 2006, visit http://www.nasa.gov/mro .

 

 

 

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-132&cid=release_2013-132

 

 

NASA knew Columbia crew would die but chose not to tell them

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Shuttle Columbia crew in 2003 via Wikipedia

 
 

(Raw Story) -A NASA flight director has revealed that personnel on the ground knew in 2003 that the Space Shuttle Columbia would not survive re-entry, but chose not to inform the vessel’s crew. According to an ABC News report from Thursday, when faced with the choice of letting the astronauts die trying to come home or leaving them to orbit until their air ran out, high-ranking NASA officials chose to let the Columbia crew die in ignorance of what was to befall them.

Wayne Hale, who became a Space Shuttle program manager in the years after the Columbia disaster, wrote on his blog Thursday about the meeting among ground personnel at Johnson Space Center as they grappled with the decision. Video of Columbia’s takeoff showed a briefcase-sized chunk of foam breaking off an engine and colliding with the shuttle’s wing, gouging a hole in the shield designed to protect the craft from the furious heat generated as it crossed from the vacuum of space into the atmosphere.

When it became clear that the orbiter was seriously damaged and likely wouldn’t survive re-entry, Flight Director Jon Harpold said to Hale and others at the meeting, “You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS (Thermal Protection System). If it has been damaged it’s probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don’t you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?”

 

On Feb. 3, 2003, engineers and managers watched helplessly as the vehicle broke up into a trail of fireballs in the upper atmosphere, killing all 7 astronauts on board. The crew was made up of five men and two women, David Brown, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, William McCool and Ilan Ramon.

The surviving children of the astronauts will take part in a commemorative ceremony to be held on the 10th anniversary of the accident on Friday.
Raw Story (http://s.tt/1zfxs)

Winter Solstice 2012: Meteor Shower Likely, 0% Chance Of Apocalypse

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(IBITimes) -December 21 might not have brought the apocalypse that some were expecting, but an important celestial event did occur around 6 am Eastern time: the winter solstice. People across the Northern Hemisphere can look forward to longer and longer days as we make the inexorable march towards spring.

Winter Solstice 2012: Meteor Shower Likely, 0% Chance Of Apocalypse
On Friday, the northern half of our planet is tilted as far away from the sun as it gets, and the sun appears to hang extremely low in the sky at noon.

The reason for the season is axial tilt. The Earth doesn’t spin around an axis that points straight up and down relative to its orbit; it rotates on a bit of an incline, with the North Pole pretty much constantly pointing towards the north star, Polaris. Axial tilt means that during certain parts of our orbit around the sun, the Northern Hemisphere is tipped more towards Earth than the Southern Hemisphere, making it summer for half the planet; then, in another part of the cycle, we’re tilted back away from the sun.

Winter solstice coincides with the longest night of the year.

“But that’s a good thing!” astronomer Phil Plait wrote for Slate on Friday. “Every day for the next six months, we’ll slowly round the Sun and have our axis point more toward it. The Sun will get higher, the days longer and warmer.”

As we progress towards the summer solstice, we’ll pass through the vernal equinox on March 20, the point in spring when day and night will be about the same length.

Throughout human history, the winter solstice has been a time of celebration and significance, especially for agricultural communities more at the mercy of nature. Stonehenge, for instance, appears to have been constructed in part to observe celestial events like the summer and winter solstices.

The solstice also brings the peak of the Ursid meteor shower, which happens as Earth passes through the stream of debris left by Tuttle’s Comet. The Ursids, which appear to radiate from the constellation Ursa Minor, aren’t show-stoppers like the recent and much more active Geminids, and it’ll be harder to see them thanks to the waxing moon.

December 21 also marks another special celestial event, as the sun appears to get close to Sagittarius A*, the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Despite what some conspiracy theorists might say on YouTube, the sun isn’t going to align perfectly with the center of the galaxy.

“The winter solstice Sun does not get closer than 3 degrees to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy,” the California-based Griffith Observatory says. “This is equal to six full moons [from our perspective], a very large discrepancy, even for the unaided eye.”

Some doomsday seers and profiteers have stoked fears that a so-called Galactic Alignment means Earth will be sucked into some kind of catastrophe, but since the alignment happens every year, there’s no reason to expect 2012 will be any more eventful than the last few millenia.

“Enjoy the solstice, by all means, and don’t let the Dark Rift, alignments, solar flares, magnetic field reversals, potential impacts or alleged Maya end-of-the-world predictions get in the way,” NASA says.

Curiosity Rover Finds Organic Signal on Mars, But Not Definitive: NASA

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(Space.com) NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has discovered complex chemistry on the Red Planet, as well as hints of long-sought organic compounds that could aid primitive life, scientists announced today (Dec. 3).

The Curiosity rover found evidence of chlorine, sulfur and water in Mars dirt studied by its onboard laboratory, as well as organic compounds (chemicals containing carbon) inside its Sample Analysis at Mars instrument. However, the science team can’t yet be sure whether these compounds truly come from Mars, or arise from contamination transported to the Red Planet onboard Curiosity.

“SAM has no definitive detection to report of organic compounds,” Paul Mahaffy, SAM principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said during a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

“Even though [Mahaffy’s] instrument detected organic compounds, first of all we have to determine whether they’re indigenous to Mars,” said John Grotzinger, Curiosity’s project scientist. [Organic Compounds On Mars - Did Curiosity Bring it? | Video]

The announcement came after recent rumors — which NASA attempted to dampen last week — that Curiosity had made a huge discovery on Mars.

Curiosity's 'Rocknest' Workplace
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover documented itself in the context of its work site, an area called “Rocknest Wind Drift,” on the 84th Martian day, or sol, of its mission (Oct. 31, 2012). Image released Dec. 3, 2012.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The observation by Curiosity involved perchlorate, a reactive compound of oxygen and chlorine that had previously been found in the Martian arctic by NASA’s Phoenix lander.

Curiosity’s SAM instrument uses a tiny oven to cook Mars dirt samples, then study the gases they give off to determine their chemical makeup. Martian soil samples are placed in the device by a scoop on Curiosity’s robotic arm.

When Curiosity cooked the perchlorate in its SAM oven, it created chlorinated methane compounds, one-carbon organic material.

“The chlorine is of Martian orgin, but it’s possible the carbon may be of Earth origin, carried by Curiosity and detected by SAM’s high sensitivity design,” NASA officials wrote in a statement.

 

 

The new findings by Curiosity came during the rover’s study of a patch of windblown Martian dust and sand called “Rocknest.” It is a flat stretch of Mars terrain that is still miles away from Curiosity’s first destination, rock outcrop called Glenelg at the base of the 3-mile (5 kilometers) Mount Sharp that rises from the center of the rover’s landing site — the vast Gale Crater.

While scientists puzzle out the validity of Curiosity’s SAM signals, the rover’s other instruments have made curious discoveries, as well, mission scientists said.

Curiosity’s arm-mounted tools have confirmed that the Martian soil at the Rocknest site is similar in chemical composition and appearance to the dirt seen by NASA’s three other rovers: the small Pathfinder, and golf cart-size Spirt and Opportunity rovers.

Windblown Sand from the 'Rocknest' Drift

The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired close-up views of sands in the “Rocknest” wind drift to document the nature of the material that the rover scooped, sieved and delivered to the Chemistry and Mineralogy Experiment (CheMin) and the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) in October and November 2012. Image released Dec. 3, 2012.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Photos from the rover’s Mars hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, revealed that the sand drifts at Rocknest have a crusty surface that hides even darker, finer sand below.

“Active drifts on Mars look darker on the surface,” MAHLI principal investigator Ken Edgett of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego said in a statement.”This is an older drift that has had time to be inactive, letting the crust form and dust accumulate on it.”

Meanwhile, Curiosity’s Chemical and Mineralogy detector, called CheMin, found that the terrain around Rocknest is a mix of volcanic and glassy, non-crystalline materials. While the rover found more evidence of water than expected, some water molecules bound to bits of sand were anticipated, scientists said.

The car-size Mars rover Curiosity landed on the Red Planet in early August. The $2.5 billion robot is the largest rover ever sent to another planet and is expected to spend at least two years exploring Gale Crater to determine if the region could have ever supported microbial life.

Will a Secret Private Manned Mission to the Moon Be Announced This Week?

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Is this happening again? Image: NASA

(Wired.com) Internet rumors have been swirling for several weeks of a secret venture backed by private entrepreneurs that would return people to the moon’s surface. It seems that the veil will finally be lifted this week, during a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 6.

“The Golden Spike Company invites you to attend a game-changing announcement about the future of commercial human space travel to the Moon,” reads the announcement for the media briefing. ”Executives from the company will describe the team, the mission architecture, and the business model.”

Many questions remain about the prospects for such a mission, including its feasibility, rationale, and how the company intends to fund the endeavor, which will likely run to billions of dollars. Early rumors suggested that backers included Warren Buffet and Richard Branson, though these have since been shown false. The plan may also include a $120 million deal with SpaceX to provide a heavy rocket to reach the moon. SpaceX had no statement about such a deal when Wired reached out to them on Dec. 2.

The Golden Spike Company is registered in Colorado to planetary scientist and aerospace engineer Alan Stern, who ran NASA’s science directorate from 2007 to 2008. Stern also worked in the private spaceflight sector that year, as an independent research representative for Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. In a 2011 interview he said, “I hope that in 10 to 20 years’ time, we are on the hills of human return to the moon, so that we could then go on with humans to explore the solar system. I think this is our destiny.”

Golden Spike is a reference to the ceremonial spike driven into the rails connecting the U.S. transcontinental railroad in 1869, which helped open up the American West. The company has recently started both a Facebook group and Twitter account.

The company has apparently been around for a while. A conference presentation from May mentioned a company called Golden Spike that was “backed by respected scientific and astronautical entities” and “envisions the development of a reliable ‘Cislunar Superhighway.’” That same presentation mentioned a “cooperative initiative coalescing between independent, national and international enterprises [that] could see 2 to 4 people on the surface for 1 to 4 weeks at an estimated cost of US$5-10 billion.” Whether this plan is the same as Golden Spike’s is unclear.