This is looking from the rear camera so looking west. More west of the sun is seen in the morning where the objects rise first. On the second day, planets are seen with the Nibiru. Continue reading
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
The event took place during the morning rush hour at about 8:45am local time in Bangkok, although the meteor did not make an audible sound as it struck the ground.
Continue reading
As far as the future of humanity goes, there are five areas that will shape us the most: the internet, sustainable energy, space exploration, artificial intelligence, and human genetic code manipulation.
Elon Musk, one of the greatest innovators of our time, has already helped shape three of those areas — he co-founded Paypal for online financial transactions, Tesla Motors has given us a future with automobiles that don’t require fossil fuels, and SpaceX is making leaps into affordable and efficient space exploration.
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
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.
“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
A paper in Physics Letters B has raised the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could make a discovery that would put its previous triumph with the Higgs Boson in the shade. The authors suggest it could detect mini black holes. Such a finding would be a matter of huge significance on its own, but might be an indication of even more important things. Continue reading
Leonard Nimoy’s death on Friday has inspired countless actors, politicians and ordinary people to pay tribute to the man behind Spock on “Star Trek.” Continue reading
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
(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.
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.
(CNET) -Isn’t it about time the White House had a distraction from the fiscal cliff (whatever that is)? How about the feasibility of building a real-world Death Star?
As of today, a petition calling for the government of the United States to begin construction on a Death Star by 2016 has more than 25,000 signatures on the administration’s official public suggestion page, surpassing the threshold that triggers a required response from the White House.
The petition hit the mark today, just a day before reaching its 30-day expiration date. Conveniently, petition creator “John D.” of Longmont, Colo., even provided some politician-friendly talking points to promote the idea:
By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense.
Indeed, and since it would take 800,000 years to produce the amount of steel needed for a Death Star, we won’t have to worry about unemployment rates for the next several epochs.
But despite all the common sense arguments in favor of building a moon-size mega-weapon, the petition is about as likely to gain political traction as some of the other popular suggestions on the White House site, which include allowing Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina to secede; impeaching the president; and deporting “everyone who signed a petition to withdraw their state from the United States of America.”
Wow, one of those might actually be even more awesome than the Death Star petition.
By M. Frank Drover
theintelhub.com
December 8, 2012
A pre-dawn fireball streaked across the Houston, Texas sky this morning and was seen as far north as Dallas, over 200 miles away.
It was so bright that the unidentified flying object was spotted by NASA’s meteor camera some 500 miles west of Houston in Mayhill, NM.
Concerned residents contacted local news stations to report what has been described as a “huge shooting star-like object.”
Local radio broadcasts immediately began receiving calls, many from people who were driving to work, with some asking whether the fireball in the sky could be a sign that the fabled Mayan Prophecy has begun.
The Maya were a mesoamerican civilization that are believed to have been one of the most advanced peoples to live in the Americas, having developed language, mathematics and astronomical systems.
The prophecy refers to December 21, 2012, which is believed by some to be the date the world will end – Doomsday.
Though disputed by most mainstream science, some historians and mathematicians have concluded that the date, calculated from the Mayan Calendar, will lead to massive changes on earth that may include floods, earthquakes, and solar events.
The scenario was popularized in the Hollywood blockbuster 2012.
Despite some panic, NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston insisted that this was not a sign of the coming destruction of the planet, but rather, just a rogue asteroid originating from the asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter (which incidentally is theorized to have been created when a large planet-size object met its Doomsday).
“It is a meteor, most likely a fragment from the asteroid belt and not associated with the Geminid meteor shower,” said NASA spokesman Bill Cooke.
Civilian reports:
NASA Camera captures fireball burst:
Contributed by M. Frank Drover of The Daily Sheeple.
M. Frank Drover is a co-editor and contributor for The Daily Sheeple, an alternative media hub for leading headlines, head lies, opinion, and commentary. Wake the flock up!
(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.
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.
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.
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.
