NASA looks into sending astronauts on a trip beyond the moon as early as 2019

NASA and its commercial partners say they’re studying the possibility of sending astronauts beyond the moon years earlier than planned, by putting a crew on the first flight of the space agency’s heavy-lift Space Launch System.

The NASA study, sparked in part by a desire for the Trump administration to do something dramatic in space during its first term, would consider whether such a flight could occur in 2019 or 2020.

The current plan calls for an uncrewed test flight of the SLS and NASA’s Orion capsule in late 2018, known as Exploration Mission-1 or EM-1. That mission would followed by a crewed test flight called EM-2 in the 2021-2023 time frame.

In a statement, NASA said acting administrator Robert Lightfoot asked Bill Gerstenmaier, the agency’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, to assess whether the first crew could ride on EM-1 instead of EM-2.

“The study will examine the opportunities it could present to accelerate the effort of the first crewed flight and what it would take to accomplish that first step of pushing humans farther into space,” NASA said.

Gerstenmaier discussed the study with NASA’s commercial Orion/SLS partners at a conference today in Washington, D.C. NASA representatives declined to specify how long the study would take, but some of the reports that emerged after Gerstenmaier’s talk suggested a 30-day time frame.

Boeing, Lockheed Martin on board

EM-1’s current mission plan calls for sending the Orion capsule on a trajectory beyond the moon, most likely into lunar orbit, and then back to Earth. No lunar landing would be attempted. The trip would be similar to Apollo 8’s “Earthrise” mission in 1968. The current plan calls for EM-2 to go beyond the moon as well.

The revised plan would force NASA and its partners to ensure that EM-1 had all the safety and life support features required for human spaceflight. That’s why EM-1 would have to fly somewhat later that currently planned.

The crewed Orion/SLS flight would mark the first trip for humans beyond Earth orbit since NASA’s last Apollo moon mission in 1972. There’s another historical angle if the round-the-moon flight were to take place in 2019, in that it would come during the golden anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin, NASA’s two main commercial partners in the multibillion-dollar Orion/SLS program, both said they’d look into accelerating their schedules. Boeing is the prime contractor for the SLS rocket, while Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the Orion crew capsule.

“The possibility of NASA accelerating the timeline to put humans into the vicinity of the moon and onto Mars is exciting,” Boeing spokeswoman Kelly Kaplan said in an email. “Safety of the crew is most important, so of course there will be many factors we will consider as we assess the feasibility of adding crew to EM-1. We applaud NASA’s bold path forward in this transition time, and we’re proud to be a part of the journey to Mars.”

Lockheed Martin is also on board with the study, said Allison Miller, a spokeswoman for the company’s Orion program. “We’ll look at accelerating remaining crew system designs, as well as potential technical and schedule challenges and how to mitigate them,” she said in an email.

Trump’s space strategy

Word of the potential schedule shift comes after weeks of speculation over how President Donald Trump and his advisers might change the focus of the nation’s space program.

Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, had initially set NASA’s sights on sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid in the mid-2020s, followed by trips to Mars and its moons in the 2030s.

Those plans have morphed over the years, and at the same time, billionaire-backed commercial ventures such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have upped the ante. Last fall, Musk unveiled plans to send settlers to Mars in the 2020s, and Blue Origin executives said their long-term vision for spaceflight included trips to the moon and Mars as well.

Some of Trump’s advisers reportedly pressed for an accelerated campaign to send astronauts on trips around the moon, and put commercial robotic landers on the moon’s surface, by 2020. One scenario even called for an “internal competition” between NASA’s traditional industrial partners and more recent market entrants such as SpaceX and Blue Origin.

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who advised Trump during the presidential campaign, told Politico last week that “a good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space.”

NASA’s Lightfoot addressed the debate in a memo he sent to the space agency’s employees today.

“There has been a lot of speculation in the public discourse about NASA being pulled in two directions – what has come before and what we want to do now,” he said in the memo, as reported by NASA Watch. “At NASA, this is an ‘and’ proposition, not an ‘or.’ … We must work with everyone to secure our leadership in space – and we will.”

Trump hasn’t yet nominated an administrator for NASA. Lightfoot is serving in a caretaker role – but he is regarded as one of the prospects for the official appointment, along with U.S. Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla.

Speeding up the schedule for sending astronauts beyond Earth orbit carries significant risks. It would be highly unusual for humans to get on board for the first test launch of a new type of rocket. Contractors would have to shorten their time frame for testing the hardware needed for crewed flight, ranging from launch abort systems to life support systems.

Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee who now runs the independent NASA Watch website, said in a posting that the schedule speed-up looked like a “Hail Mary pass” for the expensive SLS program.

“To move this rather important milestone up now in the midst of dueling and ever-shifting policy directions – for no clearly articulated reason other than politics – starts to smell like launch fever to me,” he wrote.

Source www.geekwire.com

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

07-07-2017 om 00:37 geschreven door peter  

SpaceX to send two people around the moon who paid for a 2018 private mission

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, revealed on Monday that two people have paid for a private mission around the moon, tentatively set for launch in 2018 with the private company’s yet untested Falcon Heavy rocket.

In a conference call with reporters, Musk declined to name the people or what they had paid, though he said the individuals know each other and are “very serious” about the flight. The “private citizens” approached the company late last year and will receive training and take health and fitness tests as early as this year.

Musk said the circumlunar journey would take about a week, nearing the moon’s surface without landing on it before its return to Earth. The total flight would go about 300,000 to 400,000 miles into space, he said, meaning the flight could take humans farther from Earth than ever before.

If SpaceX accomplishes the trip before Nasa or another space agency can send astronauts to the moon, it would be the first lunar mission with humans in 45 years, on a course that would extend past the record 249,000 miles traveled by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970.

SpaceX said in a statement that the would-be passengers “have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission”, and Musk called the cost “comparable” to that of sending astronauts to the International Space Station. Nasa currently pays Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, about $70m a person to fly astronauts to the ISS.

“Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow,” the company statement read. “Additional information will be released about the flight teams, contingent upon their approval and confirmation of the health and fitness test results.”

The flight would rely on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the massive engine that the company hopes to test for the first time this summer, and a Dragon 2 capsule. Musk said that the capsule had a “quite high” success rate for missions so far.

The passengers were “nobody from Hollywood”, Musk said.

He acknowledged that the flight would be dangerous but said the customers have “their eyes open” about what could happen. “We’re doing everything we can to minimize that risk, but it’s not zero,” Musk said.

“We would expect to do more than one mission of this nature,” he added.

While Nasa has contracted SpaceX to launch crewed missions to the International Space Station, the company has not yet flown any missions with humans. Musk said the space agency would receive priority if it decided to do another lunar mission first, and that the private trip would need a license from the Federal Aviation Administration. Nasa’s acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, has said that the agency is reviewing a possible return to the moon or a flight into deep space beyond it.

The company will test its Crew Dragon spacecraft without humans on board later this mission and is scheduled to fly a crewed mission to the space station in 2018.

In its 15-year history, SpaceX and its founder have accrued a steady record of ambitious goals and blown deadlines. In 2011, Musk said that SpaceX would “be ready to fly its first manned mission in 2014”. That same year, he told the Wall Street Journal that he hoped to take humans to Mars by 2021 in a “best case” scenario, an estimate that he pushed back to 2024 last year. And though SpaceX has launched and landed eight reusable rockets, it has also suffered setbacks of failed landings and last year’s launchpad explosion that destroyed the expensive rocket and its satellite payload.

Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office warned of safety concerns in a review of SpaceX’s rockets and plans, suggesting that there are more delays ahead. The report noted that both SpaceX and another private contractor, United Launch Alliance, have consistently failed to meet deadlines.

Musk remained optimistic on the call, saying, “Next year is going to be the big year for carrying people.”

In a statement, Nasa said it “commends its industry partners for reaching higher”.

“We will work closely with SpaceX to ensure it safely meets the contractual obligations to return the launch of astronauts to US soil and continue to successfully deliver supplies to the International Space Station,” the agency said.

The company currently flies cargo missions to the ISS in a Dragon capsule, and successfully launched and landed its eighth reusable Falcon 9 rocket, part of a fleet that Musk hopes will help usher in an era of easier, relatively cheap space travel.

In its statement, SpaceX said that Nasa has encouraged privately crewed missions, saying that through them “long-term costs to the government decline and more flight reliability history is gained, benefiting both government and private missions”.

Only after crewed missions have begun for Nasa, SpaceX said, will the company launch its mission around the moon, from the Cape Canaveral launchpad used by the Apollo program. “This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them,” the company said.

Rival spaceflight company Blue Origins, headed by the Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, has also announced plans to eventually take people and cargo to low Earth orbit with its own reusable rockets. In 2001, billionaire Dennis Tito became the world’s first space tourist for an estimated $20m, booking a trip on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, and about half a dozen others followed him into orbit.

Source www.theguardian.com

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

07-07-2017 om 00:29 geschreven door peter  

UFO shot down by Military before they were attacked and killed by the surviving aliens!!

{ http://www.awdnews.com/ }

07-07-2017 om 00:13 geschreven door peter  

Mars More Toxic to Life Than Previously Thought

Mount Sharp on Mars, as imaged by the Curiosity rover. 

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

Life on Mars … does it exist? Depending on when you last checked in with news about the Red Planet, you could probably be convinced either way. As we discover more and more about the composition and planetary dynamics of Mars, there has been cause for both elation and disappointment regarding the likelihood that organic life could manage to eke out a living on the planet.

The pendulum swung back toward the “no” side today with the release of a study examining how a special kind of salt on Mars interacts with ultraviolet radiation there. Martian soil is laced with perchlorates, an ion composed of one chlorine and four oxygen atoms, and which binds to a number of different elements to form various compounds. It’s classified as a salt, and was initially cause for celebration among extraterrestrial hopefuls because it drastically lowers the freezing point of water, meaning that liquid H20 might conceivably exist on the surface. It can also be used to produce rocket fuel and oxygen, another plus for future settlers.

Salt of the Mars

It turns out that these perchlorates are actually highly toxic to life when bathed in UV radiation that pummels Mars. Researchers from the United Kingdom Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh exposed a strain of bacteria commonly found on spacecraft to levels of perchlorates and UV light found on the Red Planet and found that nearly all of them were dead within a minute. They tried this with several different kinds of perchlorate, and found similar results every time. Adding in additional environmental factors found on Mars like low temperatures, additional minerals found on Mars and a lack of oxygen also failed to keep the bacteria alive.

This was a bit surprising for the researchers because the strain of bacteria used, Bacillus subtilis, belongs to a genus that actually does fine in the presence of perchlorates, as studies of the microbes in terrestrial environments have confirmed. These findings were initially good news for researchers looking for extraterrestrial life, as they suggested that some forms of life could survive in Martian analogue conditions.

It Takes More Than Salt

There’s more to Mars than just the soil though, and when the Edinburgh researchers added in a few more Mars-like factors — UV specifically — the bacteria died in short order. They think this happens because the UV light breaks apart the perchlorate molecules into more reactive ions that wreak havoc on living cells. This hypothesis was backed up by the observation that low temperatures, which slow down chemical reactions, extended the lifespan of the bacteria in the perchlorates but still resulted in them dying. If they can’t survive there, it significantly lowers our chances of finding life on Mars — life that looks similar to organisms on Earth at least. The researchers published their findings Thursday in Nature Scientific Reports.

While it’s a blow to the possibility of finding life on Mars, there is at least one upside to the news: NASA regularly worries about the possibility of contaminating other planets with Earthly bacteria, even going so far as to crash probes into Saturn so that they don’t hit the planet’s moons. If Mars is so hostile to bacteria that they can’t even make it a minute on the surface, our fears of contamination could be pretty much resolved.

{http://discovermagazine.com/ }

06-07-2017 om 23:59 geschreven door peter  

What was this UFO above Gloucester?

What on Earth is it?

BY TOM GIBBON, BEN FALCONER

Just what on Earth - or perhaps Mars or Jupiter - is this?

This apparently intergalactic lightshow was filmed above Gloucester.

The mysterious orb was first spotted by Rob Wheatman in Elmbridge in March and he had a powerful enough camera to zoom right in on it.

Rob said: "I saw it as a sparkling 'star' from the garden in Elmbridge, due south. What alerted me was an orange light that came from it and travelled at speed north east.

"I grabbed my video and luckily it has a 40x zoom and that's when I got the images of the bizarre light you saw."

Another video was taken showing a 'UFO' in the skies above Gloucestershire at around the same time.

It was taken by Ryan Gribbon in Hucclecote.

It is the second video showing strange lights in the sky above the city.

We don't know what the lights are, but we are sure you, our readers, have a lot of suggestions.

You can let us know at citizen.news@glosmedia.co.uk

{ http://www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/ }

06-07-2017 om 23:54 geschreven door peter  

Second UFO sighting reported over the Sooke Basin

Sooke resident Ethan Dunn spots a shiny flying object in the sky

Another UFO sighting has been reported in Sooke.

Ethan Dunn, 10, spotted the unfamiliar object from his house floating high in the sky over the Sooke Basin while he was eating dinner last week.

Taken on the morning of June 4 by a resident in Hope of a “strange blurry object.” (ufosnw.com)

“It almost looked like a dinner plate,” Dunn said. “It was shiny and silver and flying much higher than a plane would go.”

Two weeks ago Sooke resident Ann Talbot reported a similar object near the same location.

“I didn’t know what it could be, it was interesting. I didn’t think it was a meteorite, because it would have had a trail. I couldn’t hear a thing, no buzzing, no whooshing sound, nothing,” Talbot said.

Talbot also described the UFO to be bright and perfectly round. Both Sooke residents said the object floated higher than a drone would be able to, and moved faster than a plane could cross the sky.

“I saw it and wondered if it correlates to what other people had seen,” Dunn said. “It looked much larger than a drone so I don’t think it could have been that.”

He described the UFO to be “fairly large” but found it hard to compare to anything because it was too far away.

Dunn said the object stayed in sight for around 10 seconds before he lost sight of it.

“It was like it vanished into thin air,” he said. “One second it was there and the next it had disappeared.”

One thing’s certain, whatever the objects may have been, they weren’t military, said Greg Menzies, a media spokesperson at CFB Esquimalt.

“We have no drones flying around, and we don’t participate in exercises in the Sooke Basin.”

{ http://www.sookenewsmirror.com/ }

06-07-2017 om 23:44 geschreven door peter  

15,000 UFO ENTHUSIASTS SPACE OUT HARD IN ROSWELL

ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO, is a fine city that boasts a small museum, a picturesque state park, a gorgeous wildlife refuge, and all kinds of shopping. Not that it mattered to the 15,000 or so people who visited last weekend. All they cared about were aliens.

It's been that way since 1947, when a rancher named William Brazel stumbled upon some strange debris in the desert 30 miles north of town. The US Army Air Force declared it the wreckage of a flying saucer, but upon closer inspection said, no, wait, it's a weather balloon.

Too late. The legend was born. For 70 years now, people have believed ET landed in this corner of southeastern New Mexico. That's prompted no end of conspiracy theories and outlandish stories, not to mention a thriving business in UFO-themed gift shops, museums, and restaurants.

And, of course, the four-day UFO festival. True believers came from as far away as Vermont for last weekend's 22nd annual extraterrestrial extravaganza, and WIRED sent Angie Smith to take it all in. “Everywhere you looked you saw neon green,” she says.

Alien aficionados roamed Main Street, gobbling delectable desserts called Martian turds, buying kitschy alien eggs and other mementoes, and generally getting more than a little out there. A woman decked out in glittery blue paint with pipe cleaner "antennae" in her hair told Smith she attended the festival to “lift everyone’s vibrations.”

The truly inquisitive listened to experts hold forth during panels addressing topics like “Are Aliens Demons? Evidences That Suggest ‘Yes’” and "Why Defending UFOs with the Bible is a Bad Idea.” Afterward they lined up for pictures with UFOlogists like Travis Walton, who claims he spent five days with aliens in 1975, an experience that inspired the 1993 film Fire in the Sky (call him weird, but more than half of all Americans believe in aliens).

You don't have to believe in aliens to appreciate the playful, bizarre spirit of the event captured in Smith’s photos. “It’s fun and fascinating," she says, "whether or not you believe in it." Should aliens ever truly land in Roswell, they'll have a lot to live up to.

Tourists snap a selfie in front os a UFO sculpture just outside Roswell, New Mexico  

Angie Smith for WIRED

An attendee poses for a portret with Travis Walton, who claims to be abducted bybAliens in 1975. 

Angie Smith for WIRED

{ https://www.wired.com/ }

06-07-2017 om 23:38 geschreven door peter  

5 Intriguing Documentaries about Aliens

James Fox is back, and this time he brought an army (or air force). The maker of Out of the Blue, who incorporated some of that documentary into this one, organized a 2007 forum at the National Press Club, bringing in government and military officials from several countries to offer personal testimony supporting the theory of alien life and high-level coverups. Their accounts, which form the bulk of this film, are left to stand on their own merits—or, more accurately, on the merits of the speakers’ credibility. That said, some are pretty far out, but they’re worth a listen for entertainment value alone. —Allison Gorman

4. The Day Before Disclosure (2010)

The Day Before Disclosure puts forth the idea that decades of flying saucer sightings by pilots, military personnel and ordinary citizens, plus supposed evidence of alien life on Earth going back thousands of years or more, are finally coming to a head. Through video footage of UFOs and interviews with eyewitnesses, including some who claim to have been abducted by aliens, Norwegian filmmaker Terje Toftenes asserts that the U.S. and other governments have been suppressing what they know about extraterrestrials—but with much of that information now publically available, their secret won’t be safe for long. —Allison Gorman

5. Mirage Men (2013)

A British documentary based on Mark Pilkington’s book by the same name, Mirage Men takes the standard conspiracy theory about extraterrestrials and doubles it back on itself. Rather than asserting that the government has been trying to cover up evidence of alien life, it sets out to prove that the U.S. Air force and intelligence services have been pushing ET/UFO mythology—“weapons of mass deception”—to make believers look crazy, and to deflect attention from its own high-tech doings. Maybe it’s all hooey, but in our new world of alternative facts, this four-year-old film suddenly seems rather timely. —Allison Gorman

{https://www.pastemagazine.com/ }

06-07-2017 om 21:41 geschreven door peter  

5 Movie Aliens That Probably Inspired Prey's Monsters

Prey and the Pantheon of Sci-Fi Monsters

06-07-2017 om 21:25 geschreven door peter  

The "Niagara Falls Of Mars" Were Made Of Lava Not Water

Those long streaks are actually "frozen waterfalls of lava streaming into a crater.

NASA

Hawaii’s Kilauea is the most active volcano in the world. Erupting continuously since 1983, it has created a cornucopia of beautiful alien features, from overflowing lava lakes and waterfalls to anastomosing rivers of lava at the surface and the dragon-like lava tubes snaking through the ground beneath them.

Once upon a time, Mars was a lot like Kilauea – a volcanic landscape with a grand mosaic of strange hellish features. Now, thanks to a new series of NASA images, scientists think that they’ve spotted some ancient lava waterfalls draped across the surface of the Red Planet.

Unlike Kilauea, Mars is no longer volcanically active, so these waterfalls aren’t fresh ones. Rather, they’re frozen monuments to an age of fire long past – and they’re huge.

Snapped by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), these lava drapes are spread out across the rims of a volcanic crater 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) across. So how did they form?

This crater, found in the once highly active Tharsis region, initially looks like it could have contained a lava lake similar to the one at the heart of Kilauea: a bubbling mass of molten rock that is continually churning, listing, rising, and falling.

When the hotspot beneath lava lakes manages to melt more of the upper crust than usual, the lava lake sometimes rises up to such a height that it overflows and cascades down the crater rim. This can be seen on a semi-regular basis on Hawaii, and perhaps the same phenomenon happened on Mars.

However, in this case, the lava is doing something weird. It’s actually coming from outside the crater and surrounding it. At some point, the lava flow was so extensive that it ran up the crater slopes and cascaded down into it.

As the lava breached the crater rim, it encountered a series of rocky “steps” created by previous periodic eruptive episodes. This meant that the lava flow you can see here essentially moved down a volcanic staircase, a bit like pouring fresh glaze over a multi-tiered cake. Its extent has earned this aesthetically pleasing feature a new moniker by NASA – the “Niagara Falls of Mars”.

Although active for billions of years, the heat sources at the heart of Mars – its primordial heat left over from its formation and the heat released by radioactive elements – were extinguished, and these huge lava flows were no more. It’s a shame, really, because Mars once had some seriously cool volcanoes.

Its lack of plate tectonics meant that its gigantic hotspots produced the most massive volcanoes in the Solar System, and there was once an eruption so extensive that it caused the planet to tip over on its axis by 20°.

{ http://www.iflscience.com/ }

06-07-2017 om 20:48 geschreven door peter  

Strange 'dome' and 'pyramid' spotted on Mars, say alien hunters

The 'dome' and 'pyramid' features on the surface of Mars (Google Earth/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, G. Neukum)

{ http://www.foxnews.com/index.html }

06-07-2017 om 20:32 geschreven door peter  

Have alien-hunters discovered an ancient pyramid on Mars? Anomalies spotted on red planet

A YouTube user known as ArtAlienTV posted a video online showing what he called "anomalies" on NASA satellite images of the surface of the planet.

BY RACHEL O'DONOGHUE

Alien-hunters claim they have found what appears to be a pyramid and bizarre dome structure on Mars.

A YouTube user known as ArtAlienTV posted a video online showing what he called "anomalies" on NASA satellite images of the surface of the planet.

Explaining the dome, the conspiracist claims they look "artificial" and says he has not enhanced the images in an way.

"We have a clear 50 foot dome or sphere in a Mars Crater with large pipes coming out of it on the left. Also, a triangular pyramid shaped structure about 500 feet away from it that is 120 ft wide," he wrote.

According to ArtAlienTV, the find was made by fellow alien-hunter William Benton.

He added: "These features look artificial in nature and are clearly visible on Google Mars with no enhancements.

"The structures are between the Mawrth Vallis region and Oyama Crater in an area that was short listed for a Mars Rover to explore for possible signs of life before Gale Crater was eventually chosen.

"It is not hard to find."

But claims by so-called "truth-seekers" searching for evidence of extraterrestrials on Mars is nothing new.

In March, netizens scouring pictures from NASA's Curiosity rover uncovered what they claimed were "alien bones".

The rover is currently exploring the rocky surface of the distant planet and makes all its images free to view in the public domain.

A pair of shots caught the interest of the alien-hunting community after appearing to show decaying bones lying in Mars' red dust.

Although NASA has growing ambitions to visit the red planet in the near future, it is certain there is no longer any intelligent life left on the planet.

{ http://www.mirror.co.uk/ }

06-07-2017 om 20:25 geschreven door peter  

RED ALERT! High-speed alien fugitives are invading our Milky Way

Turbo-charged solar runaways escape home galaxies, scream through our cosmic backwater

By Katyanna Quach 

Artist's impression of runaway stars

(Image credit: Amanda Smith, Institute of Astronomy)

Rare hypervelocity stars tearing through the Milky Way galaxy are runaway suns that have escaped neighbouring galaxies, according to research presented at this year’s National Astronomy Meeting in Hull, England.

Hypervelocity stars are travelling between 300 and 700 kilometers (186 and 435 miles) per second faster than our galaxy’s escape velocity. Only 20 cases have been confirmed so far, most of them late B‑type stars that are larger than our sun.

There has been some debate around the origin of these breakaway stars. Scientists believed a portion of them might have been lobbed from the Milky Way’s central rotational center.

But a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in March makes the argument that all the hypervelocity stars are actually foreign objects. The research was presented at the National Astronomy Meeting in Hull on Wednesday.

The idea is that these ultra-fast stars were part of a binary system and escaped their original home – the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) – a neighbouring satellite galaxy. A supernova explosion made the orbit between both stars unstable, and the schism caused the smaller one to be booted far away like a ball in a slingshot.

A group of researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK dug into data taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to build computer simulations of runaway stars escaping from the LMC to the Milky Way.

They started by modelling the stellar evolution of the birth and death of stars in the LMC over the past two billion years, and focused on every runaway star. The gravitational interactions between these stars were also simulated so that they could reproduce and track the trajectory of the stars. They predict that there are 10,000 runaway stars spread across the sky.

There should also be about a million runaway neutron stars or black holes, since some of the massive blue stars reach the end of their lives on their way out of the LMC. They should collapse to neutron stars or black holes that continue zipping through the Milky Way.

Only half of the simulated stars that escape the LMC are fast enough to escape the gravity of the Milky Way, making them hypervelocity stars. If the confirmed hypervelocity stars are runaways, it would also explain their position in the sky.

'Hypervelocity stars did not satisfy me'

“Earlier explanations for the origin of hypervelocity stars did not satisfy me,” said Douglas Boubert, lead author of the paper and a PhD student at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy.

“The hypervelocity stars are mostly found in the Leo and Sextans constellations – we wondered why that is the case.”

The closer stars in a binary system are, the faster they orbit one another, and they’re more likely to reach speeds fast enough to become hypervelocity stars. Runaway stars starting out in the Milky Way are too slow to become hypervelocity stars because the blue B‑type stars can’t orbit close enough to their companion star in the binary system without merging, the researchers argue.

But fast-moving galaxies like the LMC could give rise to these swift stars. The LMC also has 10 per cent of the mass of the Milky Way, so the fastest runaways can easily escape the galaxy’s pull.

Like a bullet fired from a moving train, the speed of these escaping stars would be the velocity they were booted at plus the velocity of the LMC. This boost increases the likelihood that these stars become hypervelocity ones when they stream through the Milky Way.

“These stars have just jumped from an express train – no wonder they’re fast,” said Rob Izzard, co‑author of the paper and a Rutherford fellow at the Institute of Astronomy. “This also explains their position in the sky, because the fastest runaways are ejected along the orbit of the LMC towards the constellations of Leo and Sextans.”

“We’ll know soon enough whether we’re right,” said Boubert. “The European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite will report data on billions of stars next year, and there should be a trail of hypervelocity stars across the sky between the Leo and Sextans constellations in the North and the LMC in the South.”

Another independent group of researchers are also hoping to study hypervelocity stars by trying to find more specimens through data with the help of artificial neural networks. ®

{ https://www.theregister.co.uk/ }

06-07-2017 om 20:13 geschreven door peter  

Close Encounters: Why UFOs Are Having a Moment

A new biography on scientist Dr. J. Allen Hynek shows that we might be on the verge of another cluster of UFO sighting reports

A new biography on Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a scientist who became convinced that we truly could not identify some objects in our skies, opens up new questions about UFOs. Everett

By Annaliese Griffin

When the unassuming turn of phrase "unidentified flying object" was coined in the 1940s, it was intended to suggest that the objects in question were nothing more mysterious than a rogue weather balloon or an unfamiliar aircraft. UFOs have since become synonymous with aliens, from cartoon flying saucers, to abduction stories, to X-Files-style conspiracy theories – in the popular imagination their mystery has been solved, UFOs equal aliens, whether you're a true believer or not. This unshakable association came to be despite the diligent work Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a scientist who became convinced that we truly could not identify some objects in our skies, and kept pushing throughout his life for a scientific explanation, while keeping open every possibility, some of them way further out there than little green men.

Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs, a new book by Mark O'Connell, serves as a biography for both the modern UFO phenomenon and for Hynek, an astronomer and professor at Northwestern University who died over 30 years ago, but whose ideas make him one of the most surprising scientific figures of the 20th century. The book reveals an academic committed to rigorous, methodical study, but whose deep intellectual curiosity also harbored a mystical side, intrigued by Rudolf Steiner's concept of "supersensible knowledge" and the idea of a universe composed of many dimensions. By the time of his death in 1986, he was much more interested in the idea that UFOs might be evidence of interdimensional overlap or proof of a Jungian collective conscience, than the comparatively quotidian concept that they are vehicles carrying visitors from faraway planets.

Hynek's struggle to properly inform the public through a dedication to the scientific method, while also embracing the very edges of what is possible strikes a chord today, in an era rife with deep mistrust of the government and of mainstream science. Conspiracy theories have moved from the fringe since we stopped agreeing on what constitutes a basic scientific fact, and there are more than a few big ones involving the coming alien takeover and of course, NASA, which sits at the intersection of science, government and outer space.

Just last week a NASA spokesperson told The Daily Beast, in all seriousness, that the agency does not have child slaves laboring on Mars, in response to an InfoWars segment claiming otherwise. The Disclosure movement believes that governments around the world have already been in contact with alien intelligence and have suppressed this information from the public, and no, Trump would not be tweeting about it because the President is kept out of the loop in this scenario, says O'Connell. This is deep state stuff. Even the ever-pragmatic Hillary Clinton vowed to release classified information on UFOs and aliens while being interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel last year during her campaign. The unknown and how we go about knowing it is very much on our minds as a culture.

Though he would be dismayed to see that the orthodoxy of personal belief in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary has persevered, even flourished in the 21st century, Hynek would certainly find our present appetite for conspiracy and for polarized debate familiar, from climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers to the Disclosure crowd. Over his long career he learned that "It's very, very easy to disappoint people by telling them the truth," O'Connell tells Rolling Stone. "Everyone wants to believe that the next case is the big one, the one that finally proves that these are spaceships from another world and unfortunately, up to now that's never been the case, but the hope just doesn't die."

Born a few days before Earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet in 1910, Hynek died just a few months after traveling through the comet's wake again in 1986. He spent the interceding years as an astronomer who changed the field of celestial imaging by developing a high-altitude telescope and video telescope, founded the Corralitos Observatory in New Mexico, led a team that devised the first tracking system for satellites before there were any man-made objects in orbit, and reassured a nervous American public after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, which put him on the cover of Life magazine.

Hynek was also one of the first scientists to evaluate UFO sightings for the U.S. Air Force, working on a series of classified projects in the 1950s and 1960s. Though he started out a skeptic, he went on to found the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, landing a cameo in Steven Spielberg's 1977 hit, Close Encounters of the Third Kind after contacting the director when he learned that the film’s working title was drawn from his work.

Even more than 30 years after his death, Hynek remains a controversial figure in UFOlogy, mainly because of his refusal to choose a side. O'Connell, a screenwriter and UFO history expert who writes the blog High Strangeness, has already had some of Hynek's legacy rub off on his own reputation, which he takes as a sign that he is following in Hynek's footsteps as an unbiased, open-minded researcher, rather than writing for one camp or another.

"Just based on what little some people know about the book and the interviews I've been doing, I already have some UFO establishment figures accusing me of being a skeptic, which is really dirty word in UFO circles," he says. "The labeling has already begun."

Hynek proved to be a thorn in the government's side when it came to investigating UFO reports, refusing to dismiss the unexplainable as the product of mass hysteria or unreliable witness testimony. Indeed, a great number of the seminal 20th century sightings that convinced Hynek that UFOs were worth further study involved highly credible witnesses, including airline and military pilots, law enforcement officers and Delbert Newhouse, a navy photographer who caught such an object on film in the Utah desert in 1952. Hynek though, refused to say that the strangeness of UFOs and UFO sightings proved they were alien spacecraft, which made him unpopular on the other side of the debate as well. An intellectual independent, he ended up sandwiched between the government, which demanded mundane explanations for sometimes fantastic sightings, and a public convinced that aliens walked among them.

"The inability for ambiguity to exist is a powerful force in UFO research," O'Connell says. "You have to go one way or the other, there's no middle ground."

Throughout the heyday of UFO sightings, significant incidents, including reported contact with alien entities and their aircraft, frequently popped up in clusters, referred to as "flaps" by Hynek. Though the last flap occurred after Close Encounters of the Third Kind debuted in 1977, UFOs are having a moment right now, too. This year Spielberg’s film celebrates its 40th anniversary, and the 1947 sighting of "flying saucers" over the Cascade mountains in the Pacific Northwest by pilot Kevin Arnold, which is widely noted as the beginning of the modern UFO phenomenon, marks 70 years of celestial intrigue. The History Channel just picked up a scripted series about Project Blue Book, the UFO investigation project that Hynek led for the government in the 1950s and 60, with Robert Zemeckis as executive producer. And of course, there's the matter of NASA's secret slaves on Mars. Are we headed for a new flap?

O'Connell is not so sure. "You would think that this amazing advance in technology, in photo imaging would have delivered us with the perfect UFO photo by now," he says. "You would think that but it hasn't happened and it's hard to decide exactly why. You can definitely argue that there are more people watching the sky with cameras in hand than ever before in human history."

What he's most interested in, beyond seeing Martin Freeman cast as Hynek – though he was amused by the thought of David Duchovny donning the professor's signature goatee – is an embrace of Hynek's balance of rigor and open-minded curiosity. Like Hynek himself, O'Connell wants to reposition the conversation about UFOs, as well as an agreement to adhere to the scientific method itself, back into the mainstream and plumb what might be possible, rather than single-mindedly trying to prove, or disprove the existence of aliens.

He finds some of Hynek's heady combination of scientific rigor and mysticism in the work of quantum physics and astronomers who are working on exoplanets right now. "Both of those fields involve, in my opinion, leaps of faith, leaps of intuition," he says. "We've shifted very dramatically from this idea that life on other planets must be exceedingly rare to this space where now where we're talking in terms of life in the universe being unbelievably abundant because we keep on finding all these goldilocks planets with our high powered space telescopes. Those are the two areas where I see that same kind of thinking that same kind of approach to science coming back to the way that Hynek saw things."

{http://www.rollingstone.com/ }

06-07-2017 om 20:06 geschreven door peter  

Mars is een giftige bal

Bacteriën maken geen schijn van kans aan de oppervlakte van de planeet Mars, zo bevestigen experimenten.

Toen ruimtevaartorganisatie Nasa twee jaar geleden met veel bombarie aankondigde dat er water gevonden was op Mars, steeg meteen ook de hoop om leven te vinden op de rode planeet. Maar dat water, gevonden in de vorm van vloeibare pekel en zichtbaar als bruine strepen, is net de meest onbewoonbare omgeving aan het Mars-oppervlak. Dat blijkt uit experimenten die deze week gepubliceerd zijn in het vakblad Scientific Reports.

De pekel bestaat namelijk in grote mate uit natriumperchloraat en magnesiumperchloraat, zouten die uitermate dodelijk zijn voor bacteriën. Niet op zich, integendeel. Van perchloraten wordt gedacht dat ze een energiebron kunnen zijn voor groeiende bacteriën. Maar het is in combinatie met UV-straling dat de perchloraten omgezet worden in uiterst reactieve oxidanten. Dat konden wetenschappers van de Universiteit van Edinburgh achterhalen door de bacterie Bacillus subtilis bloot te stellen aan zowel perchloraten als aan de dosis UV-straling die de bodem van Mars bereikt. Bacillus subtilis is een beweeglijke bacterie die op Aarde meestal in de grond voorkomt en vrij extreme omstandigheden kan verdragen. Het is ook een van de micro-organismen die vaak meereist met ruimtetuigen.

Giftige cocktail

De onderzoekers benaderden in hun laboratorium zo veel mogelijk de omstandigheden van Mars. De experimenten werden uitgevoerd bij een temperatuur die - afhankelijk van de plek en het moment van de dag - ook op Mars bereikt wordt. In bijkomende proeven voegde men stoffen toe die net als de perchloraten alomtegenwoordig zijn in de bodem van onze dichtste planeet. Wat bleek: in combinatie met ijzeroxiden en waterstofperoxide waren de perchloraten nóg dodelijker. Na 60 seconden bleef er bijna niets van de bacteriën over.

De studie lijkt slecht nieuws, maar is vooral oud nieuws. Dat de bodem van Mars een giftige cocktail vormt, werd al langer vermoed en is nu bevestigd. Bovendien moeten we nu wellicht niet vrezen dat we Mars ‘besmetten’ met micro-organismen van de Aarde, een bezorgdheid die vaker geuit wordt. Dat bacteriën ‘in hun blootje’ doodgaan op Mars, hoeft overigens niet te beletten dat er ooit mensen in ruimtepak rondwandelen. Het is zelfs niet uitgesloten dat er alsnog leven is op Mars: de perchloraten zijn giftig in combinatie met UV-straling, maar zoals gezegd niet zonder straling. Het kan dus best dat er dieper onder de grond wel martiaanse micro-organismen leven.

{ http://www.standaard.be/ }

06-07-2017 om 19:33 geschreven door peter  

Several recent developments have made it clear that space has become the latest front in whatever strange new Cold War is brewing. Just this week, it seems that the war might have gone from ‘cold’ to ‘shooting’ with the news that several satellite-tracking agencies have spotted a European-contolled communications satellite breaking apart in space. The satellite’s operator? A private agency which provides satellite services for the U.S. Armed Forces, NASA, and NATO, among others.

It’s currently unclear what could have damaged the satellite, but a deliberate attack has not been ruled out.

The story began on June 17th when the Luxembourg-based satellite firm SES S.A. lost control of its AMC-9 satellite which reportedly provides data and broadcast services over the U.S. and Mexico. Shortly after, operators watched helplessly as the satellite began to drift and then break apart.

It’s currently unknown what might have happened to the satellite. Leading theories include a collision with debris or a malfunction, although the possibility remains that the satellite could have been attacked by the new weaponized satellites many world superpowers have been putting into orbit recently. Doug Hendrix, CEO at aerospace technology firm ExoAnalytic Solutions, told ArsTechnica that his company watched the AMC-9 satellite break apart, but even they aren’t sure what the cause was:

We have seen several pieces come off of it over the past several days. We are tracking at least one of the pieces. I would hesitate to say we know for sure what happened.

There are concerns now that debris from the satellite might damage others in the same orbit, which is heavily populated with communications satellites. It’s been known for years that satellites will become both the next weapons and the next targets in the wars of the future; disrupting an entire geostationary orbit with debris would be a perfect way to distract one’s adversaries.

The next war will happen far above our heads. Invest in umbrellas. Strong ones.

Noting that a war might be brewing in space isn’t purely conjecture; the U.S. Armed Forces have made several recent announcements regarding the creation of new space weaponsand space-oriented leadership posts in what has been described as a pivot to the upcoming battlefield that is space. Couple that with the news that Russia is waking up its mysterious “killer satellites,” launching unidentified new satellites from secret Arctic bases, and that U.S. intelligence agencies are launching their own mysterious satellites which have been displaying some rather strange behavior lately, and it seems as if a shadowy space conflict might already be underway.

Where’s 007 when you need him? Oh…yeah…

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

06-07-2017 om 19:23 geschreven door peter  

During the course of last week’s 70th anniversary festivities in Roswell, New Mexico – specifically following my lecture on the legendary crash of July 1947 – the subject of the controversial “Ramey Memo” surfaced. For those who don’t know, the memo is one of the most intriguing pieces of Roswell-based documentation in existence. In fact, it’s one of the very few, real documents pertaining to Roswell (forget about all that MJ12 documentation). It’s a single piece of paper and can be seen in a black-and-white photograph taken of Brigadier General Roger Ramey. In 1947, he was the head of the 8th Army Air Force, which operated out of Fort Worth, Texas. Ramey is a key part of the story, as he is holding the memo in question in his left hand; a memo which says something about Roswell. But, what? That’s the issue UFO researchers are unable to agree upon. What we know for sure is that the photo was taken at Fort Worth on July 8, 1947 by a man named J. Bond Johnson. At the time, he worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper. The controversy over what the memo shows began years ago, but it gained far more momentum in the 2015-2016 period.

Yes, the memo can certainly be seen in the photo, with the text pointing outwards, albeit in slightly folded fashion. A number of attempts have been made to decipher the memo. The first real attempt of any major significance was undertaken on behalf of the U.S. Air Force. In their massive 1994 report on the Roswell affair, the USAF stated that it sent the photo-collection to what was only referred to as a “national-level organization for digitizing and subsequent photo interpretation and analysis.” The results, however, were disappointing, as that same unnamed organization informed the Air Force, on July 20, 1994, that even after careful digitizing, “the photos were of insufficient quality to visualize either of the details sought for analysis.” It’s interesting to note that, to this day, the Air Force refuses to identify the aforementioned “national-level organization.” On top of that, the Air Force states that the relevant documentation generated by the organization cannot now be found.

With the turning of a new century, Ufology undertook its very own attempts to solve the mystery of the Ramey Memo and what, exactly, it says. One of those was UFO investigator David Rudiak, who has a particular interest in deciphering the memo, and whose research into its contents continues to this day. Rudiak says of his work in this particular arena: “There is very little doubt that the memo includes the words ‘in the ‘disc’ they will ship.'” Far more controversially, Rudiak concludes from his analysis that the words “operation at the ranch” and “the victims of the wreck” can also be seen.

Of the memo itself, Kevin Randle said in 2015: “The only point of dispute is what the memo actually says. Parts of it are easily read and others are obscured to the point where it is sometimes just a best guess. If the memo could be completely deciphered it might provide a clue about what fell near Roswell and would be some of the best documentation available.” Randle also noted in 2015: “While ‘Victims of the wreck’ might not take us immediately to the extraterrestrial, it would certainly start us on the path.”

Then, in 2016, there was this from Kevin: “Several have suggested that the word is not ‘victims’ but is ‘viewing.’ It does contain the right number of letters and it does begin with a ‘V,’ but it also alters the importance of the Ramey Memo if that is correct.”

There is no doubt that the Ramey Memo is extremely thought-provoking, specifically in terms of what it might say, and in relation to the events which occurred in 1947-era New Mexico. A careful study of the text does suggest that the word “victims” could actually be the correct one. As Kevin Randle notes, however, “viewing” is an equally good candidate, too. The latter makes sense, considering the fact that the debris was on show for J. Bond Johnson to photograph. And for Johnson to view. Kevin is also right on target when he states that if the real word is “viewing,” then it most definitely lessens the importance that is generated by the word “victims.” After all, if there were victims, then the object which came down was clearly neither a weather-balloon nor a Mogul balloon. And no-one of a sane mind would ever describe a crash-test dummy as a victim.

There is, however, an issue that seldom gets discussed when it comes to the matter of the Ramey Memo. The full-on “Roswell was E.T.” believer would most likely say that a reference to “victims” is the smoking-gun we have sought for so long; a smoking-gun which makes a reference to the aliens found on-board the wrecked UFO, or somewhere else on the huge Foster Ranch. But, does it, really? Well, it certainly could; but I suggest not. And I will tell you exactly why.

I find the use of that specific word – “victims” – to be both odd and potentially revealing. I would have thought that terms like “the crew,” “the pilots,” “the spacemen,” or “the beings” would have been far more appropriate when it came to describing strange-looking entities that arrived from another world with no warning. “Victims” suggests something else. In fact, I would go so far to say that just the word “victims” itself has an undeniable human, even emotion-filled, quality attached to it, rather than something we might apply to a definitively unearthly alien.

Let’s take a look at the definitions for “victim” that Merriam-Webster provides. They include: (A)“one that is acted on and usually adversely affected by a force or agent;” (B) “one that is injured, destroyed, or sacrificed under any of various conditions;” (C) “one that is subjected to oppression, hardship, or mistreatment;” and (D) “one that is tricked or duped.”

If the “human experiment” angle for Roswell is the correct one – as I believe it to be – then the terminology used by Merriam-Webster to define a “victim” is most apt. Finally, but still on the matter of that controversial sentence in the Ramey Memo, there is the issue of the word “wreck.” It seems very strange that such a word would have been used to describe what the military was assuring the media was just a flimsy weather-balloon. It’s equally odd terminology to use for a Mogul balloon – the theory the Air Force came up with in 1994. “Wreck” implies something pretty physically substantial that has been significantly damaged, rather than the torn and scattered remains of a balloon, whether large or small. So, while the Ramey Memo is not the ultimate smoking-gun that proves any particular theory, there’s no doubt that it keeps the Roswell flame burning, whatever the answer.

06-07-2017 om 19:15 geschreven door peter  

06-07-2017 om 19:04 geschreven door peter  

06-07-2017 om 19:01 geschreven door peter  

STRONGEST EARTHQUAKE IN DECADES ROCKS YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

An earthquake with magnitude 5.8 (ml/mb) was detected on Wednesday, 9 kilometers (6 miles) from Lincoln in Montana.

The M5.8 earthquake is the largest earthquake in years hitting the region of Yellowstone National Park in Montana. It was felt in Oregon and Washington state.

The strong M5.8 earthquake was followed by two moderate quakes of M4.5 and M3.9 

If the preliminary magnitude holds, it will be the strongest earthquake to hit Montana since June 1975, when a 5.9-magnitude earthquake struck Yellowstone National Park. A 6.9-magnitude earthquake that struck southern Idaho in 1983 was also felt in Montana.

HERE A FEW REPORTS ABOUT THE STRONG SHAKING:

• Seeley Lake, Montana / MMI V (Moderate shaking): House shaking, fixtures moving,heard structure making cracking noise,pet bird would not calm down in her cage. Mild Aftershock.
• Whitefish (217.9 km NNW from epicenter) [Map] / MMI V (Moderate shaking): Lasting about a minute.
• Missoula, Mt / MMI IV (Light shaking): Thought my buddy was shaking the bed, light rumble then a few good jolts, nothing compared to the nisqually quake but enough to grab your attention.
• Placerville Idaho / MMI IV (Light shaking): Shook bed. Moved bed enough to disconnect a plug-in. Outside deck moved and creaked. Felt slight aftershocks. Stevensville / MMI V (Moderate shaking): Strong rolling shake with strong afterquake shortly after ( via strangesounds.org ).  

RELATED ARTICLES

• This Boiling River In Yellowstone National Park Is Not A Good Sign
• 4.5 Earthquake shakes area near West Yellowstone

{ http://www.disclose.tv/ }

06-07-2017 om 16:07 geschreven door peter