Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
The firsts keep rolling in for a 2021 moon mission.
The Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic plans to send its robotic Peregrine lander to the lunar surface in July 2021, on a mission sponsored by NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The flight will be the first for Peregrine and its rocket, United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur vehicle, and may mark the first successful moon landing by a private spacecraft. (Another commercial lander and CLPS awardee, Intuitive Machines' Nova-C, is scheduled to launch around the same time.)
Peregrine will also carry the United Kingdom's first-ever moon rover, a little, four-legged craft built by London-based company Spacebit. And another little pioneer will be on the flight as well, it turns out: Japan's first lunar rover, a tiny, wheeled robot named Yaoki, which was developed by Tokyo-based company Dymon.
"We are really excited to fly our mission with Astrobotic. This lunar rover Yaoki will result in the first lunar rover from Japan to explore the lunar surface, and marks a unique contribution to Peregrine's mission," Dymon CEO Shinichiro Nakajima said in a statement.
"Yaoki has already successfully passed more than 100 tests and has the smallest but most effective rover wheels ever produced," Nakajima added. "We are ready to complete development and fly in 2021."
This first mission could be the start of something big on the moon for Dymon. The company aims to land 100 Yaokis by 2030, Dymon representatives have said.
"Dymon’s unique, single-axle rover is a creative design that we look forward to delivering on Peregrine in 2021," Astrobotic CEO John Thornton said in the same statement. "We're excited to deliver this groundbreaking Japanese rover to the moon."
Yaoki and the "walking rover" from Spacebit will have a lot of company on the 2021 flight. Peregrine is toting to the lunar surface about 30 payloads, 14 of which will be provided by NASA.
The U.S. space agency is funding the mission, via CLPS, to the tune of $79.5 million. Intuitive Machines is getting $77 million for its first mission. (The company Orbit Beyond got $97 million in this round of CLPS awards, which were announced in May. But Orbit Beyond has since dropped out, saying it could not meet its September 2020 launch target.)
NASA views the CLPS-funded missions as key enablers of its Artemis program of crewed lunar exploration. That project aims to put astronauts down near the lunar south pole by 2024 and establish a permanent, sustainable human presence on and around the moon by 2028. For example, some of the science gear flying on the robotic landers will assess stores of lunar water ice, an important resource for potential explorers and settlers.
To date, just three entities have successfully soft-landed a spacecraft on the moon: the Soviet Union, the United States and China. The private Israeli outfit SpaceIL and the government of India tried to follow suit this year with the Beresheet and Chandrayaan-2 missions, respectively, but both came up short.
Dymon isn't the only Japanese company that wants to explore the moon. Tokyo-based ispace plans to put down a lander toting customer payloads in 2021, following that up with a rover-deploying surface mission in 2023.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook.
By analyzing the disintegrated remains of distant worlds consumed by their stars, a new study finds that at least some rocky exoplanets may have interiors similar to those of Earth and Mars.
Previous research found that most rocky bodies in our solar system formed amid high levels of oxygen, about 100,000 times higher than what is found in the sun's hydrogen-rich gas. Such oxidation likely reflects the primordial conditions that existed during the earliest stages of rock formation around the sun. Those first rocks ultimately built asteroids, moons and planets.
It remains unclear whether the kind of chemistry seen in the solar system's rocks is typical of planetary systems overall. After all, scientists have yet to bring back rock samples from a neighboring planet such as Mars, much less an exoplanet circling a distant star.
Now, researchers may have found a way to probe the chemistry of distant planets — by analyzing the remains of worlds that crashed into white dwarf stars.
White dwarfs are the dim, fading, Earth-size cores of dead stars that are left behind after average-size stars have exhausted their fuel and shed their outer layers. Our sun will one day end up as a white dwarf, as will more than 90% of all stars in our galaxy.
White dwarfs are incredibly dense (just a teaspoon of matter from a white dwarf would weigh 5 tons, or 4.5 metric tons), which gives them powerful gravitational fields for their size. Prior work has suggested that elements heavier than helium would rapidly sink below the surfaces of these stars under the influence of that powerful gravity. However, astronomers have also previously identified some white dwarfs with atmospheres polluted by heavier elements, including silicon, magnesium, iron, carbon and oxygen, likely the remains of rocky exoplanets and asteroids that collided with those dead stars.
So, the scientists behind the new research gathered the light given off by six of these polluted white dwarfs. Researchers can use the distribution of wavelengths present in such light to calculate what elements are present; so in the case of these polluted white dwarfs, the team could measure how abundant oxidized iron was in rock that had fallen into the dead stars.
"This is the most precise way of measuring the geochemistry of these rocky bodies that we have right now," study lead author Alexandra Doyle, an astrochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Space.com.
The researchers found that when it came to oxygen, the rocky bodies that had orbited these white dwarfs had chemistries similar to those of Earth, Mars and asteroids in our solar system, but unlike that of Mercury.
"These findings enhance the prospects that there are Earth-like rocky bodies out there," study senior author Edward Young, a cosmochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Space.com.
The scientists now plan to analyze more white dwarfs to get a better picture of what exoplanets are like.
"We think we've seen signs of extrasolar bodies like Earth, Mars and some of the asteroids in the solar system's asteroid belt, but there may be hints of bodies like Mercury in the data as well," Doyle said.
The researchers detailed their findings in the Oct. 18 issue of the journal Science.
The U.S. Army and a prominent UFO research group are teaming up to investigate mysterious technology, but won’t come out and say where the tech comes from.
To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, the organization led by former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge, will work with the Army to “characterize” technology under the organization’s control, and then use the tech to improve military vehicles. We have a lot of questions about this bizarre partnership, starting with the most important: Where did the technology come from?
To The Stars, which released the infamous Navy-confirmed UFO videos, made the announcement today on its website, saying it has entered into a “Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command to advance TTSA’s materiel and technology innovations in order to develop enhanced capabilities for Army ground vehicles.”
CRADAs are a form of joint research agreement between an agency of the federal government and research organizations, particularly academia, in which the feds provide “laboratories ... personnel, facilities, equipment or other resources with or without reimbursement.”
According to multiple definitions of CRADAs on federal websites, the transfer of federal funding is prohibited.
TTSA describes its contribution to the agreement as “technology solutions” that include “material science, space-time metric engineering, quantum physics, beamed energy propulsion, and active camouflage.”
In 1966, a 13-year-old boy was walking his dog and reportedly took this photo of a flying saucer in Wall Township, New Jersey. He showed it to the Army, but no comment was made by the military.
BETTMANNGETTY IMAGES
The Army will provide “laboratories, expertise, support, and resources to help characterize the technologies and its applications.”
“Our partnership with TTSA serves as an exciting, non-traditional source for novel materials and transformational technologies to enhance our military ground system capabilities,” said Dr. Joseph Cannon of Army Futures Command in the press release. “At the Army's Ground Vehicle Systems Center, we look forward to this partnership and the potential technical innovations forthcoming.”
Where did TTSA’s impressive list of technology come from? The implicit answer is: UFOs, also known as Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAPs).
UFO/UAP traditionally means anything we spot in the sky that's unusual. But here's the thing: Swamp gas and Venus sightings don't leave behind technology that's so advanced, it needs to be "characterized" by the federal government.
Whatever this technology is, and even To The Stars apparently isn't quite sure, it comes from what we commonly call flying saucers.
According to The New York Times, the Pentagon spent $22 million between 2008 and 2011 on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an organization tasked with looking into UFOs. The program reportedly stored “metal alloys and other materials" that Luis Elizondo, then the director of the AATIP and now the director of global security and special programs at To The Stars, said had been "recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena."
In July, we reported that TTSA acquired “several pieces of metamaterials” sourced from “an advanced aerospace vehicle of unknown origin.” The organization claims it can track ownership of the materials all the way back to the mid-1990s. Exactly where the materials came from is anyone's guess.
Lights in the morning sky over Coast Guard Air Station Salem, Salem, Massachusetts, July 16, 1952. The lights, speculated to be UFOs, were photographed by US Coast Guardsman Shell R. Alpert and witnessed by fellow Coast Guardsman Thomas E. Flaherty.
TIME LIFE PICTURESGETTY IMAGES
It’s hard to know what to make of all this. The Army obviously thinks there's something worth sticking its reputation out for, but there isn't any evidence available to the public to justify its association with a UFO research group.
Funding research into UFOs is one thing, and the U.S. government has done it multiple times over the past 70 years. Expecting actual technology samples from UFOs is another thing. Agreeing to do research and development work on them is something else entirely.
If—and it’s a big if—this technology could be ported over to the military, could it give U.S. troops an advantage on the battlefield? Yes, although at best, that advantage might be no better than giving a caveman’s spear a titanium shaft.
At worst, the technology could prove unreplicable by our modern standards. If you went back in time and gave Benjamin Franklin an iPhone, he would certainly find it fascinating, but be completely unable to duplicate it—and that’s with a time difference of just over 200 years. UFOs, if they are indeed from another world, could be thousands of years ahead of us.
Could To The Stars technology list benefit the Army? Theoretically, yes. “Material science” could lead to tougher, lighter materials able to better resist enemy fire. “Beamed energy propulsion,” which sounds like the use of microwaves or lasers to transfer energy, could enable drones to fly longer. “Active camouflage” sounds like a mimetic camouflage system such as that used by squid or even the Predator.
But does TTAS actually have this technology? Well, we’re just going to have to wait and see.
For The First Time, Physicists Have Observed a Giant Magnetic 'Bridge' Between Galaxies
FIONA MACDONALD
For the first time, scientists have detected evidence of a magnetic field that's associated with the vast intergalactic 'bridge' that links our two nearest galactic neighbours.
Known as the Magellanic Bridge, the bridge is a huge stream of neutral gas that stretches some 75,000 light-years between our two neighbouring galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC). Although researchers had predicted it was there, this is the first observation of its magnetic field, and it could help us understand how these vast bridges come to be.
Our closest galactic neighbours, the LMC and SMC (photographed below) are 160,000 and 200,000 light-years from Earth respectively, and are visible in the southern night sky.
ESO/J. Colosimo
Researchers have long known about the Magellanic Bridge that exists between these neighbours, a path with a few known stars inside it. But until now, very little was known about the magnetic field associated with the bridge.
The team has now shown that this newly detected magnetic field is one millionth the strength of Earth's own protective magnetic shield - and it could provide some insight into how it formed.
Two of the leading options are that the magnetic field was generated from within the bridge after the structure formed, or it may have been 'ripped' from the dwarf galaxies thought to have merged and formed the bridge in the first place.
If a bridge between the stars sounds a little sci-fi to you, keep in mind that most of space is made up of different magnetic fields.
"Not only are entire galaxies magnetic, but the faint delicate threads joining galaxies are magnetic, too," said one of the researchers, Bryan Gaensler from the University of Toronto.
"Everywhere we look in the sky, we find magnetism."
The reason we've struggled to study this structure in the past is the fact that these types of cosmic magnetic fields can only be observed indirectly through their effect on other structures in space.
In this case, radio signals from hundreds of very distant galaxies was used to pick up the magnetic field associated with the Magellanic Bridge.
Radio signals can be thought of like waves on the surface of a pond, in that they vibrate along a particular plane in space.
When these radio signals pass through a magnetic field, that plane is rotated, and it allows astronomers to the measure the strength and polarity (direction) of the field.
"The radio emission from the distant galaxies served as background 'flashlights' that shine through the Bridge," said Kaczmarek.
"Its magnetic field then changes the polarisation of the radio signal. How the polarised light is changed tells us about the intervening magnetic field."
Now that we've been able to detect the field, scientists now have a chance to figure out not only how it formed, but the impact it's had on the LMC and SMC.
"In general, we don't know how such vast magnetic fields are generated, nor how these large-scale magnetic fields affect galaxy formation and evolution," said Kaczmarek.
"The LMC and SMC are our nearest neighbours, so understanding how they evolve may help us understand how our Milky Way Galaxy will evolve. Understanding the role that magnetic fields play in the evolution of galaxies and their environment is a fundamental question in astronomy that remains to be answered."
Even cooler is the fact that this is just one study that's part of a bigger project to map the entire Universe's magnetism.
This hypersonic airliner would take you from Los Angeles to Tokyo in under two hours
This hypersonic airliner would take you from Los Angeles to Tokyo in under two hours
The 300-passenger Stratofly MR3 would hit speeds of up to 5,400 miles an hour. Just don't expect to book a flight anytime soon.
Stratofly jet.Stratofly
By Kate Baggaley
In the almost two decades since the retirement of the supersonic Concorde airliner, jet-setters have had to make their peace with planes that poke along at about 500 miles an hour. But with help from new materials and advanced engine technologies, faster-than-sound air travel may be poised for a comeback.
Scientists and engineers on both sides of the Atlantic are developing airliners that would slash the time now required for long flights. The planes would not only fly faster than conventional airliners but also the vaunted Concorde, whose top speed was Mach 2.04, or a bit more than twice the speed of sound (1,354 miles per hour at cruising altitude).
Some researchers are working on a new generation of supersonic airliners, capable of speeds between Mach 1 and Mach 5. Others are dreaming bigger.
Last year, Boeing unveiled a design for a plane capable of reaching Mach 5, the low end of a realm known as hypersonic speed. And the Stratofly MR3, a 300-passenger airliner under development by a European consortium that includes the German Aerospace Center, the French Aerospace Lab and eight other universities and research organizations, would fly faster still.
Model of the Stratofly hypersonic plane.Stratofly
With its needle-sharp profile and advanced powerplants, Stratofly would hit speeds of up to Mach 8 — about 5,400 miles an hour — and reach altitudes of more than 98,000 feet, far above the operational ceiling of conventional airliners.
At that heady altitude, there’s little turbulence or bad weather. Experts say passengers would experience smooth flights and see the curvature of the Earth — though the view would likely be visible through weight-saving window-like video screens rather than actual windows.
“It would be like going to space,” says Michael Smart, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Hypersonics in Brisbane, Australia, who is not involved in the Stratofly project.
Shrinking the globe
While the Concorde was used primarily for transatlantic flights, Stratofly would likely be reserved for longer journeys. It could zip from New York City to Sydney, Australia, in about three hours, according to the consortium, or make the trip from Los Angeles to Tokyo in about an hour and 45 minutes.
“We want to go to Mars but still we have huge distances [separating us] here on Earth,” says Nicole Viola, a professor of aerospace systems design at the Polytechnic of Turin in Italy and the project coordinator of the Stratofly consortium. With hypersonic flight, she adds, “it will be so much easier to travel to distant destinations.”
By flying at altitudes beyond the reach of conventional airliners, Viola says, Stratofly might also help ease the congestion that is expected to be an increasing problem as the population swells and more and more people take to the skies.
Technological challenges
Later this year, the Stratofly consortium plans to begin wind tunnel tests of the engine components. But it will take many years to bring Stratofly to life. The key technologies might not be ready until 2035, Viola says, with another decade needed before flight tests are completed and the plane is ready to carry passengers.
One reason for the lengthy timeline is that researchers have little experience with hypersonic aviation. Only a few experimental planes have ever reached hypersonic speed, and the last time a hypersonic plane flew with a person on board was in 1967. That plane, the North American X-15, was powered by rocket engines, which are impractical for commercial air travel.
Stratofly would need more than one kind of engine. For takeoff and landing, the plane would use turbine engines similar to those found in conventional airliners. For cruising, the plane would switch to so-called ramjet and scramjet powerplants. These engines compress the air-fuel mixture not with spinning fan blades, as turbine engines do, but using the aircraft’s high speed and the shape of their inlet ducts.
Combining engine technologies in a single plane is a daunting task, Smart says. And the challenges won’t end when Stratofly hits hypersonic speed: since the plane will generate tremendous friction and heat as it cuts through the air, it must be able to withstand temperatures well in excess of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hot enough to melt the aluminum found in conventional airliners.
To survive the searing heat, the Stratofly team is exploring the use of high-tech materials, including ceramic reinforced with carbon fiber. They’re also looking into innovative ways to cool the plane — perhaps by allowing some of the craft’s supercold liquid hydrogen fuel to boil off during flight and absorb some of the friction-induced heat, Viola says.
Using hydrogen fuel instead of jet fuel would also help reduce Stratofly’s carbon footprint; unlike the jet fuel burned by conventional airliners, the hydrogen-fueled vehicle would produce no carbon dioxide — although it would emit water vapor and nitrogen oxides, which are greenhouse gases.
Concern over the environmental impact of commercial aviation has led some people to avoid flying, and Viola says the consortium is paying close attention to the plane's effect on the environment. “We are analyzing all the operations and all the technologies to minimize the environmental impact,” she says.
But such concerns notwithstanding, experts are rooting for hypersonic air travel.
“I’m really excited to see the progress they’ve been making, even though it’s a big challenge,” Smart says. “Flying at these types of speeds is something we’ve all dreamt about being able to do.”
The U.S. Army has signed a contract to study and exploit materials from unidentified flying objects. It intends to use what it learns in order to develop new weapons platforms.
No, I'm not joking.
The facts are provided in a newly agreed cooperative research and development contract between the U.S. Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command (specifically, the Ground Vehicle Systems Center) and the UFO technology exploitation group To The Stars Academy. Established by Blink-182 founder Tom DeLonge, To The Stars Academy involves former U.S. government, military, and advanced aerospace engineers in the research and capability exploitation of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UFOs.
The U.S. Army's stamped and signed 26-page contract is quite stunning.
It says that To The Stars Academy has shown the Army that it "is a company with materiel and technology innovations that offer capability advancements for Army ground vehicles. These technology innovations have been acquired, designed, or produced by [To The Stars Academy], leveraging advancements in metamaterials and quantum physics to push performance gains."
"The government is interested," the contract explains, "in a variety of the collaborator's technologies, such as, but not limited to inertial mass reduction, mechanical/structural metamaterials, electromagnetic metamaterial wave guides, quantum physics, quantum communications, and beamed energy propulsion." The contract also entails the research of metamaterial exploitation for the purposes of "active camouflage and directed photo projection." On that last point, an Army spokesman tells me that To The Stars Academy has conveyed it has means of supporting "camouflage concealment deception and obscuration" interests.
But what is this metamaterial?
I can confirm that at least some of the source material was retrieved from crash remnants or materials sourced from UFOs. Analysis of these UFOs suggests they are enabled with space-time, cloaking, transmedium travel, and gravity manipulation capabilities. That's not crazy conspiracy talk. In a key credibility submission, the contract adds that "the Office of the Secretary of Defense can share historical reports of findings and origin of materiel solutions in the possession of [To The Stars Academy]."
Translation: historical reports of material exploitation from crashed UFOs. We're not in Kansas anymore, folks.
With a baseline 60-month duration, the contract will give the Army "access to advanced materiel solutions" in To The Stars Academy's possession. To The Stars Academy will provide the government with access to its subject matter experts and metamaterial of both "mechanical and electromagnetic sensitive metamaterial." In turn, To The Stars Academy will share in the government's research findings and have access to its testing facilities. Neither side will pay the other for the contract.
The government's rationale for the contract is simple. "If the government can verify materiel solutions claims by [To The Stars Academy]," it says, "then significant advancements can be made in the capabilities of Army ground vehicle platforms in terms of security, force protection and weight reduction."
Read between the lines here: How do you reduce weight? Gravity manipulation.
Yes, Tom DeLonge has a penchant for saying things that are unbound from established evidence. But he and his organization deserve significant credit here. Because with this formal contract, they have gained the U.S. government's open attestation that it believes To The Stars Academy has access to exceptionally advanced technological capabilities.
Visitors from deep space are buzzing our solar system. The race is on to explore them.
Visitors from deep space are buzzing our solar system. The race is on to explore them.
Interstellar objects such as 'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov may be raining alien life down on us.
The Hubble Space Telescope observed Comet 2I/Borisov on Oct. 12, 2019. The comet is believed to have arrived here from another planetary system elsewhere in our galaxy.
NASA / ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)
By Corey S. Powell
The interstellar visitors have arrived.
Two years ago, an automated telescope in Hawaii detected ‘Oumuamua, the first known object from interstellar space observed passing through our solar system. Then in August, an amateur astronomer in Crimea found a second interstellar visitor, 2I/Borisov, suggesting that such objects come our way on a regular basis.
Now, scientists are eagerly developing plans to explore these messengers from afar and to learn their secrets.
“Imagine something that’s traveled for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years through space, now reaching us,” says Andreas Hein, an aerospace engineer at the Initiative for Interstellar Studies in Charfield, England. “What will it tell us about its origin? What composition do planets have that orbit this alien sun? Does life propagate between stars?”
The path of interstellar comet 21/Borisov now passing through our solar system.NASA, ESA, J. Olmsted, F. Summers (STScI). / ESA/Hubble
For now, answers are trickling in slowly from observatories on the ground and in orbit around Earth, including an intriguing new image of Borisov just taken by the Hubble telescope. Come 2028, though, a European spacecraft called Comet Interceptor could be on its way to a brief encounter with another, as-yet-undetected interstellar object.
Hein and his colleagues have an even grander project in mind. They’ve drawn up plans for Project Lyra, a space probe that could travel fast enough to overtake either ‘Oumuamua or Borisov (or another interstellar object) as it speeds its way out of the solar system, reaching either one by the mid-2040s.
To Hein, launching Project Lyra would be akin to building humanity’s first starship — and doing it on the cheap. “We won't have the capability of reaching another star system within the next few decades at least, but having the opportunity to study a big chunk of material from another star is a bit like flying to another star,” he says. “It is a literal version of, ‘If you can't go to the mountain, let the mountain come to you’.”
Inching toward the interstellar visitors
The many mysteries surrounding ‘Oumuamua (“oh moo-uh moo-uh”) have further boosted the desire to get to see one of these interstellar visitors up close.
Researchers anticipated that the vast majority of interstellar objects would be comets, but ‘Oumuamua sure didn’t look like one. It was strangely elongated, like a half-mile-long cigar, tumbling as it went. It also displayed no comet-like tail, and it sped up slightly as it moved away from the sun. These oddities led Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb to float the controversial idea that ‘Oumuamua might not be a comet at all, but an alien spacecraft.
In contrast, Borisov seems to closely resemble the comets in our own solar system. “It appears to be of a very different nature than `Oumuamua,” Loeb says. “But when you walk down the street and notice a weird person, the fact that later on you encounter many normal people does not take away the weirdness of that first unusual person.”
Alas, the European Space Agency’s Comet Interceptor will be unable to reach either of these objects. In fact, it wasn't designed to go after an interstellar object at all. The original plan was that, after its launch in 2028, the 1-ton spacecraft would park itself in orbit around the sun, waiting for a comet to arrive from the outskirts of our own solar system. Then it would fire up its engines, making an encounter and deploying smaller probes that could come within a few hundred miles of its target.
The discovery of ‘Oumuamua and Borisov has the Comet Interceptor team reconsidering its plans. By one estimate, at any time there are about 100 interstellar objects within Jupiter’s orbit around the sun — and there’s a decent chance that at least one of them will come within range of the spacecraft.
“If an interstellar object happens to turn up with the right trajectory at the right time, it would be too good an opportunity to turn down,” says mission co-leader Colin Snodgrass, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh.
Although Comet Interceptor’s flight past an interstellar visitor would be fast and brief, it could prove highly revealing. “It would be fascinating to see one up close,” Snodgrass says. “Either it would look like nothing we ever saw before, and would require new theories, or it would look surprisingly familiar, implying that there are some universal similarities in planetary systems.”
Hit the space accelerator
If you want to chase down ‘Oumuamua or Borisov to determine their true nature, you’ll need a spacecraft with a lot more oomph than Comet Interceptor. ‘Oumuamua is now more than 1 billion miles from Earth and speeding away from us at nearly 18 miles per second. Borisov will make its closest approach to the sun Dec. 7, and then it too will head back to interstellar space at high speed.
That’s where Project Lyra comes in. The engineers at the nonprofit Initiative for Interstellar Studies came up with this concept based on their research into technologies for advanced space travel. The team concluded that the most promising way to reach an interstellar object is with a so-called Oberth maneuver, in which a spacecraft swoops to within 2 million miles of the sun and then fires its rockets full-blast to slingshot toward its target. Using a giant rocket like NASA’s long-awaited Space Launch System, combined with solid-rocket boosters, Hein and his group calculate they could get a speed boost of about 12 miles per second, just enough to do the job.
With a 2033 launch, this scheme could deliver a small but capable probe weighing perhaps 100 pounds to ‘Oumuamua by 2048. Slowing down at the other end would be another challenge. “Maybe we can use electric or magnetic sails,” Hein suggests, referring to a giant metal web that would create drag against the magnetic field and charged particles found in deep space.
A fleet of laser sail spacecraft arriving at 'Oumuamua.Maciej Rebisz / Project Lyra
Surviving the sun’s intense heat may be an easier problem to solve. NASA’s current Parker Solar Probe, which will repeatedly swing within 4 million miles of the sun during the 2020s, is testing a carbon-composite heat shield that can effectively withstand temperatures of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Aliens closer to home
But there is another way to accelerate a mission to an interstellar object: Instead of going faster, aim closer. Loeb notes that not all of the incoming objects head back to the stars. He calculates that some might get deflected by Jupiter’s gravity and trapped into an orbit around the sun. If so, a conventional spacecraft could reach them in a matter of years.
“There are already a number of candidate objects known,” Loeb says. He cites in particular 2015 BZ509, a recently discovered asteroid that orbits near Jupiter but in the opposite direction of all the planets — a likely sign of an interstellar origin.
Loeb also proposes scouring the surface of the moon for debris left by other interstellar objects that might have crashed there over billions of years of lunar history. That’s a timely suggestion, since NASA’s Artemis program could send astronauts back to the moon as early as 2024.
The realization that so much interstellar material has passed through our solar system over the eons, with more coming all the time, provides another powerful motivation to study the incoming objects up close. “It is possible that a non-negligible fraction of them carry evidence for life,” Loeb says.
He’s talking not about derelict alien spacecraft but about possible extraterrestrial microorganisms or their remains, which in many ways would be just as shocking. Finding such evidence would open the possibility that alien life is raining down on us from afar — “between the stars and across the galaxy,” Loeb says — and that humans could be descended from extraterrestrial microbes that landed on Earth billions of years ago.
It’s a Hollywood-worthy twist: We’re looking far off for the interstellar visitors, but it could turn out that they’ve been here all along.
Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is officially partnering with Japanese automotive giant Toyota to build a six-wheeled, self-driving vehicle to explore the surface of the Moon. Japan is hoping to launch the vehicle to the Moon as soon as 2029.
Since there’s no atmosphere, a ton of radiation, and harsh temperature conditions, JAXA argues that a space mobility vehicle is necessary.
The rover will be able to carry two passengers — or four in an emergency — for more than 6,200 miles (10,000 km) across the lunar surface. The vehicle concept is about twice as wide and twice as tall as a 2019 Toyota 4Runner SUV.
Fuel Cell Power
Power will come from an array of replaceable fuel cells which will be charged over time using foldable solar panels.
“Fuel cells, which use clean power-generation methods, emit only water, and, because of their high energy density, they can provide a lot of energy, making them especially suited for the project being discussed with JAXA,” said Toyota Executive Vice President Shigeki Terashi in apress release.
Long Road Ahead
Today’s announcement is only a first step in an very ambitious project. The plan is first to “accelerate their ongoing joint study of a manned, pressurized rover that employs fuel cell electric vehicle technologies,” according to a press release. The vehicle has been in the works, conceptually, since May 2018.
Eventually, Japan is ready to send its Toyota rover to the Moon within the next decade.
“Manned, pressurized rovers will be an important element supporting human lunar exploration, which we envision will take place in the 2030s,” said JAXA Vice President Koichi Wakata. “We aim at launching such a rover into space in 2029.”
The United Kingdom plans to send itsfirst lunar rover to the Moon in 2021 — and the robot is unlike any that came before it.
Not only will the rover created UK-based space startup SpaceBit be the smallest one in history, but it will also have legs rather than wheels — a design innovation that could allow it to explore previously unreachable areas of the Moon.
Small Package
SpaceBit unveiled the rover on Thursday at the science and tech festival New Scientist Live, noting that the bot will hitch a ride to the Moon’s surface aboard U.S. space robotics company Astrobotic’s 2021 mission.
The 1 kilogram (2.2 pound) robot is shaped like a cube with four legs, which it will use to gather video and other data for scientists during its 10-Earth-days-long mission.
The SpaceBit rover will explore the moon’s surface with its legs, and will send its data back to the much larger lander, which will transmit it back to Earth.
James Winspear
The Astrobotic Peregrine lander will carry the UK’s first rover to the moon
NASA Photo / Alamy Stock Photo
Intrepid Explorer
SpaceBit and Astrobotic are hopeful that the mission will illustrate the benefits of giving rovers legs — and lead to future missions in which legged rovers explore the Moon’s tubular caves.
“The legs could be better for steep, rocky terrain, and basically any place where wheels start to struggle,” Astrobotic’s CEO John Thornton told New Scientist.
Top secret TR-3B supersonic craft caught SPYING on France? Frenzy over triangular UFO
Top secret TR-3B supersonic craft caught SPYING on France? Frenzy over triangular UFO
FOOTAGE has emerged that proves the US Air Force is running a secret government project to spy on other countries, according to wild claims online.
By Callum Hoare
The video was captured above the French overseas port town of Saint-Pierre in Reunion Island on May 14, as a group of friends took a walk on the beach.
They noticed something bizarre in the sky and began to film.
The clip shows what appears to be a triangular craft hovering above the water before taking off into the distance.
It was later submitted to MUFON – an American-based non-profit organisation that investigates cases of alleged UFO sightings – where the witness explained how the event unfolded.
BIZARRE: Could this be a spy plane?
(Image: MUFON)
The post read: "Every night we admire the view of the coast which is very visible from where we live.
"But tonight three lights appeared – two white and one red with a strong intensity in the form of a triangle.
"Having never seen this on the area I took my camera to take photos and film.
"The object remained on the spot for about four minutes and began to move in a straight line at a fairly high speed at low altitude."
The video was later uploaded to popular YouTube conspiracy channel The Hidden Underbelly, where viewers gave their own opinions on what was captured.
One comment read: "I've seen this triangle-shaped UFO before."
Before another speculated: "That is definitely the TR-3B."
The TR-3 Black Manta is the name of a surveillance aircraft of the United States Air Force, speculated to be developed under a black project.
It is said to be a supersonic stealth spy plane with a flying wing design.
Believers in the theory say it was used during the Gulf War to provide laser designation for Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk bombers.
And it is not the first time it has reportedly been spotted.
Just yesterday, conspiracists believed they had captured it watching Russia.
And before that, we saw similar scenes in Los Angeles.
The footage captured on October 11, 2019 at about 18h 19h shows a huge UFO hovering just above the water surface of the ocean near the Island Réunion. until it slowly moves up into the sky and disappears.
The witness said that she noticed something like a dark mass on the ocean that rose stagnant over the water and when she looked through her telescope she saw this bizarre shape on which she started to film the UFO until it disappeared
Suppose this UFO came out of the water, could it be that there is an UFO / USO underwater base near the island of Reunion?
Remarkable, the UFO is similar to the UFOs that have been photographed from a US submarine in 1971.
Astronomers in Poland have just published the 1st peer-reviewed paper on the 2nd interstellar visitor, now officially labeled as a comet, 2I/Borisov. Plus check out the new Hubble Space Telescope image of this object.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the 2nd known interstellar object – called comet 2I/Borisov by earthly astronomers – on October 12, 2019, when the object was about 260 million miles (420 million km) from Earth. This object is believed to have arrived here from another planetary system elsewhere in our galaxy.
Astronomers estimate that several interstellar objects – objects originating in other solar systems – pass inside the orbit of Earth each year. By one estimate, 10,000 pass inside the orbit of Neptune on any given day. They all passed unseen, for billions of years, until recently. Astronomers in Hawaii happened upon the first interstellar object – now officially called 1I/’Oumuamua – in late 2017. An amateur astronomer, Gennadiy Borisov, spotted the second one on August 30, 2019, using a 26-inch (0.65-meter) telescope he designed and built himself. This second object was officially named 2I/Borisov by the International Astronomical Union in late September. The “I” stands for interstellar. The “2” means it’s the second such object known to astronomers. It’s still rushing toward its encounter with our sun and will pass closest to our sun – at a distance of about two astronomical units (AU), or about twice the Earth-sun distance – on December 8, 2019.
As it sweeps through our neighborhood of space, astronomers are rushing to study this object. This week (October 14, 2019), the Hubble Space Telescope released the image above of 2I/Borisov. Also, astronomers in Poland published the first peer-reviewed paper about it, discussed below.
New Hubble Space Telescope image of comet 2I/Borisov. The image above was acquired on October 12, 2019, when the object was approximately 260 million miles (420 million km) from Earth. It shows why, unlike ‘Oumuamua, which was hard to distinguish as either definitely asteroid-like or definitely comet-like, the second interstellar object is now confirmed as a comet from another solar system. The Hubble image reveals a very comet-like central concentration of dust around a solid icy nucleus. Astronomer David Jewitt of UCLA, leader of the Hubble team who observed the object, explained in a statement:
Whereas ‘Oumuamua looked like a bare rock, Borisov is really active, more like a normal comet. It’s a puzzle why these two are so different.
Amaya Moro-Martin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, added:
Because another star system could be quite different from our own, the comet could have experienced significant changes during its long interstellar journey. Yet its properties are very similar to those of the solar system’s building blocks, and this is very remarkable.
NASA also explained a bit about where these objects come from:
Observations by Hubble and other telescopes have shown that rings and shells of icy debris encircle young stars where planet formation is underway. A gravitational interaction between these comet-like objects and other massive bodies could hurtle them deep into space where they go adrift among the stars.
Future Hubble observations of 2I/Borisov are planned through January 2020, with more being proposed.
This illustration depicts the trajectory of 2I/Borisov, formerly called C/2019 Q4. Now considered the 2nd known interstellar object – and 1st confirmed comet from another solar system – it will approach no closer to Earth than about 190 million miles (300 million km) before returning again to interstellar space.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
First peer-reviewed paper about 2I/Borisov. Meanwhile, researchers at Jagiellonian University in Kraków in Poland this week published a new study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy asserting that – although comet 2I/Borisov appears to be an outcast from another star system – its properties determined so far are “surprisingly familiar.” Researchers Piotr Guzik and Michal Drahus were well prepared for a visit by this second interstellar object, having created a computer program to look for such objects following the earlier visit of ‘Oumuamua. Their program – nicknamed Interstellar Crusher – scanned:
… tirelessly through online data of newly-found comets and asteroids in search of guests from far away. On September 8, 2019, at 04:15 Universal Time, the program issued a red alert and notified the team of a possible new hyperbolic object arriving from interstellar space.
Piotr Guzik explained:
This code was written specifically for this purpose, and we really hoped to receive this message one day. We only didn’t know when.
As it turned out, the second interstellar object had been first spotted by Gennady Borisov a week earlier, although its identity had been unknown at that time. It was only when astronomers around the world began studying the object’s orbit that its interstellar origin was confirmed. Guzik and Drahus, meanwhile, lost no time in scrutinizing images of the object, acquired by telescopes in various parts of the world. Drahus said:
We immediately noticed the familiar coma and tail that were not seen around ‘Oumuamua. This is really cool because it means that our new visitor is one of these mythical and never-before-seen ‘real’ interstellar comets.
How do astronomers know that ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov don’t belong in the sun’s family of objects? The answer is the shape of their orbits. This illustration shows a hyperbolic comet orbit. By definition, this sort of orbit means an object will travel through the solar system only once.
Now that astronomers have published a paper about them, the comet-like characteristics of 2I/Borisov might seem obvious … yet they’re profound. The comet-like nature of 2IBorisov is direct proof – proof we in our lifetimes could reach out and touch, if we had the will and wherewithal to launch a spacecraft to this object fast enough – that the assumptions of astronomers have been correct all along. Nature does, apparently, operate in other solar systems as it does in our solar system. Our sun and its solar system are, indeed, likely very ordinary. Our neighborhood of space is likely just one example among hundreds of billions of similar systems in this star-island we call the Milky Way.
Prior to 2I/Borisov, all catalogued comets have come, NASA said, from:
… either from a ring of icy debris at the periphery of our solar system, called the Kuiper belt, or from the Oort cloud, a shell of icy objects which is thought to be in the outermost regions of our solar system, with its innermost edge at about 2000 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.
Now that astronomers are beginning to spot them, 2I/Borisov and ‘Oumuamua – whose name means “scout” – mark the beginning of what’s likely to be many more discoveries of interstellar objects. As NASA explained:
There may be thousands of such interstellar objects here at any given time; most, however, are too faint to be detected with present-day telescopes.
And, who knows, if we’re lucky we may eventually spot an interstellar object that isn’t a natural object at all. After all, our Voyager spacecraft are now heading outward from our solar system into interstellar space, with their golden records containing images of Earth, greetings in 55 languages, music, and an EEG showing the brain waves of a woman in love.
Bottom line: The second known interstellar object has been categorized as a comet and officially named 2I/Borisov. The Hubble Space Telescope released an image of it this week, showing it as distinctly comet-like. Astronomers in Poland published the first peer-reviewed paper about it, confirming its comet-like characteristics.
Light from a distant star system has begun to dim, prompting some scientists to examine whether it might be a sign of alien life.
The star system in question, HD 139139, lies some 350 million light years from Earth, in the Libra constellation.
Scientists believe the system is home to a pair of stars that are bound to one another, given the joint nickname 'Random Transiter,' which have been observed frequently dimming over the last several months.
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Stars that have been observed to frequently dim have been hypothetically linked to possible alien activity
The Kepler Space Telescope recorded 28 instances of random dimming over an 87-day period suggesting that something potentially interesting is happening.
There can be many different causes for stars dimming, according to a SFGate report, including debris floating in front of the star, or one of the 28 planets that orbit Random Transiter passing by.
Another possibility is that aliens have constructed some sort of technology that regularly interferes with the light emitted by the stars.
That option is perhaps the least likely, but it can't be definitely ruled out.
In 2017, scientists wondered whether the rapid dimming of Tabby's Star (pictured above) was being caused by alien megastructures
TABBY'S STAR
Tabby's Star, known officially as KIC 8462852, has baffled experts since it was discovered in 2015.
Observations revealed its light dimmed regularly, as do distant stars when their planets pass in front of them.
But while the stars of most exoplanet systems are seen to dim by a few per cent, KIC 8462852 dimmed by more than 20 per cent over periods of months.
Some have claimed this dimming could be evidence of a Dyson Sphere – a hypothetical structure which could be used by an advanced alien race to harness the energy of a star.
Scientists remain skeptical, offering that the dimming could be explained by a dust ring around the star or a hail of comets passing in between the star and Earth.
In a forthcoming paper, researchers at UC Berkeley point to all the unusual activity coming from HD 139139 as a reason to make it a focus of study.
'The mystery behind the origin of these events makes this system an interesting target for technosignature searches,' the group says in the paper, to be published in Research Notes of the American.
In the past, a number of other instances of star dimming have been linked to the potential existence of alien life.
In 2017, researchers investigated where the rapid dimming of Tabby's star might have been caused by an 'alien megastructure.'
In the end, they determined it was likely caused by microscopic fine dust that scattered the starlight.
Last year, a team of researchers from Harvard and Yale went so far as to suggest the idea of trying to dim our own home star, the sun, as a way of fighting climate change.
Using a technique called stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), researchers would deliver sulfates into the atmosphere with balloons and high altitude planes.
The sulfates would theoretically disperse the light from the sun.
The idea was strictly hypothetical, with an estimated starting cost of $3.5 billion.
As with a first encounter with alien life, scientists were unsure whether the longterm outcome would be better or worse.
A view of Tabby's Star taken from the Kepler Space Telescope
WHAT IS A DYSON SPHERE?
A suggested method for harnessing the power of an entire star is known as a Dyson sphere.
First proposed by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, this would be a swarm of satellites that surrounds a star.
They could be an enclosed shell, or spacecraft spread out to gather its energy - known as a Dyson swarm.
If such structures do exist, they would emit huge amounts of noticeable infrared radiation back on Earth.
But as of yet, such a structure has not been detected.
The Dyson Ring, left, is the simplest form of Dyson structure. Creating a Dyson bubble would be an incredible engineering challenge but it is considered to be far more feasible than surrounding a star in a rigid sphere
Somewhere in the galaxy, a white dwarf star suddenly started shining brightly. And now we understand the violent cataclysm that caused it: the star's gravitational field tore the asteroid to bits, scattering its metallic bits in a shiny halo around the star.
There's no telescope video of an asteroid shattering across space. But here's what we do know: There's a white dwarf star in our galaxy that, for years, emitted a consistent amount of mid-infrared (MIR) light. Then, in 2018, these emissions changed. Over the course of six months, the starlight from that point in space got about 10% more intense in the MIR spectrum — and that point is still getting brighter. The researchers think that's because of a newly formed cloud of metallic dust between Earth and the star, likely due to the recent breakup of the asteroid.
To an outsider, it may sound counterintuitive that a cloud of dust would make a star look brighter. But Tinggui Wang, an astronomer at the University of Science and Technology of China and lead author of a paper describing the event, said the brightening makes sense if you think about how the star and the cloud interact.
"When the debris are on our line of sight to the star, it would make the star dim," he told Live Science. "However, the [individual pieces of] debris cover only a small fraction of the sky, so the chance of being on the line of sight is small."
However, although individual pieces of debris are small and each cover only a tiny patch of sky, the whole cloud is large — much larger than the star. Under normal conditions, only photons that fly out of the star directly at Earth reach human telescopes. But the cloud changes that. Beams of light aimed in all sorts of directions strike the cloud of the debris, heating it up and causing the bits of asteroid to emit MIR light. That light reaches Earth too, even though the beams of light that caused it normally wouldn't have. The result is a bigger glowing region of the sky that our telescopes register as a spike in light, Wang said.
Imagine a faint flashlight in the distance on a clear night. If it's pointed right at you, you might notice it as a thin dot of light. But if you shine the flashlight through the billowing steam of a fog machine, there's a much bigger, bright object to catch your eye — even if the power of the light source stays the same.
Astronomers have seen clouds of debris like this before in space, said Malena Rice, an expert in the astronomy of debris disks around distant stars and doctoral student in the Yale University Department of Astronomy. And they've seen evidence of nonspherical objects, likely asteroids orbiting objects outside our solar system — possibly another white dwarf. But this may be the first time astronomers have spotted an asteroid disintegrating into a debris cloud around a star.
"This process has been theorized for over a decade," Rice, who wasn't involved in the research, told Live Science. "But we've never had a chance to study the full disruption process in action until now."
So, what could have ripped the asteroid to bits? Wang and his colleagues concluded that it was likely a gravitational effect called tidal disruption.
"A white dwarf is a very compact star," Wang said. "As such, close to the star, the gradient of the gravitational field can be very large," meaning gravity can change sharply over a short space.
Imagine you were floating in space, orbiting a star with your feet pointed toward it. The gravity on your feet would be greater than the gravity on your shoulders. If you're standing on Earth right now, you're experiencing the same effect, though the difference — the gradient — is so minimal that you don't notice it.
In the steep gravitational fields close to white dwarfs, Wang said, gradients can become so intense that they overwhelm forces holding an object together. Large asteroids are glued together with their own gravity, but that gravity isn't as strong as the gradients close to white dwarfs. When asteroids pass through those tidal regions, astronomers believe, they shatter, smearing across space as a cloud.
This is related to the reason some planets are surrounded by rings of dust, and not just moons, Rice said. The weaker tidal forces of large planets can keep the matter in their rings from clumping together into balls.
The astronomers are certain the debris wasn't from a comet in this case, Wang said, because comets move so fast that the debris would quickly leave the immediate warm neighborhood around the star and cool down. It's possible that a rocky planet blew up, he said, but the researchers believe a smaller, asteroid-sized object is more likely. (The precise distinction between a large asteroid and a small planet can be a bit vague. But when it comes to other star systems astronomers usually use "exoasteroid" to refer to smaller, jagged metal and rock objects and "exoplanet" to refer to objects large enough that their gravity has formed them into spheres.
Right now, the debris cloud is still circling the star, which goes by the name WD 0145+234. Over time, though, that cloud is likely to fall onto the stellar surface, Wang said. That infalling debris, made of metal and perhaps some warm gas, could explain how many white dwarfs end up with evidence of significant metal pollution in their starlight.
The research has not yet been peer reviewed and was published online Oct. 10 in the preprint journal arXiv.
Not long ago, we shared the news of two Romanian inventors who claim to have built a working prototype of what could be the world’s first fully functional hypersonic flying saucer. This week, military aviation site Alert-5 caused quite a buzz among UFO and aviation enthusiasts when it shared several images of a curiously shaped craft it labeled a “Chinese UFO.” The following day, state-run Chinese media outlet Global Times wrote that the attack chopper has a name: the “Super Great White Shark.”
Cutaway schematic of the 'Super Great White Shark' found on Chinese internet
Described as a “sci-fi like aircraft “ by Chinese media, designers say the Super Great White Shark’s “high-speed and stealth capabilities could give the weapon an edge on the battlefield.” But aerospace engineers and aviation historians say that the aircraft’s design isn’t new, and that it’s unlikely it’ll ever actually get very far off the ground.
Making its big debut at last week’s China Helicopter Exposition in Tianjin, a nearby information placard described the rotorcraft as an “armed helicopter” featuring “a composite wing-body fusion high-speed helicopter configuration designed for the future digital information battlefield.” Also dubbed “Super Jaws” by Chinese media, designers say the craft “refers to the international excellent and mature helicopter design technologies” and specifically names the US’s AH-64 Apache and CH-53 Sea Stallion, along with Russia’s Ka-52 and Mi-26. It’s unknown how these other traditional rotorwing designs compare with the “The Great White Shark,” As two of the listed models are attack helicopters, and the others are heavy transport aircraft.
English translations from an accompanying schematic say the"Super Great White Shark" will capable of traveling a little over 400 mph with a maximum ceiling of almost 20,000 feet. The concept rotorcraft has “two turbojet engines that could provide huge horizontal thrust for high speed movement”and the “fuselage is coated with stealth materials,” claims Chinese media
While designers describe the craft as making use of “internationally popular wing-body fusion design’ to create “a new type of high-speed helicopter,” at present, the Super Great White Shark doesn’t appear to show many differences from ducted-fan aircraft designs attempted and later abandoned by the United States military over 60 years ago.
SCHEMATIC DIAGRAM OF THE CRAFT
Using the same general concept to achieve lift and thrust as conventional rotor based aircraft, instead of mounting propellers on the outside, ducted-fan vehicles contain internal propellers within a larger housing. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Army and NASA experimented with several aircraft with ducted-fan based propulsion systems. It was relatively quickly determined that, in comparison to conventional airplanes and helicopters, there were no real advantages to a ducted-fan based aircraft.
Notably, the Super Great White Shark bears a striking resemblance to the U.S. Air Force, and later Army’s, most famous attempt at creating a saucer-shaped aircraft and the Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar. Not technically based on ducted-fan propulsion, the Avrocar attempted to use the so-called Coanda effect by using three jet blowing exhausts through the craft’s circular rim to achieve lift and thrust. When initial Air Force visions of a Mach 3.5 fighter called the “Y-2” were deemed dangerously unrealistic, the Army envisioned a tempered version of the flying saucer design—the Avrocar—as being a single replacement for both the jeep and helicopter. After three years of development, the Avrocar program was cancelled, with the saucer shaped craft never traveling more than 35mph and 3 feet off the ground.
THE AVROCAR.
IMAGE: US AIR FORCE NATIONAL MUSEUM
Even with one of the more recent promising flying saucer designs, the All Directions Flying Object or ADIFO, designers admit their novel approach of using vectored jet-propulsion is merely a prototype and presently is little more than a remote control drone.
Admittedly still a prototype itself, China hasn’t explained exactly how Super Great White Shark will succeed where all others have failed.
Nevertheless, developers say it will be ready to take its maiden flight at the 2020 Airshow China, in the South China Guangdong Province town of Zhuhai.
ALIENS BESPIONEREN ONS MOGELIJK VANAF QUASI-SATELLIETEN
ALIENS BESPIONEREN ONS MOGELIJK VANAF QUASI-SATELLIETEN
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Als aliens ons hebben opgemerkt en net zo nieuwsgierig zijn als wij, lijkt het niet ondenkbaar dat ze ons vanaf ruimtestenen nabij de aarde begluren.
Met dat idee komt de Amerikaanse wetenschapper James Benford op de proppen. In een paper – verschenen in het blad The Astronomical Journal – pleit hij er dan ook voor om de zoektocht naar aliens wat dichter bij huis te beginnen en ook deze nabije ruimtestenen af te speuren naar tekenen van buitenaards leven.
Quasi-satellieten Het idee dat aliens ons begluren, is niet nieuw. Al in de jaren zestig opperden onderzoekers dat geavanceerde buitenaardse beschavingen wel eens kunstmatig intelligente spionageapparatuur konden inzetten op of nabij bewoonde werelden om zo de ontwikkeling op die werelden te kunnen volgen. En ook in sciencefiction komen we dergelijke buitenaardse gluurders wel tegen. Tot op heden is er echter nog niet actief naar deze gluurders gezocht. En Benford stelt dat daar verandering in moet komen. Hij wijst erop dat nabij de aarde verschillende ruimtestenen te vinden zijn die perfect zicht bieden op onze planeet en dus uitermate geschikt zijn als uitkijkplaats voor aliens. Hij denkt dan met name aan quasi-satellieten (zie kader). Dit zijn geen echte satellieten, maar natuurlijke objecten die net zoveel tijd nodig hebben om een rondje rond de zon te voltooien als onze planeet. “Het betekent dat het object gedurende heel wat omloopbanen dicht bij de planeet blijft,” zo schrijft Benford. “Deze objecten nabij de aarde zijn de ideale plek om onze wereld vanaf een veilig, natuurlijk object te bekijken.”
Aardse quasi-satellieten
De aarde heeft meerdere quasi-satellieten. Voorbeelden zijn Cruithne – ongeveer 2 kilometer groot en nadert de aarde tot een afstand van 12 miljoen kilometer – en Kamo’oalewa – met een diameter van 40 tot 100 meter de kleinste, maar ook de dichtstbijzijnde en meest stabiele quasi-satelliet van de aarde die ons bekend is. De meeste quasi-satellieten vergezellen de aarde maar tijdelijk. Tijdelijk is in dit geval echter een vrij ruim begrip. Zelfs de quasi-satelliet met de meest onstabiele baan trekt bijna 1000 jaar met de aarde op. En de meeste quasi-satellieten doen dat dus nog veel langer; soms wel duizenden of zelfs honderdduizend jaar. Aangezien de meeste quasi-satellieten pas vrij recent zijn gevonden, is de verwachting dat er nog meer op ontdekking wachten.
Benford verwacht niet direct daadwerkelijk aliens op deze ruimtestenen aan te treffen. Hij acht het aannemelijker dat er buitenaardse robotische spionageapparatuur te vinden is. Deze apparatuur kan daar heel lang geleden reeds door aliens zijn geplaatst. “Als de apparatuur een goede energiebron heeft en en in staat is om zichzelf te repareren, dan kan deze over heel lange tijdschalen informatie verzamelen en terugsturen naar waar deze vandaan komt.”
Detecteren In principe zou het mogelijk moeten zijn om deze robotische ‘lurkers’ – zoals Benford ze noemt – te detecteren. Bijvoorbeeld door de quasi-satellieten met behulp van radio- en optische telescopen te bestuderen. De robotische apparatuur zou zich al prijs kunnen geven doordat deze zonlicht op een aparte manier reflecteert. Ook zouden we actief op zoek kunnen gaan naar signalen die deze ‘lurkers’ naar hun thuiswereld versturen. Een andere mogelijkheid is dat we zelf – op goed geluk – een signaal naar deze quasi-satellieten sturen, in de hoop dat de robotische sondes die aliens daar wellicht hebben geplaatst, reageren. We kunnen ook nog een stap verder gaan en zelf sondes of zelfs een bemande missie naar een quasi-satelliet sturen en zo ter plekken op jacht gaan naar sporen van buitenaards leven. Benford wijst er in het kader hiervan op dat bijvoorbeeld de quasi-satelliet 2016 HO3 binnen bereik ligt. “Misschien (…) luisteren de (buitenaardse, red.) sondes wel op ons en wachten ze tot we ze gevonden hebben.”
Dichtbij huis Als we de plannen van Benford tot uitvoer zouden brengen, zou de zoektocht naar aliens zich een stuk dichter naar de aarde verplaatsen. “Een goede reden om dichter bij de aarde te kijken, is dat we in de rest van het zonnestelsel niets gezien hebben,” stelt Benford. “En we hebben ook niets zien communiceren vanaf nabijgelegen sterren.” Bijna haastig voegt hij daaraan toe dat de schijnbare afwezigheid van aliens in en in de directe nabijheid van ons zonnestelsel niet tegen de aanwezigheid van buitenaardse spionageapparatuur op nabijgelegen ruimtestenen pleit. “(Buitenaardse, red.) beschavingen hoeven zich niet dicht bij het zonnestelsel te bevinden om ergens in de laatste eeuwen een sonde naar ons toe te kunnen hebben gestuurd. Stel je voor dat een sonde met een snelheid van een tiende van het licht gelanceerd wordt – iets wat conceptueel zeker mogelijk is, bijvoorbeeld met behulp van lichtzeilen of kernfusie-raketten – dan zou zo’n sonde ons vanaf 30 lichtjaar afstand binnen ongeveer 300 jaar kunnen bereiken. Binnen een straal van zo’n 100 lichtjaar bevinden zich zo’n 3000 Hoofdreekssterren (waartoe ook de zon wordt gerekend, red.), dus genoeg mogelijkheden voor buitenaardse beschavingen.”
Maar misschien wel het meest sterke argument voor het zoeken naar sporen van buitenaards leven op quasi-satellieten is dat we eigenlijk niets te verliezen hebben. “We zouden pas ontdekte objecten bestuderen die heel interessant zijn voor de astronomie en waar nog niemand echt naar gekeken heeft en waar we bijna niets van weten.” Kortom: zelfs als er geen spionage-apparatuur op de quasi-satellieten rust, kan de zoektocht ernaar van grote waarde blijken voor de astronomie. En mochten er wél ‘lurkers’ op quasi-satellieten worden aangetroffen, dan kunnen deze ons niet alleen meer vertellen over een tot op heden onbekende buitenaardse beschaving, maar ook veel meer onthullen over onszelf. Want stel je eens voor dat zo’n ‘lurker’ onze planeet al duizenden jaren observeert en al die informatie tevens lokaal heeft opgeslagen. Dan kan deze ons ook veel meer vertellen over onze eigen geschiedenis. “Zo verkennen we met het bestuderen van objecten nabij de aarde mogelijk zowel ruimte als tijd,” aldus Benford.
A new and very mysterious organism has found a new home in a large tank at the Paris Zoological Park. Nicknamed the “blob” after a 1958 horror movie, its official scientific name is Physarum polycephalum or “many-headed slime”. The yellow-colored slime is a unicellular living being that looks similar to a fungus but reacts like an animal.
This organism has been on Earth for approximately 500 million years longer than humans and has many mysterious features like the fact that it has almost 720 genders. Another amazing feature is that after being cut in half, it can heal itself in just two minutes. Additionally, it has no eyes, no mouth, and no stomach; however, it knows how to detect food and can digest it. It can also procreate on its own.
The organism’s scientific name translates to “many-headed slime”.
Although it appears to stay in one spot, it does move approximately one centimeter (or 0.4 inches) every hour looking for prey (mushroom spores, bacteria, and more microbes). The organism is normally found on leaves that are decaying, as well as tree trunks in the woods where the air is cool and moist.
Bruno David, who is the director of the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, stated, “The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature’s mysteries,” adding, “It surprises us because it has no brain but is able to learn and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other.”
Researchers conducted an experiment in 2016 that found the mold could in fact learn things. They taught the mold to move across a bridge that had been lined with salt. Prior to this experiment, the mold wouldn’t go near salt. What’s even more incredible is that when they put the mold together with another mold that was not taught to cross the bridge, the first organism passed on what it learned to the other. Scientists believe that a type of “vein” that is created when the two organisms combine together is what allows the first mold to pass on its knowledge to the other one.
The blob can learn things and pass its knowledge on to other organisms.
Another incredible fact about the blob is that it’s extremely hard to kill. When it feels as if it’s in danger, it dries itself out in a type of hibernation and after receiving just a few drops of water, it immediately comes back to life. And it can grow to incredible sizes, as one lab grew a blob that was 33 feet in width.
“The blob is really one of the most extraordinary things that live on Earth today,” expressed David, who went on to say, “It has been here for millions of years, and we still do not really know what it is. We don’t really know if it’s an animal, if it’s a fungus or if it’s something between the two.” (A picture of the “blob” can be seen here.)
David Bowie sang about it. Ray Bradbury wrote about it. Elon Musk dreams about it being him. The possibility of life existing on Mars has intrigued humans ever since the red dot in the sky was called a planet and given a name. But no one – that includes robotic rovers – has ever proven without a doubt that there is life on Mars. Now, an ex-NASA scientist who worked on the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions to the Red Planet in the mid 1970s is claiming that life – or something that looked an awful lot like it – was discovered by the Viking landers but NASA dismissed all of the positive signs when it couldn’t duplicate them in an Earth laboratory. Now he wants the agency to send life detection equipment to Mars again. Wait a minute … you mean in 43 years NASA has NEVER sent life-detection instruments back to Mars? Is this a cover-up?
“NASA concluded that the LR had found a substance mimicking life, but not life. Inexplicably, over the 43 years since Viking, none of NASA’s subsequent Mars landers has carried a life detection instrument to follow up on these exciting results.”
In an article published in Scientific American, Gilbert V. Levin — an engineer and inventor and the principal investigator for the Labeled Release life detection experiment on NASA’s Viking missions to Mars – claims that what the landers found in two locations 4,000 miles apart couldn’t be anything BUT life forms, yet NASA pays lip service to a life-detection mission but has no plans for one, even after the Curiosity rover last year found organic matter in 3-billion-year-old mudstone and recently found evidence of salty lakes where organisms could live. Levin explains his frustration.
“Life on Mars seemed a long shot. On the other hand, it would take a near miracle for Mars to be sterile. NASA scientist Chris McKay once said that Mars and Earth have been “swapping spit” for billions of years, meaning that, when either planet is hit by comets or large meteorites, some ejecta shoot into space. A tiny fraction of this material eventually lands on the other planet, perhaps infecting it with microbiological hitch-hikers. That some Earth microbial species could survive the Martian environment has been demonstrated in many laboratories. There are even reports of the survival of microorganisms exposed to naked space outside the International Space Station (ISS).”
Swapping spit? That gives me an idea!
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in many scientific writings, Gilbert V. Levin has presented evidence which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Viking LR experiments detected living organisms metabolizing in a solution known to reliably detect life. Furthermore, subsequent missions have found methane, surface water, formaldehyde, ammonia and other substances needed for life as well as physical formations that indicate life. In fact, as he states in his article:
“No factor inimical to life has been found on Mars.” (Inimical: hostile or adverse.)
In conclusion, Gilbert V. Levin sees no other way to rule but:
“… the Viking LR did find life.”
Is he right? Why has NASA continued to look on Mars for evidence of past life, but not present life? The instruments are available and ready to go. What are they waiting for?
Even if Martians are just Earth spit, we have a right to know.
These two UFOs disguised as clouds were seen over Iceland this week. The closest UFO...which is egg shaped is hovering over some old houses. This makes me highly suspicious that the UFOs are scanning the inhabitants in order to learn more about human activity. They may even be abducting some people and then returning them all in a few minutes whiteout them ever knowing it happened. Although such a phenomenon is known as "missing time," it can happen so fast that no such time is missing at all. The chances that the egg shaped craft is abducting someone is extraordinarily high. I made one photo into a negative format above in order to see more detail of the UFOs. Scott C. Waring
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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