100 Meter UFO Shoots Over Volcano In Mexico On Live Cam, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: April 21, 2020

Location of sighting: Volcano Popocatepetl, Mexico

 

Here is a great example of a triangle UFO passing over the mouth of Popocatepetl, a volcano in Mexico. It has been long believed that this volcano holds an underground alien base 5km below its surface. An ancient civilization of aliens that have existed there for tens of thousands of years. 

 

If we compare the size of the UFO with the mouth of the volcano, we can find its true size. The mouth is about 600 meters across and this UFO is about 1/6 the size of the mouth...thats 100 meters across! 

 

When I added focus and shadows to the UFO, it turns into a triangle craft. Many triangle UFOs have been reported from around the world. The shape of this one is unmistakable...its a triangle. This is 100% a real alien craft passing over the volcano. Not a single doubt in my mind about this. 

Scott C. Waring - Tawian

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18-05-2020 om 16:03 geschreven door peter  

On May 15, 2020, the ISS live cam captured an extremely odd object that hovers above the cloud formations. 

If you look at the object, it doesn't look like a cloud, but rather a solid object, suggesting it could be a cloaked UFO.

  

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18-05-2020 om 15:48 geschreven door peter  

Triangle formation in the sky above Kelso, UK 17-May-2020

This interesting UFO video of a bright unidentified flying object in triangular formation was filmed over Kelso in UK yesterday.

Witness report: 

I saw something last night that I’d like to share. This is in Kelso, Scottish borders. I could only see the white light that twinkled like a bright star and burned out like a flame and repeated that sequence which led me to record it, I was stunned. 17th May 2020 at 22.14 as you see in the video there are three lights of different colours. I couldn’t hear any sounds, it was windy so I assumed it to be a street light, but there is not street lighting up there!
I was freaked out, my sister suggested it might be a satellite but I read that satellites dont flash like that did, she said the video is beautiful and I shouldn’t be afraid!
I was too frightened to film any more

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18-05-2020 om 15:17 geschreven door peter  

An Unidentified object (UFO) in a quad diamond formation recorded hovering over a building complex in Texas

The people of El Paso (Texas) were left in a state of panic when an unusual sighting was recorded at the night time. They witnessed something which could only be explained by taking the mystical perspective. In a first ever witness account of this type, a pair of flashing lights in a diamond formation was seen hovering above a building complex by the people living in nearby areas. Initially, only three lights in a triangular pattern were visible but after a few seconds, the fourth light also gained luminescence, thereby completing the square formation.

Looking at the vast spread of lights, it can be plausibly said that whatever it was, it had a prodigious stature. One could also see a fifth light following the square formation and it could mean to represent a long flank that trailed back from the square body, just like in a helicopter. Based on the orientation of the lights, and their distance from one another, the size of the “UFO” can easily be imagined and it is way bigger than anyone that what the people of earth are familiar with.

Check out more UFO sightings from Texas state.

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18-05-2020 om 15:11 geschreven door peter  

2 linked UFOs over Mississauga, Canada 15-May-2020

Check out this UFO video that was filmed over Mississauga in Ontario, Canada on 15th May 2020. Adding to the very few sightings recorded from Province of Canada, a pair of blinking lights was seen flying across the State of Ontario. It left the viewers in a state of complete awe as they had not seen anything of this sort before in their life.

The two big dots of lights just floating in the sky could have been two different UFOs or a single big UFO with two rear lights. The absolute synchronicity in which they moved reinforces the possibility of the latter theory being more true. But after flying for about 1 minute, the two lights started blinking in an unrecognisable pattern. Maybe the spaceship was trying to establish contact with others in their herd.

One theory also states that the two visible lights could have been combustion thrusters, which help to keep the space ship afloat. The blinking could then denote an attempt to alter the altitude or the orientation of the space ship. After about two minutes, one of the lights shut off and disappeared from the screen while the other still stay on for about 1 more minute before completely vanishing into the darkness.

Witness report: 

Two orange lights flying in what seemed to be in formation then disappearing possibly into the clouds. Two orange lights flying in what seemed to be in formation then disappearing possibly into the clouds. Lasted about three minutes from when I first saw them.

Check out this amazing book about the top 10 UFO cases in the history.

Get your’s on Amazon: Top 10 UFO Sightings: Best Cases: Aliens are visiting us

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18-05-2020 om 15:07 geschreven door peter  

Solid UFO over Mexican-USA border / Eagle Pass, Texas |2020

This UFO was filmed over Eagle Pass, Texas on 24th January 2020. A College student from Texas recored a rather mysterious object sailing through the skies. He spotted it just as he was approaching his school to attend his class.

At first glance, he thought it was a bird, but when he looked carefully, the object seemed nothing like a bird but was perfectly round in shape. It could have been a balloon left loose by someone, but the way it moved without being deflected by the wind proved that it was something heavier than the balloon, perhaps a Metal balloon.

The denizens of this planet have never even imagined, let alone witness, a flying balloon. When this video went viral, many people were flabbergasted at having seen such a bizarre thing floating in their little town, which does not get a lot of Air traffic.

Witness report: 

I was on my way to class already late by 2-3 minutes when I saw this egg shaped object hovering in straight path SE. Object seemed to not make any sound and appeared to be distant from my location around the height I’d normally see helicopter. No commercial traffic flies by as I’m in a small town on the Mexican-American border.

I am doing my best to keep this website updated daily and giving you the latest sightings and news about UFOs. I’m proud to say, that that I keep this website alive from 2009.

If you like our work please help me and make (small) donation here: Click here

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18-05-2020 om 15:01 geschreven door peter  

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18-05-2020 om 01:49 geschreven door peter  

There’s no sound in space. But – working with NASA – musicians and scientists turned a Hubble Space Telescope image of a galaxy cluster into music.

We stumbled on this video via a May 3, 2020, re-post at ScienceAlert. Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida of System Sounds in Toronto – which calls itself “a sci-art outreach project” – created the video. It’s part of NASA’s Astrophysics Visualizations series.

NASA explained the video this way:

Space becomes sonified in this visualization of a cluster of galaxies imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Time flows left to right, and the frequency of sound changes from bottom to top, ranging from 30 to 1,000 hertz. Objects near the bottom of the image produce lower notes, while those near the top produce higher ones. Most of the visible specks are galaxies housing countless stars. A few individual stars shine brightly in the foreground. Stars and compact galaxies create short, clear tones, while sprawling spiral galaxies emit longer notes that change pitch. The higher density of galaxies near the center of the image – the heart of this galaxy cluster, known as RXC J0142.9+4438 – results in a swell of mid-range tones halfway through the video. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 acquired this image on August 13, 2018.

Cool!

Here’s the original Hubble image of galaxy cluster RXC J0142.9+4438, later “sonified” by Russo and Santaguida. NASA wrote: “Galaxies abound in this spectacular Hubble image; spiral arms swirl in all colors and orientations, and fuzzy ellipticals can be seen speckled across the frame as softly glowing smudges on the sky. Each visible speck of a galaxy is home to countless stars. A few stars closer to home shine brightly in the foreground, while a massive galaxy cluster nestles at the very center of the image; an immense collection of maybe thousands of galaxies, all held together by the relentless force of gravity.” 

Read more about this image, which is via ESA/ Hubble & NASA, RELICS.

• Bottom line: Musicians and scientists turned a Hubble Space Telescope image – of galaxy cluster RXC J0142.9+4438 – into music.
• Via ScienceAlert

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18-05-2020 om 01:36 geschreven door peter  

Russian Scientists Warn the Return of the Fallen Angels

The Military and Scientific Committee reports reveal that Russia’s allies, which are India, China, and Brazil, need to defend the Earth because some extraterrestrial entities disguising as Fallen Angels are coming back to the planet.

During World War 2, sources suggest that Soviet Intelligence Services confirmed the strange relationship of Nazis with the so-called “fallen angels or demons.” However, in our oldest records, these entities are known as “gods.”

Fallen Angels have been defeated during the great revolution that wiped out the city-state called Atlantis some 5000 years ago. The devastating event has been recorded in religion and myths as “the great flood.”

Any news related to a series of mysterious craters in Siberia has been classified as a national threat by Vladimir Putin. Also, don’t forget the Chelyabinsk meteorite from 2013.

It appears that the US, with the support of Europe, is making its best effort to demonize Putin and entrap Russia into a battle to invade Siberia and control the old defense system that has been designed to protect Earth from the invasion of these “fallen angels”, that could also be alien beings.

Please watch the video for more detailed information and share your opinions with us.

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18-05-2020 om 01:27 geschreven door peter  

Archaeologists Have Dates Wrong for North American Indigenous History

Columbus famously reached the Americas in 1492. Other Europeans had made the journey before, but the century from then until 1609 marks the creation of the modern globalized world.

This period brought extraordinary riches to Europe , and genocide and disease to indigenous peoples across the Americas.

Table: The Conversation.

Source: Sturt Manning

The European settlement dates and personalities are known from  texts and sometimes  illustrations, to use the failed colony on what was then Virginia’s Roanoke Island as an example.

But one thing is missing. What about indigenous history throughout this traumatic era? Until now, the standard timeline has derived, inevitably, from the European conquerors, even when scholars try to present an indigenous perspective.

This all happened just 400 to 500 years ago – how wrong could the conventional chronology for indigenous settlements be? Quite wrong, it turns out,  based on radiocarbon dating  my collaborators and I have carried out at a number of Iroquoian sites in Ontario and New York state. We’re challenging existing – and rather colonialist – assumptions and mapping out the correct time frames for when indigenous people were active in these places.

Dating Iroquoia project member Samantha Sanft excavating at White Springs, New York. 

(Samantha Sanft and Kurt Jordan,  CC BY-ND / Author provided)

Refining dates based on European goods

Archaeologists estimate when a given indigenous settlement was active based on the absence or presence of certain types of European trade goods, such as metal and glass beads . It was always approximate, but became the conventional history.

Since the first known  commercial fur trading missions were in the 1580s , archaeologists date initial regular appearances of scattered European goods to 1580-1600. They call these two decades Glass Bead Period 1. We know some trade occurred before that, though, since indigenous people Cartier met in the 1530s  had previously encountered Europeans, and were ready to trade  with him.

16th-century European copper alloy beads from two sites in the Mohawk Valley. 

(Image: New York State Museum,  CC BY-ND / Author provided)

Archaeologists set Glass Bead Period 2 from 1600-1630. During this time, new types of glass beads and finished metal goods were introduced, and trade was more frequent.

The logic of dating based on the absence or presence of these goods would make sense if all communities had equal access to, and desire to have, such items. But these key assumptions have not been proven.

That’s why the  Dating Iroquoia Project  exists. Made up of researchers at Cornell University, the University of Georgia and the New York State Museum, we’ve used radiocarbon dating and statistical modeling to date organic materials directly associated with Iroquoian sites in  New York’s Mohawk Valley  and Ontario in Canada .

First we looked at two sites in Ontario: Warminster and Ball. Both are long argued to have had direct connections with Europeans. For instance, Samuel de Champlain likely stayed at the Warminster site in 1615-1616. Archaeologists have found large numbers of trade goods at both sites.

Centuries-old maize sample, ready to be radiocarbon dated. 

(Image: Eva Wild / CC BY-ND )

When my colleagues and I examined and radiocarbon dated plant remains ( maize, bean, plum) and a wooden post, the calendar ages we came up with are entirely consistent with historical estimates and the glass bead chronology. The three dating methods agreed, placing Ball circa 1565-1590 and Warminster circa 1590-1620.

However, the picture was quite different at several other major Iroquois sites that lack such close European connections. Our radiocarbon tests came up with substantially different date ranges compared with previous estimates that were based on the presence or absence of various European goods.

For example, the Jean-Baptiste Lainé, or  Mantle, site  northeast of Toronto is currently the largest and most complex Iroquoian village excavated in Ontario. Excavated between 2003–2005, archaeologists dated the site to 1500–1530 because it lacks most trade goods and had just three European-source metal objects. But our radiocarbon dating now places it  between about 1586 and 1623, most likely 1599-1614 . That means previous dates were off the mark by as much as 50 to 100 years.

Other sites belonging to this same ancestral Wendat community are also more recent than previously assumed. For example, a site called Draper was conventionally dated to the second half of the 1400s, but radiocarbon dating places it at least 50 years later, between 1521 and 1557. Several other Ontario Iroquoian sites lacking large trade good assemblages vary by several decades to around 50 years or so from conventional dates based on our work.

• Thunder god and Skywoman – Myth and History of the Iroquois: Exploring a First Nations Tradition
• The Tragedies that Befell the Five Civilized Tribes that were Forced to Trek the Trail of Tears
• Long-lost Native American Fort of the Norwalk Discovered in Connecticut

Sturt Manning examining a sample in the Cornell Tree Ring Laboratory. 

(Image: Chris Kitchen/Cornell University/ CC BY-ND )

My colleagues and I have also investigated a number of sites in the Mohawk Valley, in New York state. During the 16th and early 17th centuries, the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers formed a key transport route from the Atlantic coast inland for Europeans and their trade goods. Again, we found that radiocarbon dating  casts doubt on the conventional time frame  attributed to a number of sites in the area.

Biases that led to misguided timelines

Why was some of the previous chronology wrong?

The answer seems to be that scholars viewed the topic through a pervasive colonial lens. Researchers mistakenly assumed that trade goods were equally available, and desired, all over the region, and considered all indigenous groups as the same.

To the contrary, it was Wendat custom, for example, that the lineage whose members first discovered a trade route claimed rights to it. Such “ownership” could be a source of power and status. Thus it would make sense to see uneven distributions of certain trade goods, as mediated by the controlling groups. Some people were “in,” with access, and others may have been “out.”

Ethnohistoric records indicate cases of indigenous groups rejecting contact with Europeans and their goods. For example, Jesuit missionaries described an  entire village no longer using French kettles  because the foreigners and their goods were blamed for disease.

Dating Iroquoia Project member Megan Conger excavating at White Springs, New York. Some locations have been under-explored, so far, by archaeologists.

(Image: Megan Conger, Kurt Jordan/ CC BY-ND )

There are other reasons European goods do or do not show up in the archaeological record. How near or far a place was from transport routes, and local politics, both within and between groups, could play a role. Whether Europeans made direct contact, or there were only indirect links, could affect availability. Objects used and kept in settlements could also vary from those intentionally buried in cemeteries.

Above all, the majority of sites are only partly investigated at best, some are as yet unknown. And sadly the archaeological record is affected by the looting and destruction of sites.

Only a direct dating approach removes the Eurocentric and historical lens, allowing an independent time frame for sites and past narratives.

Effects of re-dating indigenous history

Apart from changing the dates for textbooks and museum displays, the re-dating of a number of Iroquoian sites raises major questions about the social, political and economic history of indigenous communities.

For example, conventionally, researchers place the start of a shift to larger and fortified communities, and evidence of increased conflict, in the mid-15th century.

However, our radiocarbon dates find that some of the key sites are from a century later, dating from the mid-16th to start of the 17th centuries. The timing raises questions of whether and how early contacts with Europeans did or did not play a role. This period was also  during the peak of what’s called the Little Ice Age , perhaps indicating the changes in indigenous settlements have some association with climate challenge.

Our new radiocarbon dates indicate the correct time frame; they pose, but do not answer, many other remaining questions.

• Top image: For centuries, indigenous history has been largely told through a European lens.        
• Source: John White, circa 1585-1593, © The Trustees of the British Museum , CC BY-NC-SA
• This article was originally published under the title ‘ Archaeologists have a lot of dates wrong for North American indigenous history – but we’re using new techniques to get it right’ by Sturt Manning on The Conversation , and has been republished under a Creative Commons License

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18-05-2020 om 01:13 geschreven door peter  

Newfound Comet SWAN could soon fizzle out of view

During the next couple of weeks we'll have a chance of seeing a new comet as it sweeps past the sun. 

The comet's name is SWAN, an acronym for the Solar Wind Anisotropies camera on NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Officially designated as C/2020 F8, the comet was discovered by Australian amateur astronomer, Michael Mattiazzo, while exploring SWAN imagery on March 25. 

Comet SWAN initially caught Mattiazzo's attention because it apparently was undergoing a sudden outburst of hydrogen gas — something that SOHO's SWAN instrument is particularly well adapted to picking up. Water ice from the comet's nucleus evaporates as the comet approaches the sun. Solar ultraviolet radiation splits up water molecules, and the liberated hydrogen atoms glow in ultraviolet light. 

• Related: The 9 most brilliant comets ever seen
  

The comet was 135 million miles (217 million kilometers) from the sun when Mattiazzo first saw it, but it will ultimately come to within 40.2 million miles (64.6 million km) of our star when it arrives at its perihelion, its closest point to the sun, on May 27. 

In scanning the Internet I've seen comments about Comet SWAN describing it as (potentially) putting on a "splendid" show in the coming days, and how it could be the "best comet in years" or the "brightest in decades." 

Well ... don't count on that.

Sorry if I sound like the wet blanket at the party, folks, but it seems to me that many who are ballyhooing Comet SWAN as a possible celestial showpiece are forgetting some of the old basics of forecasting what a lot of comets tend to do: Tease us, and more often than not end up underperforming and disappointing. 

In recent days, some very impressive images of Comet SWAN have been making the rounds on different astronomy sites, all showing a comet with a large glowing head (called the "coma"), trailed by a long and beautiful gossamer tail. 

I'm sure that one look at those photographs, combined with the promise that viewers could see such a spectacle with their own eyes, will have many making a special effort to go out and see it for themselves.

But what you see in those photographs, is not what you're going to get.

Is it a dusty comet, or a gassy one? 

Comets are composed of frozen gases — methane, ammonia, water vapor and many others — that are heated as they approach the sun and made to glow by the sun's light, much in the same manner as phosphorescent paint glows under an ultraviolet lamp. Mixed within the gas are particles of mostly fine-grained and dusty material. 

Now the best comets — the ones that put on a good show — contain a lot of dust. Dust, you see, is a very good reflector of sunlight. As the gasses warm and expand, the solar wind (a stream of subatomic particles rushing out from the sun) blows the expanding material out into space to form the comet's beautiful tail. 

If the comet is a dusty one, the coma and resulting tail will be bright and easy to see. On occasion you may even perceive a slight yellow or pinkish tint. The dust may actually lag behind the comet head and impart the shape of a gentle arc. Comet Bennett (1970), Comet West (1976), Comet Hale-Bopp (1997) and Comet McNaught (2007) are all examples of bright and dusty comets. 

But if the comet is primarily composed of gas, it will generally appear much dimmer; more "ghostly" than anything else. Such comets usually appear as nothing more than a fuzzball to the eye, and the resulting tail will tend to be a faint and narrow appendage, stretching straight out from behind the coma. 

Moreover, to the naked eye and even through binoculars or a small telescope, the gas tail (usually of a bluish tint) tends to be so faint that it is hardly evident at all. Ironically, long-exposure photographs will bring out the gaseous tail quite nicely. Such tails can be rather long and stretch for many degrees across the sky, although what the camera sees is deceptive, for visually with your eyes, only a fraction of that length tends to be evident, again because of the faintness of the gas projected against the background of the sky.

Now, guess what type of comet SWAN happens to be? If you said "gas" you're (unfortunately) correct.

It's also a "newbie."

Initially, Comet SWAN looked like it was traveling in a very elongated ellipse with an orbital period in the tens of millions of years; a comet that had been here at least once before. But that doesn't appear to be the case now.  

Rather, Comet SWAN appears to be a "new" comet; a "virgin" from out of the Oort Cloud, a shell of icy bodies at the outskirts of the solar system that is considered the "breeding ground" of comets. New comets, or comets that have not swept around the sun before, travel in parabolic orbits because they literally fall from the depths of space toward the sun in a straight line, swing around the sun and are then flung back out into space. 

Such first-timers have never interacted with the sun before and are covered with very volatile materials such as frozen nitrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. These ices vaporize far from the sun, giving a distant comet a rapid surge in brightness that can raise unrealistic expectations. But once those ices are gone, the comet's rapid brightening dramatically slows.

Once sizzling ... now fizzling?

And that drop in brightness is exactly what has appeared to have happened to Comet SWAN, based on observations taken from the Comet Observation Database (COBS). 

On April 24, the comet was shining at magnitude +7.2, which is too faint to be seen with the naked eye and only accessible with binoculars or telescopes. Magnitude is a measure of the brightness of a star or other celestial body. The brighter the object, the lower the number assigned as a magnitude. The brightest stars are magnitude 0 or +1; the faintest stars visible without optical aid are +6. 

Less than a week later, on April 30, the comet's brightness had surged more than six-fold, reaching magnitude +5.2. By that time, the comet was faintly visible in a dark sky with the unaided eye. But ever since then, the comet's brightening has stalled and even has appeared to dim a little, hovering at around magnitude +5.6. 

"I don't like what I'm seeing in F8 SWAN's light curve," Robert Pickard, a member of the International Comet Quarterly (ICQ), noted in a post to the ICQ Facebook group. "I see an outburst, followed by fading, then some recovery, then more constant fading."

The comet's fuzzy coma appears around 7 arc minutes in diameter — that's roughly one-quarter the apparent size of the moon. In terms of a linear size, that's roughly 107,000 miles (172,000 km) in diameter. 

At perihelion on May 27, early forecasts had the comet reaching a peak brightness of magnitude +3.5 or about as bright as a star of medium brightness. It might still do that if it undergoes another surge, but if not, it could remain at the same level of brightness — or get even dimmer — compared to now.

In a word: faint.

"Now there are two tails, both faint. We will be losing the comet and handing it over to more northerly horizons," longtime skywatcher Stephen O'Meara, who has been observing Comet SWAN from Maun, Botswana, told Space.com. "Hopefully, the dustiness will continue to increase as the comet nears the sun and give you guys a decent dust tail, rather than a domino tail. Fingers crossed."

Where and when to look

From now through early June, Comet SWAN will track north and east from the constellation Triangulum, into Perseus and will enter Auriga on June 1. From now through May 24, your best chance of catching a view of the comet will be in the morning sky. 

Start looking about 60 to 70 minutes before sunrise. Your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees. The comet should appear roughly 10 degrees above the northeast horizon; not likely immediately evident to the unaided eye, so scan the sky with binoculars. 

What you'll be looking for is a diffuse, circular glow, possibly accompanied by a faint tail pointing upward and to the right. 

Then starting on May 25, best chances of seeing the comet will transition to the evening sky. About 60 to 70 minutes after sunset, the comet will be positioned about 10 degrees above the north-northwest horizon, with any semblance of a tail pointing upward and to the left. Perhaps your best shot at getting a glimpse of Comet SWAN will come on the evening of June 2nd to the lower left of the brilliant yellow star Capella. 

Clear skies and good luck! 

• As Comet ATLAS crumbles, Comet SWAN arrives to take its place
• Comet ATLAS disintegrates into pieces as Hubble telescope watches (photos)
• How the 'comet of the century' became an astronomical disappointment

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmers' Almanac and other publications. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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18-05-2020 om 00:37 geschreven door peter  

These lava tubes could be the safest place for explorers to live on Mars

By Rafi Letzter 

The Martian surface is a radiation hot zone. But these lava tubes might offer safety.

Curiosity can handle the harsh radiation on the Martian surface. But people can't.

(Image: © NASA/JPL/MSSS/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer)

There's no safe place to camp out on Mars. But a team of researchers has identified what could be future Martian explorers' best possible hideout: a string of lava tubes in the low-lying Hellas Planitia — an impact basin blasted into the Red Planet's surface by ancient meteor impacts.

Every part of Mars could kill you. Its surface is arid, starved of oxygen and blasted daily with unrelenting, unfiltered solar radiation. Any future Martian explorers will put their lives in peril when they embark. NASA has decades of experience hauling oxygen, food and water beyond Earth. But that last killer, the radiation, is a harder problem to tackle.

On Earth, a powerful magnetic shield, known as the magnetosphere, protects us from the harsh radiation of space. Without it, a constant stream of electromagnetic rays would damage our cells and DNA, with dire consequences to our health. Ionized particles, streaming through space as slower-moving solar wind or relativistic cosmic rays add to that risk. And we know from the experiences of the only humans to exit the magnetosphere — Apollo astronauts — that even a few days' exposure to those particles can trigger headaches, flashes of light and cataracts, the researchers of the new study noted in their new paper. Plus, there's always the risk that a solar flare or cosmic ray burst could expose a Martian habitat to a sudden, deadly dose.

• Related: Here's what NASA's Opportunity rover saw before 'lights out'

There's only so much shielding you can put on a spacecraft or habitat, and even astronauts on the International Space Station accept much higher cancer risk than they would experience on Earth, NASA has said. But in the new paper, that team of researchers argues that the Hellas Planitia lava tubes might be among the safest places for Martian explorers to camp out.

Hellas Planitia offers a few protective advantages on its own: NASA probes have shown that the most intense radiation environments on Mars are at the poles. But Hellas Planitia lies closer to the equator. And of all Martian environments, the impact basin is among the most low-lying at about 23,464 feet (7,152 meters) deep. That means more of Mars' thin atmosphere overhead. About 50% less radiation reaches the basin floor than higher-elevation regions of Mars, the researchers wrote. Explorers could expect about 342 microsieverts per day (a unit of radiation exposure) in the basin, compared with 547 μSv/day elsewhere on Mars. That's a much smaller dose, but still much higher than what's typically considered safe.

The precise effects of long-term exposure to sub-fatal doses of radiation like this aren't well understood, as Richard Kerr wrote for the news section of the journal Science in 2013. But 342 μSv/day is 25% higher than what the average astronauts experience on the ISS every day, where NASA typically limits exposures to just a couple months. Martian explorers might spend years on the Red Planet. And exposure to such a high dose for years on end could pose a serious danger to everyone involved, the researchers said. (The maximum safe radiation dose, according to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission is 620 millirem, or 6,200 μSv, per year. At 342 μSv/day, Martian explorers would experience that much radiation in just 19 days.)

In the northeast corner of Hellas Planitia lies the Hadriacus Mons. This mountain formed as a result of an erupting volcano back when lava still flowed in the long-since-cooled Martian interior.

On Earth, lava flows can burrow through the ground on their way to the surface, leaving behind empty tunnels with hardened walls, floors and ceilings once the molten rock drains away. You can spot signs of them flying overhead: A line of "pit craters" near a dormant volcano tells the story of a lava tube that formed, drained and then partially collapsed in one section or another — sometimes even leaving behind "skylight" holes in the middle of the crater, the researchers wrote.

Hunting through images taken from probes in Mars' orbit, the researchers identified several such pit crater chains and other evidence of old lava flows that burrowed into the Martian crust around Hadriacus Mons. Multiple sites around that low-lying mountain seem like tempting candidates for future exploration, they wrote. And on Mars, with its lower gravity, simulations suggest that the hollowed-out tubes would be much larger than those found on Earth.

Assuming these clues point to the existence of real lava tubes in Hellas Planitia, the researchers visited similar sites in the American Southwest to test the idea of lava tubes as radiation shields. Though cosmic radiation on Earth's surface is much lower than on Mars, some of those particles do make it to our planet's surface. Comparing measurements of radiation inside and outside California's Mojave Aiken tube, Arizona's Lava River Cave, and New Mexico's Big Skylight, Giant Ice Cave and Junction Cave, the researchers found a significant radiation-shielding effect. Extrapolating their results to Mars, they calculated that living in a Hellas lava tube, people might experience just about 61.64 μSv/day. That's still high, but closer to what you could expect if you got your teeth X-rayed several times a day than what you could expect living in a habitat on the surface of Mars.

There are other potential advantages to life in the tubes, the researchers wrote. Shore them up, seal them off, and it might be possible to pressurize them and warm them up to create livable environments much larger than what a rocket could haul from Earth. Like human-made shelters, the tubes would also offer protection from micrometeorites, temperature fluctuations and potentially dangerous substances in the Martian surface dust.

And these explorers could learn more about the Red Planet. "The candidate lava tubes, moreover, can serve as important locations for direct observation and study of Martian geology and geomorphology," the researchers concluded, "as well as potentially uncovering any evidence for the development of microbial life early in the natural history of Mars."

The paper has been accepted for publication in The Journal of The Washington Academy of Sciences and can be read on arXiv.

• The 12 strangest objects in the universe
• The Curiosity rover just took a very emo photo of its rocky Martian prison
• The 15 weirdest galaxies in our universe

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/news }

18-05-2020 om 00:16 geschreven door peter  

17-05-2020 om 23:58 geschreven door peter  

Imagine you are out at an outdoor event, perhaps a BBQ or camping trip and a bug keeps flying by your face. You try to ignore it at first, perhaps lazily swat at it, but it keeps coming back for more. This is nothing unusual, as bugs have a habit of ruining the outdoors for people, but then it lands on your arm. Now you can see it doesn’t exactly look like a regular fly, something is off about it. You lean in, peer down at the little insect perched upon your arm, and that is when you notice that it is peering right back at you, with a camera in place of eyes. Welcome to the future of drone technology, with robotic flies and more, and it is every bit as weird as it sounds.

Everyone is familiar with drones nowadays. They seem to be everywhere, and they are getting smaller and cooler as time goes on, but how small can they really get, some may wonder. Well, looking at the trends in the technology these days, it seems that they can get very small, indeed. One private research team called Animal Dynamics has been working on tiny drones that use the concept of biomechanics, that is, mimicking the natural movements of insects and birds in nature. After all, what better designer is there than hundreds of millions of years of evolution? A prime example of this is one of their drones that aims to copy the shape and movements of a dragonfly, a drone called the “Skeeter.” The drone is launched by hand, its design allows it to maintain flight in high winds of up to more than 20 knots (23mph or 37km/h) due to its close approximation of an actual dragonfly, and its multiple wings give it deft movement control. One of the researchers who helped design it, Alex Caccia, has said of its biomechanical design:

The way to really understand how a bird or insect flies is to build a vehicle using the same principles. And that’s what we set up Animal Dynamics to do. Small drones often have problems maneuvering in heavy wind. Yet dragonflies don’t have this problem. So we used flapping wings to replicate this effect in our Skeeter. Making devices with flapping wings is very, very hard. A dragonfly is an awesome flyer. It’s just insane how beautiful they are, nothing is left to chance in that design. It has very sophisticated flight control.

In addition to its small size and sophisticated controls, the Skeeter also can be equipped with a camera and communications links, using the type of miniaturized tech found in mobile smartphones. Currently the Skeeter measures around 8 inches long, but of course the team is working on smaller, lighter versions. As impressive as it is, Skeeter is not even the smallest insect drone out there. Another model designed by a team at the Delft University of Technology is called the “Delfly,” and weighs less than 50 grams. The Delfly is meant to copy the movements of a fruit fly, and has advanced software that allows it to autonomously fly about and avoid obstacles on its four cutting edge wings, fashioned from ultra-light transparent foil. The drone has been designed for monitoring agricultural crops, and is equipped with a minuscule camera. The team behind the Delfly hope to equip it with dynamic AI that will allow it to mimic the way an insect erratically flies about and avoids objects, and it seems very likely someone could easily mistake it for an actual fly. The only problem it faces at the moment is that it is so small that it has limited battery life, only able to stay aloft for 6 to 9 minutes at a time.

Indeed, this is the challenge that any sophisticated technology faces; the limitations of battery life. There is only so small you can make a battery before its efficiency is compromised, no matter how light and small the equipment, and it is a problem we are stuck with until battery technology is seriously upgraded. In fact, many of the prototype insect drones currently rely on being tethered to an external power source for the time being. But what if your drone doesn’t need batteries at all? That is the idea behind another drone designed by engineers at the University of Washington, who have created a robotic flying insect, which they call the RoboFly, that does not rely on any battery or external power source at all. Instead, the drone, which is about the same weight as a toothpick, rides about on a laser beam. This beam is invisible, and is aimed at a photovoltaic cell on the drone, which is then amplified with a circuit and is enough to power its wings and other components. However, even with such a game changing development, the RoboFly, and indeed all insect-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are usually referred to as micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), still face some big challenges going ahead. Sawyer Fuller, leader of the team that created the RoboFly and director of the slightly ominous sounding Autonomous Insect Robotics Laboratory, has said of this:

A lot of the sensors that have been used on larger robots successfully just aren’t available at fly size. Radar, scanning lasers, range finders — these things that make the perfect maps of the world, that things like self-driving cars use. So we’re going to have to use basically the same sensor suite as a fly uses, a little camera.

However, great progress is being made, and these little drones are becoming more sophisticated in leaps and bounds, with the final aim being a fully autonomous flying insect robot that can more or less operate on its own or with only minimal human oversight. Fuller is very optimistic about the prospects, saying, “For full autonomous I would say we are about five years off probably.” Such a MAV would have all manner of applications, including surveillance, logistics, agriculture, taking measurements in hostile environments that a traditional drone can’t fit into or operating in hazardous environments, finding victims of earthquakes or other natural disasters, planetary exploration, and many others. Many readers might be thinking about now whether the military has any interest in all of this, and the answer is, of course they do.

The use of these MAVs is seen as very promising to the military, and the U.S. government has poured in over a billion dollars of funding into such research. Indeed, Animal Dynamics has been courted by the military with funding, and the creators of the RoboFly have also received generous funding for their research. The U.S. government’s own Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been pursuing the technology for years, as have other countries. On the battlefield MAVs have obvious applications, such as spying and reconnaissance, but they are also seen as having other uses, such as attaching to enemies to serve as tracking devices or very literal “bugs,” attaching tags to enemy vehicles to make targeting easier, taking DNA samples, or even administering poisons or dangerous chemical or biological agents. There are quite a few world governments who are actively pursuing these insect drones, and one New Zealand based strategic analyst, Paul Buchanan, has said of this landscape:

The work on miniaturization began decades ago during the Cold War, both in the USA and USSR, and to a lesser extent the UK and China. The idea then and now was to have an undetectable and easily expendable weapons delivery or intelligence collection system. Nano technologies in particular have seen an increase in research on miniaturized UAVs, something that is not exclusive to government scientific agencies, but which also has sparked significant private sector involvement. That is because beyond the military, security and intelligence applications of miniaturized UAVs, the commercial applications of such platforms are potentially game changing. Within a few short years the world will be divided into those who have them and those who do not, with the advantage in a wide range of human endeavor going to the former.

While so far all of this is in the prototype stages and there are no working models in the field yet as far as we know, some conspiracy theorists believe that this is not even something for down the line in the future, but that the technology is already perfected and being used against an unsuspecting populace at this very moment. For instance, there was a report in 2007 in the Washington Post of several witnesses at an anti-war rally who claimed to have seen tiny drones like dragonflies or bumblebees darting about. One of these witnesses would say:

I look up and I’m like, ‘what the hell is that?’ They looked like dragonflies or little helicopters, but I mean, those are not insects. They were large for dragonflies and I thought, ‘is that mechanical or is that alive?

Such supposed sightings of these tiny drones have increased in recent years, leading to the idea that the technology is already being used to spy on us, but of course the government and research institutes behind it all insist that working models are still a thing of the future. Yet it is still a scary thought, scary enough to instill paranoia, which is only fueled by these reports and others like them. One famous recent meme that caused a lot of panic in 2019 was a post from Facebook user in South Africa, which shows an eerily mosquito-like robot perched on a human finger, accompanied by the text:

Is this a mosquito? No. It’s an insect spy drone for urban areas, already in production, funded by the US government. It can be remotely controlled and is equipped with a camera and a microphone. It can land on you, and may have the potential to take a DNA sample or leave RFID tracking nanotechnology on your skin. It can fly through an open window, or it can attach to your clothing until you take it home.

The post went viral, with rampant speculation on whether it was true or not. The debunking site Snopes came to the conclusion that the photo was fake and it was just a fictional meme, but others are not so sure, igniting the debate again on whether this is or will be a reality, or whether it ever should be. Regardless of the ethical and privacy concerns of having insect sized spy drones flying around, with all of the money and effort being put into this technology, the question of whether we will really have mosquito sized robots buzzing about seems to be not one of if, but of when. Perhaps they are even here already. So the next time you are out at a BBQ and that annoying fly keeps buzzing past your head, you might just want to take a closer look. Just in case.

Videos, selected by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

17-05-2020 om 23:30 geschreven door peter  

Stephen Wagner, writing at liveabout.com says: “One of the most mysterious examples of paranormal phenomena is strange fog or smoke. The appearance of such an unusual cloud – especially if it is strangely colored or has no apparent natural cause – may signal the presence of something otherworldly such as a ghost or a spirit. Mysterious fog and smoke are also associated with vanishings.” He continues: “Such experiences, surprisingly, are not as uncommon as many people might think.” Wagner is not wrong. There are numerous such examples. And, it’s this issue of mysterious fog and mist that I’m taking a look at today. We’ll begin with the eerie story of Anne Owen, who I interviewed on August 11, 2000. Anne had a very strange experience while living in North Wales. It was the night of January 23, 1974. Anne told me the following:

“We had bought two, derelict, four-hundred-year-old cottages which we were converting. This was on a mountain above Trefriw and Llanrwst near the River Conwy. We’d taken a caravan up and a horse, as well, and our two children. We were in the caravan with the children, as we couldn’t move into the cottages yet. That night – January twenty-three – the horse was very restless, so we put him near our caravan. But later in the night he started rocking the caravan and was in a terrible state. Then we suddenly saw this thing outside the window. It was like a white ball, very slow-moving. It was difficult to know how far away from us it was as it was pitch black outside, but it looked about two or three feet wide. Then suddenly there was an enormous bang, absolutely colossal.”

Anne continued: “The only other person who was local to us was an old lady who was staring at it too. Well, she came up to me and said that she’d been woken by the bang. She also lived on the mountain and had gone to her bedroom window and had seen these ‘little men’ that were very small and all dressed in black – about three to four foot tall. She thought, because she’d seen the military on the mountain before that this was something to do with them. But she found it rather odd that they were so small! She described a ‘little gathering’ of them, about four or five, very, very early in the morning and near where the tree was. But she said that they didn’t look too different, only smaller.” Rather notably, Anne added that: “The day before, and the day after, this happened a weird mist came down out of nowhere. This was nothing like a normal mist and I still remember it now [italics mine].”

Howstuffworks wrote an article titled “The Rendlesham Forest Incident.” They say: “…after observers reported strange lights, the deputy base commander, Lt. Col. Charles Halt, led a larger party into Rendlesham. There, Halt measured abnormal amounts of radiation at the original landing site. Another, smaller group, off on a separate trek through the forest, spotted a dancing red light inside an eerily pulsating ‘fog’ [italics mine].” Researcher and writer Brian Dunning says of what was seen at Rendlesham Forest six years later: “Base personnel described the craft they pursued as metal and conical, with a bright red light above and a circle of blue lights below, and suspended in a yellow mist [italics mine].”

Moving away from UFOs: over the course of more than two decades, Linda Godfrey has written a number of excellent books on what many might call werewolves, but which are popularly known as Dogmen. Linda’s books include The Beast of Bray Road, Hunting the American Werewolf, The Michigan Dogman, Werewolves, and Real Wolfmen.In my opinion, Linda’s book Monsters Among Us: An Exploration of Otherworldly Bigfoots, Wolfmen, Portals, Phantoms, and Odd Phenomena is her most ambitious and thought-provoking. Section four of her book is titled “Creatures of Shadows, Mists, and Lights.” And it has that title for a very good reason. As Linda demonstrates on many occasions, where Dogmen are often seen, so are strange and usually small balls of light and mysterious mist. Attempts to photograph the man-wolves are foiled time and again by weird mists and fog that seem to envelop and cloak the locations – thus preventing anything of supernatural significance from being captured for posterity. Some of those mists are of an eerie green color and, on occasion, seem to be the cause of noticeable amounts of “missing time” on the parts of the witnesses. Or, as Ufologist Jenny Randles words it, the Oz-Factor. At times, the witnesses report being plunged into a different reality – an unreality, some might suggest. An almost dream-like world completely lacking in sound and normal surroundings, but filled to the brim with high-strangeness.

UFOs, ghosts, Dogmen, paranormal phenomena, and alien encounters: they all have connections to mysterious mist and strange fog. Does that mean all of those phenomena are somehow interconnected? Maybe. John Keel came to believe that numerous types of supernatural entities – Bigfoot, MIB, ghosts, lake-monsters, phantom black dogs, Djinn, and more – were all part of a bigger picture that we were (and still are) unable to understand or penetrate. In other words, things remain foggy (apologies for the terrible joke!).

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

17-05-2020 om 23:27 geschreven door peter  

How Newborn Stars Prepare for the Birth of Planets

An international team of astronomers used two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world to create more than three hundred images of planet-forming disks around very young stars in the Orion Clouds. These images reveal new details about the birthplaces of planets and the earliest stages of star formation.

ALMA and the VLA observed more than 300 protostars and their young protoplanetary disks in Orion. This image shows a subset of stars, including a few binaries. The ALMA and VLA data compliment each other: ALMA sees the outer disk structure (visualized in blue), and the VLA observes the inner disks and star cores (orange).

This schematic shows a proposed pathway (top row) for the formation of protostars, based on four very young protostars (bottom row) observed by VLA (orange) and ALMA (blue). Step 1 represents the collapsing fragment of gas and dust. In step 2, an opaque region starts to form in the cloud. In step 3, a hydrostatic core starts to form due to an increase in pressure and temperature, surrounded by a disk-like structure and the beginning of an outflow. Step 4 depicts the formation of a class 0 protostar inside the opaque region, that may have a rotationally supported disk and more well-defined outflows. Step 5 is a typical class 0 protostar with outflows that have broken through the envelope (making it optically visible), an actively accreting, rotationally supported disk. In the bottom row, white contours are the protostar outflows as seen with ALMA.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), N. Karnath; NRAO/AUI/NSF, B. Saxton and S. Dagnello

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

17-05-2020 om 22:23 geschreven door peter  

Solar Minimum is Coming

High up in the clear blue noontime sky, the sun appears to be much the same day-in, day-out, year after year.

But astronomers have long known that this is not true. The sun does change. Properly-filtered telescopes reveal a fiery disk often speckled with dark sunspots. Sunspots are strongly magnetized, and they crackle with solar flares—magnetic explosions that illuminate Earth with flashes of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation. The sun is a seething mass of activity.

Until it’s not. Every 11 years or so, sunspots fade away, bringing a period of relative calm.

“This is called solar minimum,” says Dean Pesnell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. “And it’s a regular part of the sunspot cycle.”

The sun is heading toward solar minimum now. Sunspot counts were relatively high in 2014, and now they are sliding toward a low point expected in 2019-2020.

While intense activity such as sunspots and solar flares subside during solar minimum, that doesn’t mean the sun becomes dull. Solar activity simply changes form.

For instance, says Pesnell, “during solar minimum we can see the development of long-lived coronal holes.”

Coronal holes are vast regions in the sun’s atmosphere where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows streams of solar particles to escape the sun as the fast solar wind.

Pesnell says “We see these holes throughout the solar cycle, but during solar minimum, they can last for a long time - six months or more.” Streams of solar wind flowing from coronal holes can cause space weather effects near Earth when they hit Earth’s magnetic field. These effects can include temporary disturbances of the Earth’s magnetosphere, called geomagnetic storms, auroras, and disruptions to communications and navigation systems.

During solar minimum, the effects of Earth’s upper atmosphere on satellites in low Earth orbit changes too.

Normally Earth’s upper atmosphere is heated and puffed up by ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Satellites in low Earth orbit experience friction as they skim through the outskirts of our atmosphere. This friction creates drag, causing satellites to lose speed over time and eventually fall back to Earth. Drag is a good thing, for space junk; natural and man-made particles floating in orbit around Earth. Drag helps keep low Earth orbit clear of debris.

But during solar minimum, this natural heating mechanism subsides. Earth’s upper atmosphere cools and, to some degree, can collapse. Without a normal amount of drag, space junk tends to hang around.

There are unique space weather effects that get stronger during solar minimum. For example, the number of galactic cosmic rays that reach Earth’s upper atmosphere increases during solar minimum. Galactic cosmic rays are high energy particles accelerated toward the solar system by distant supernova explosions and other violent events in the galaxy.

Pesnell says that “During solar minimum, the sun’s magnetic field weakens and provides less shielding from these cosmic rays. This can pose an increased threat to astronauts traveling through space.”

Solar minimum brings about many changes to our sun, but less solar activity doesn’t make the sun and our space environment any less interesting.

For more news about the changes ahead, stay tuned to science.nasa.gov

{ https://science.nasa.gov/ }

17-05-2020 om 18:46 geschreven door peter  

17-05-2020 om 18:40 geschreven door peter  

Metal Orb UFO Seen In Two Shuttle Atlantis Missions! UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: February 15, 2008

Location of discovery: Space Station

Mission: STS-122 Shuttle Atlantis at ISS

Photo: 

• http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-122/html/s122e008922.html

These photos were taken during the STS-122 mission back in February of 2008. This is an alien orb and similar orbs have been seen around the shuttle Atlantis before and broadcasted on live CNN around the world a few years ago. Notice the mist around this orb. If this was the moon it would be in total focus like the Earth, but you need to click on the large photo to see this fact. This is the exact same type of UFO seen back in 2006 Atlantis mission!

 

On Sept 20, 2006 the world had a treat...CNN announced live that the Shuttle Atlantis would be delayed for its landing due to a UFO following it...Unidentified Flying Object, which does not necessarily mean alien object. When CNN showed the live feed from the shuttle...the world saw not one, but 5-7 grey metallic orbs floating around behind and around the shuttle. I will put the video of a close up of an orb from that mission at the intro of my video below. Its the same footage I saw on CNN years ago. The orbs are the same, 100% identical. The same UFOs seen at the same shuttle on two different missions! 

Scott C. Waring

 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

17-05-2020 om 18:05 geschreven door peter  

UFO filmed over Denver, Colorado 16-May-2020

In another bizarre UFO sighting that came only yesterday from Colorado, USA, a black coloured and grotesquely shaped object was seen hovering in the sky. In the first glance, it looked like some bird or maybe a hot air balloon stuck in the wind current. However, it remained stuck there for more than 3 minutes, and this feat couldn’t haven’t been performed by a hot air balloon or bird, which change their direction of flight or lower their altitude almost immediately when faced with such a problem. Whatever it was, it stayed hovering in the same location until the cloud in the backdrop passed it completely.

There are two theories which can be used define this event:

1. The object belonged to some another world and was awestruck at the magnificence of the cloud, and it hovered at the same spot as it gasped at the lofty cloud passing by it.
2. The cloud was maybe blocking its path and in the three minutes it hovered there, it was trying to push the cloud of its way. This fact can be corroborated by the video evidence, which shows that the cloud immediately started moving a few seconds after the object stopped in its flight.

There are many explanations, apart from the above two, that can explain this sighting, but almost all of those are based on the assumption that the object was not from this side of the cosmos

Witness report:

Dark object moving steadily across the sky. Object started in the East of the sky, high but below clouds. Seemed to either change color from black to white/white to black or the sun seemed to change color. Moved steady across the sky at a slow pace in a straight line, seemed Ike it was following a direct path. At one point it seemed to completely stop in the sky and not move for several minutes. No sound, no trail, seemed to have an aura. 3 witnesses, all saw the same thing.

Don’t forget to follow us on Youtube for the latest UFO videos.

Link: youtube.com/c/LUFOS-UFO

Other videos, selected by peter2011

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

17-05-2020 om 17:55 geschreven door peter