Space Junk

Space Junk, Lots of space junk.

Water Geysers on Europa Moon

SAN FRANCISCO — The apparent discovery of water geysers on Jupiter's moon Europa makes the icy body an even more attractive target for a life-hunting mission, researchers say.

Scientists announced Thursday (Dec. 12) that they had detected transient plumes of water vaporerupting from Europa's south poleand extending about 125 miles (200 kilometers) into space. The ice-covered moon is thought to contain a subsurface ocean of liquid water, and the geysers represent a way to sample this potentially life-supporting environment, NASA officials said.

"Indeed, the plumes are incredibly exciting, if they are there," Jim Green, head of NASA's planetary science division, said here Thursday at the at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. "They're bringing up material from within the ocean; perhaps there's organic material that will be laying on the surface of the south pole." 

An artist's illustration of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, with a water geyser erupting in the foreground while Jupiter appears as a backdrop. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest Europa may have water plumes like Saturn's moon Enceladus.

The new find, made using observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, could build some momentum for a mission concept the space agency is developing called the Europa Clipper.

The Europa Clipper probewould orbit Jupiter but make multiple flybys of the 1,900-mile-wide (3,000 kilometers) moon, using a number of different science instruments to study Europa's ice shell and subsurface ocean. The strategy would be similar to that employed by NASA's Cassini mission, which has made flybys of many Saturn moons since entering into orbit around the ringed planet in 2004.

"What we have been doing is studying several approaches to really understand Europa from a spacecraft in that environment, and it looks like the Clipper concept is our best one," Green said.

"Based on these [new] observations, we're going to redouble our efforts to take a good look at Clipper — its orbital trajectories, the plans for the mission architecture — to ensure that we have the right instrumentation and that we can cover this area very well and really, really understand it," he added.

Artist's concept of the Europa Clipper mission investigating Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

The Clipper could conceivably fly directly through Europa's plumes, taking samples as it goes, researchers said.

The Europa Clipper is not formally on NASA's books; it remains a concept at the moment, and some rethinking may be required to make the mission a reality. For example, its price tag — estimated last year to be $2 billion — is too high to be approved in these tough fiscal times, Green said.

The Clipper mission "is what we would call a flagship, and right now the budget horizon is such that we're deferring that kind of mission until later in the decade," he said.

The European Space Agency, meanwhile, has its own plans to study Europa. ESA plans to launch a mission called the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer, or JUICE, in 2022, with arrival in the Jovian system slated for 2030.

JUICE will focus on three of Jupiter's moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. However, the spacecraft will likely make just two flybys of Europa over the course of its mission, researchers said.

Crab Nebula

Humans who keep pretending there is no other life out there in the Universe, should consider the vast space this occupies all on it's own.

Across the Universe, every ending is a new beginning. When a massive star dies, exploding as a spectacular supernova, huge amounts of matter and energy are ejected into surrounding space, and the remnant of the explosion itself remains a hub of fierce activity for thousands of years.

One of the most iconic supernova remnants is the Crab Nebula. A wispy and filamentary cloud of gas and dust, it originated with a supernova explosion that was seen by Chinese astronomers in the year 1054. A spinning neutron star – or pulsar – remains at its centre, releasing streams of highly energetic particles into the nebula.

This composite image combines a new infrared view of the Crab Nebula, obtained with ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory, with an optical image from the archives of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Herschel’s observations are shown in red and reveal the glow from cosmic dust present in the nebula. Hubble’s view, in blue, traces oxygen and sulphur gas in the nebula.

A team of astronomers studying the nebula with Herschel has revealed that this supernova remnant contains much more dust than they had expected – about a quarter of the mass of the Sun.

The new observations also revealed the presence of molecules containing argon, the first time a noble gas-based molecule has been found in space.

Argon is produced in the nuclear reactions that take place during supernova explosions, and astronomers had already detected this element in the Crab Nebula. However, it is surprising that argon bonded with other elements, forming molecules that survived in the hostile environment of a supernova remnant, with hot gas still expanding at high speeds after the explosion.

Buzz Aldren punches a non-believer

While I understand how some might think the Moon landing is a hoax, I myself lived in Houston and visited NASA many times and it was what inspired me to study the UFO subject in the first place, so I happen to be a fan of NASA and the Moon landing did happen as far as I am concerned.
Also, after seeing this, Buzz Aldren is my hero. :)

Fireball over Texas

While many say these are meteorites, others feel it is something else. No one will say with 100% certainty what this is. Logic says it is a meteor, but then again who knows for certain?


Also on this webpage

UFO Researchers and Travis Walton

Well known UFO abducte Travis Walton has passed 16 lie detector tests over the years. He was a logger and had no training in passing such tests. This is a well put together video with some interesting suggestions. Rather than making fun of the subject, we invite you to have an open mind and treat the UFO subject as research in the same way NASA and the European Space Agency are researching Mars and other planets looking for signs of life or past life.

Signs of Change in our Atmosphere and Climate

The American Southwest is broiling in triple-digit temperatures for the fourth consecutive day as a result of a record-breaking heat wave that is smothering the region.

In Death Valley, California, the temperature reached 128° Fahrenheit (53° Celsius) on Sunday—just a few degrees shy of the July 10, 1913, record of 134° Fahrenheit (57° Celsius).

The heat wave has also been partly blamed for a wildfire that killed 19 firefighterson Sunday in Yarnell Hill, Arizona.

So what's behind the heat wave? Is global warming a factor? And how does it compare with past events? We talked to Martin Tingley, a climatologist at Harvard University, to find out.

In April, Tingley and his colleague Peter Huybers published a study in the journalNature that concluded that the years 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011 were warmer than any year going back 600 years, to 1400.

Do scientists know what's behind the current heat wave?

Looking at the meteorological charts, it looks to be a blocking event. That happens when there's a particular configuration of the jet stream that's quite stable. So there's a big high-pressure ridge on the West Coast and a low-pressure trough in the East Coast. That's why it's quite rainy here [in Cambridge, Massachusetts] and very hot on the West Coast.

Have you or other scientists had a chance to analyze this current heat wave and determine how it compares to past years?

No ... because 2013 is not over yet. One very hot week will have some signature on the seasonal average, but how large that signature will be depends on what happens for the rest of the summer.

Also, the study that Peter [Huybers] and I did made use of paleoclimate records—things like tree rings and ice cores. One of the limitations of that study is we can't really think of week-long heat waves like what's going on. We were limited to seasonal averages—hot summers versus cool summers—and we found that recent warm extremes in terms of summer average conditions at the high northern latitudes are unprecedented in the last 600 years.

You reached those conclusions after performing a statistical analysis on the paleoclimate data. Do you have an analogy that helps explain how that analysis works?

One imperfect analogy: Even though you and I have never met, I would bet that I'm taller than you because I'm 6-foot-4-inches (1.9 meters), and that puts me in a high percentile of the distribution of heights. But if I were to walk into a room of 1,000 people, I probably wouldn't be the tallest.

It's the same when we're addressing the question of was 2011 the hottest year in the last 600 years. It's a different statistical question to ask was it warmer than one particular year in the past—that's like me saying I'm taller than you—and it's a much different question to ask whether 2011 was the hottest year amongst all of the past 600 years.

To deal with this, what we do is instead of coming up with a single best estimate ... we use a simple statistical model to simulate 4,000 equally likely realizations of the climate [based on the paleoclimate data]. Then we can ask in how many of these 4,000 possible climate histories was 2011 the warmest year? So instead of having a single best estimate, we have 4,000 possible realizations.

Climate scientists often compare the effects of global warming to loaded dice: Not every roll of a loaded die will come up six—but sixes will occur more often than if the die had not been tampered with. Is that still the thinking?

Can we attribute this particular heat wave to an anthropogenic impact on the climate? The only safe answer is, well, probably not. It's like if I flip one coin and it comes up heads, that doesn't mean the coin is loaded.

But what we're seeing now, there seems to be a trend toward more hot extremes and fewer cold extremes. That's a pattern that's consistent with an anthropogenically-forced increase in temperatures.

What can people expect from future extreme heat waves that are affected by global warming? Will they be anything like the current heat wave affecting the West Coast?

I think that's a really big open question right now: Given rising mean temperatures, how will the extremes change, in both magnitude and frequency? It's actually one of the research projects we are tackling at the moment: How are extremes in temperature on daily timescales changing with respect to the mean temperature?

If the mean temperature goes up by half a degree, do the extremes simply track that half-degree increase? Or are the extremes being amplified in some sense so that they are becoming hotter with respect to the mean?

As a climate scientist, are you doing anything personally to prepare for the hotter summers that will result from global warming?

Well, I like to ski a lot in the winter, and I'm concerned that ski conditions are becoming more variable, especially on the East Coast.

That's not really something that I've done in my life to prepare, but it's something that's given me a lot of pause. Will the slopes have consistent snow cover for the next generation of skiers, and will the tradition of East Coast skiing survive a warming climate?

Ceres classified as Dwarf planet, has icy surface

Dwarf Planet Ceres May Have Underground Ice, Scientists Say

In March of 2015, NASA's Dawn mission will arrive at the dwarf planet Ceres, the first of the smaller class of planets to be discovered and the closest to Earth.

The dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is a unique body in the solar system, bearing many similarities to Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, both considered to be potential sources for harboring life.

On Thursday, August 15, Britney Schmidt, science team liaison for the Dawn Mission, and Julie Castillo-Rogez, planetary scientist from JPL, spoke in an Google Plus Hangout titled 'Ceres: Icy World Revealed?' about the growing excitement related to the innermost icy body. [Dwarf Planets of Our Solar System (Infographic)]

"I think of Ceres actually as a game changer in the solar system," Schmidt said.

"Ceres is arguably the only one of its kind."

The dwarf planet Ceres as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The innermost icy body

When Ceres was discovered in 1801, astronomers first classified it as a planet. The massive body traveled between Mars and Jupiter, where scientists had mathematically predicted a planet should lie. Further observations revealed that a number of small bodies littered the region, and Ceres was downgraded to just another asteroid within the asteroid belt. It wasn't until Pluto was classified as a dwarf planet in 2006 that Ceres was upgraded to the same level.

Ceres is the most massive body in the asteroid belt, and larger than some of the icy moons scientists consider ideal for hosting life. It is twice the size of Enceladus, Saturn's geyser-spouting moon that may hide liquid water beneath its surface.

Unlike other asteroids, the Texas-sized Ceres has a perfectly rounded shape that hints toward its origins.

"The fact that Ceres is so round tells us that it almost certainly had to form in the early solar system," Schmidt said. She explained that a later formation would have created a less rounded shape.

The shape of the dwarf planet, combined with its size and total mass, reveal a body of incredibly low density.

"Underneath this dusty, dirty, clay-type surface, we think that Ceres might be icy," Schmidt said. "It could potentially have had an ocean at one point in its history."

"The difference between Ceres and other icy bodies [in the solar system] is that it's the closest to the sun," Castillo-Rogez said.

Less than three times as far as Earth from the sun, Ceres is close enough to feel the warmth of the star, allowing ice to melt and reform.

Investigating the interior of the dwarf planet could provide insight into the early solar system, especially locations where water and other volatiles might have existed.

"Ceres is like the gatekeeper to the history of water in the middle solar system," Schmidt said.

NASA Footage with unusual objects streaking by

While most of the objects streaking by are probably space junk or shooting stars, it
is interesting that there is so much movement near our planet. :)

Moon Launch images, impressive.

NASA's latest mission to the moon is notable not only for what it will accomplish, but also for how widely its start was seen. The fact that the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, was launched from Virginia's Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport after dark on Friday meant that the mission's Minotaur 5 rocket blast had a potential audience of millions of people.

Close up Video of International Space Station

Impressive video, although there is quite a bit of lint? or something on the camera outer cover.

WAIT FOR THE CLOSEUP, IT'S IMPRESSIVE. :)

Object Floating by ISS International Space Station

An object was witnessed floating by the space station, it has been referred to

as a satellite of Russian origin. 

Area 51 exists, says CIA

After years of government denials, the CIA is officially acknowledging in newly declassified documents the existence of Area 51, the mysterious site in central Nevada that has spawned top-secret tools, weapons and not a few UFO conspiracies.

George Washington University's National Security Archive obtained a CIA history of the U-2 spy plane program through a public records request and released it Thursday.

National Security Archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson reviewed the history in 2002, but all mentions of Area 51 had been redacted.

READ: The newly declassified CIA documents

Richelson says he requested the history again in 2005 and received a version a few weeks ago with mentions of Area 51 restored.

Officials have already acknowledged in passing the existence of the facility in central Nevada where the government is believed to test intelligence tools and weapons.

Richelson believes the new document shows the CIA is becoming less secretive about Area 51's existence, if not about what goes at the location 90 miles north of Las Vegas.

He said that releasing information on the site "is clearly a conscious decision to acknowledge the name, the location rather than play pretend about the secrecy," the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports .

The references are found in a CIA history of the U-2 reconnaissance program written in 1992.

The history even recalls the first time CIA project director Richard Bissell and Air Force officer Col. Osmund Ritlandt spotted the site, which was then an old airstrip by the salt flat named Groom Lake.

They viewed it from aboard a small Beechcraft plane piloted by Tony LeVier, Lockheed's chief test pilot.

Excerpt:

They spotted what appeared to be an airstrip by a salt flat known as Groom Lake, near the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) Nevada Proving Ground.

After debating about landing on the old airstrip, LeVier set the plane down on the lakebed, and all four walked over to examine the strip. The facility had been used during World War II as an aerial gunnery range for Army Air Corps pilots. From the air the strip appeared to be paved, but on closer inspection it turned out to have originally been fashioned from compacted earth that had turned into ankle-deep dust after more than a decade of disuse.

If LeVier had attempted to land on the airstrip, the plane would probably have nosed over when the wheels sank into the loose soil, killing or injuring all of the key figures in the U-2 project.

The document says the group agreed that the location "would make an ideal site for testing the U-2 and training its pilots," according to the history.

The lightweight U-2 spy plane was being built by Lockheed at its top-secret "Skunk Works" plant in Burbank, Calif.

The document says that the CIA then called on the Atomic Energy Commission to add the Groom Lake area to its real estate holdings in Nevada.

"AEC chairman Adm. Lewis Strauss readily agreed and President Eisenhower also approved the addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51,to the Nevada Test site," according to the document.

"To make the facility in the middle of nowhere sound more attractive to his workers, (Skunk Works founder) Kelly Johnson called it the Paradise Ranch, which was soon shortened to the Ranch," according to the document.

Several books and articles in recent years had already begun to penetrate the mystery of Area 51.

In 2010, James Noce, who said he did contract security work at the site in the 1960s and 1970s, told The Seattle Times that he used to get paid in cash, signing a phony name to the receipt.

Noce, then 72, told the newspaper that he had attended the first-ever public reunion in 2009 of former Area 51 workers.

"I was doing something for the country," Noce says about those three years in the 1960s. "They told me, 'If anything should ever come up, anyone asks, 'Did you work for the CIA?' Say, 'Never heard of them.' But [my buddies] know."

Contributing: Associated Press

Voyager 1 Left Solar System

APE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's long-lived Voyager probe crossed into interstellar space last year, becoming the first man-made object to leave the solar system, new research shows.

Scientists have been waiting for Voyager to detect a magnetic field that flows in a different direction than the solar system's magnetic field. But the new research shows that scenario is not accurate.

"We think that the magnetic field within the solar system and in the interstellar are aligned enough that you can actually pass through without seeing a huge change in direction," University of Maryland physicist Marc Swisdak said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday.

That would mean that Voyager actually reached interstellar space last summer when it detected a sudden drop in the number of particles coming from the sun and a corresponding rise in the number of galactic cosmic rays coming from interstellar space.

Not everyone is convinced, however.

Voyager lead scientist Edward Stone, now retired from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said Swisdak's research is interesting but different computer models are portraying different scenarios to explain the Voyager data.

"We know where Voyager is in terms of distance and we know what it is observing. The challenge is relating that to these complex models of the interaction between the interstellar medium and the heliosphere," Stone said, referring to the bubble of space that falls under the sun's influence.

Stone and other scientists believe Voyager is in a previously unknown region, dubbed a "magnetic highway," that exists between the heliosphere and interstellar space.

Voyager 1 and a sister probe, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 to study the outer planets. Voyager 1 is now about 120 times farther away from the sun than Earth. Voyager 2 is heading out of the solar system in a different direction.

The probes are powered by the slow decay of radioactive plutonium. Voyager 1 will begin running out of energy for its science instruments in 2020. By 2025, it will be completely out of power.

If Swisdak and colleagues are correct, Voyager 1's magnetic field readings will stay pretty much the same throughout the remainder of its mission.

"If they see a strong shift in the magnetic field, a big jump, then that means that what we've outlined can't be correct," Swisdak said.

"I'm perfectly willing to be proven wrong here and if I were, that would be kind of cool. But it agrees with all the data that we have so far," he added.

More evidence may come when Voyager 2 crosses the solar system's boundary as well.

The research appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Bill Trott)

Tyche, Giant Hidden Planet, May Exist In Our Solar System

We may have lost Pluto, but it looks like we might be getting Tyche.

Scientists may soon be able to prove the existence of the gas giant, which could be four times the size of Jupiter, according to astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The two first proposed Tyche's existence in order to explain a change in path of comets entering the solar system, according to The Independent.

From the The Independent:

Tyche will almost certainly be made up mostly of hydrogen and helium and will probably have an atmosphere much like Jupiter's, with colourful spots and bands and clouds, Professor Whitmire said. "You'd also expect it to have moons. All the outer planets have them," he added.

For a graphical representation of Tyche, click here.

So how could we have missed such a massive planet in our own solar system?

Well, it's 15,000 times further from the sun than Earth, according to Gizmodo. Tyche (if it does exist) lies in the Oort cloud, the outer shell of asteroids in our solar system.

Despite what the scientists believe they will find in the data (which will be released in April and was collected by NASA Wise space telescope), there is at least one flaw in their theory. Theoretically, a planet of Tyche's size should seriously disturb comets in the inner Oort Cloud, but that effect is yet to have been observed, according to The Independent.

UFO Event Santa Monica June 15th 2013 6:30PM

UFO Evidence

We need only look to those who study the subject of UFO's and those who watch the night sky.
Most of those folks do not work for the Gov., so all this talk about disclosure seems odd.

Let's take the subject a bit more serious, there is plenty of existing ufo evidence to show that something is happening in the skies.

Fireball over Argentina

FIREBALL OVER ARGENTINA

CLICK IMAGE ABOVE OR HERE

UFO Sightings in Argentina 

ESA and Russia Mars Agreement

European Space Agency and Russia

sign agreement.

ESA and the Russian federal space agency, Roscosmos, have signed a formal agreement to work in partnership on the ExoMars programme towards the launch of two missions in 2016 and 2018.

Click image for full story.

The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer mission

The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer mission, JUICE, will carry a total of 11 scientific experiments to study the gas giant planet and its large ocean-bearing moons, ESA announced today. JUICE is the first Large-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 programme. Planned for launch in 2022 and arrival at Jupiter in 2030, it will spend at least three years making detailed observations of the biggest planet in the Solar System and three of its largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.