NASA Close to (Dis)Proving the Existence of a ‘Death Star’ in our Solar System
Charlie Jane Anders has a fun post on io9.com about the Nemesis theory, which the WISE telescope will prove or disprove, hopefully, soon.
The reason I say “fun” post is it’s very unlikely a Nemesis star does exist, as we have been able to figure out masses and orbits in the solar system with a high degree of accuracy for quite some time. Meaning if an object this massive was this close — Nemesis is thought to be a red dwarf star or brown dwarf — we’d have to account for it in the astronomy.
In any event, I do expect Nibiru devotees to disagree with this opinion, or if/when WISE doesn’t find it.
Charlie’s post refers to an article in Astrobiology Magazine, which is sponsored by NASA. Check out what they have to say, Leslie…
Obama NASA Plans ‘Catastrophic’ say Moon Astronauts
From BBC News:
Former Nasa astronauts who went to the Moon have told the BBC of their dismay at President Barack Obama’s decision to push back further Moon missions.
Jim Lovell, commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, said Mr Obama’s decision would have “catastrophic consequences” for US space exploration.
The last man on the Moon, Eugene Cernan, said it was “disappointing”.
Last month Mr Obama cancelled Nasa’s Constellation Moon landings programme, approved by ex-President George W Bush.
Nasa still aims to send astronauts back to the Moon, but it is likely to take decades and some believe that it will never happen again.
Water Found in Apollo Moon Rocks
From National Geographic:
Recently NASA crashed two spacecraft into the moon and orbiters scanned the lunar surface for telltale light signatures—all to confirm the rocky body isn’t bone dry after all.
But, it turns out, solid evidence for water on the moon was under our noses the whole time.
Tiny amounts of water have been found in some of the famous moon rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts, scientists announced last Wednesday. (Related: “Apollo 11 at 40: Facts, Myths, Photos, and More.”)
The water levels detected in Apollo moon rocks and volcanic glasses are in the thousands of parts per million, at most—which explains why analyses of the samples in the late 1960s and early 1970s concluded that the moon was absolutely arid.
“Only in the last decade have instruments become sensitive…
Dark Asteroids Found Lurking Near Earth
A near-Earth object becomes visible in infrared (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA)
David Shiga writes on New Scientist:
An infrared space telescope has spotted several very dark asteroids that have been lurking unseen near Earth’s orbit. Their obscurity and tilted orbits have kept them hidden from surveys designed to detect things that might hit our planet.
Called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the new NASA telescope launched on 14 December on a mission to map the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. It began its survey in mid-January.
In its first six weeks of observations, it has discovered 16 previously unknown asteroids with orbits close to Earth’s. Of these, 55 per cent reflect less than one-tenth of the sunlight that falls on them, which makes them difficult to spot with visible-light telescopes. One of these objects is as dark…
Tons of Water Ice Found on the Moon’s North Pole
Thanks to Coast to Coast AM for posting this article to their Twitter feed. By Tariq Malik for Space.com:
Vast pockets of water ice numbering in the millions of tons have been discovered at the north pole of the moon, opening up another region of the lunar surface for potential exploration by astronauts and unmanned probes, NASA announced Monday.
A NASA radar instrument on an Indian moon probe found evidence of at least 600 million metric tons of water ice spread out on the bottom of craters at the lunar north pole. It is yet another supply of lunar water ice, a vital resource that could be mined to produce oxygen or rocket fuel to support a future moon base, NASA officials said.
More than 40 craters ranging from 1 mile (2 km) to 9…
Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says
Alex Morales writes on Bloomberg:
The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.
“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”
The changes can be modeled, though…
New Outer Space Policy – Rights for Martians and Astronauts?
Professor Andy Miah notes there’s already international government policies taking hold on outer space – and a need for new ethical guidelines. “For instance, what obligations do we owe to the various life forms we send there, or those we might discover? Can we develop a more considerate approach to colonizing outer space than we were able to achieve for various sectors of Earth?”
And what rights do astronauts have? “Could our inevitable public surveillance of their behavior become too much of an infringement on their personal privacy?”
But more importantly, professor Miah notes that “the goods of space exploration far exceed the symbolic value,” pointing out that “A vast amount of research and development derives from space exploration… For example, the United Kingdom’s 2007 Space Policy inquiry indicated that the creation of…
NASA Shows First WISE Telescope Images
From CBC News:
NASA released the first pictures from the WISE infrared space telescope Wednesday, including a new view of our closest galactic neighbour.
The new images include a shot of the Andromeda galaxy and its smaller satellite galaxies, a glowing comet, a distant galaxy cluster, and cloud of dust and gas teeming with newly born stars.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, launched in December, is on a mission to survey the entire sky in the infrared part of the light spectrum.
Since it began its scan of the heavens Jan. 14, it has sent more than 250,000 raw images back to Earth, and NASA has processed some of them for the public to see, assigning false colours to the different wavelengths of infrared light.
“These first images are proving the spacecraft’s secondary mission of…
The Space Shuttle Challenger and Climate Change
From The Huffington Post:
On January 27, 1986, the night before the Space Shuttle Challenger was to be launched, a phone conference took place between NASA managers and Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the shuttle’s solid rocket motors. Engineers from the rocket company told NASA that it would be too cold (26ºF) to launch since the previous coldest launch (53ºF) showed burn-through problems with the O-ring seals and therefore there was no data to show that it was safe to launch. The NASA managers asked if they could prove that the rockets would fail at low temperatures and, of course, it could not be proved. NASA then held a private call with the rocket company’s managers, with the engineers excluded, and got them to agree to say it was OK to…
Lunargate! Alex Burns Examines the Weird World of Moon Landing Conspiracies
The recent cuts to NASA’s budget, including the axing of the upcoming lunar missions, the Ares Rocket System, and the Orion Spacecraft, have left many of us quite scared for the future of the U.S. space program. This classic article from Alex Burns examines those that question whether or not NASA even got to the moon in the first place. Are we afraid to go back, or to go there at all?
Lunargate by Alex Burns
In a now infamous 1961 speech, US President John F. Kennedy pledged that America’s space program would “place a man on the moon before the decade’s close.” At the heart of cold war battles for geopolitical supremacy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs also became the vehicle for inculcating domestic populations with American values and belief systems.
NASA’s growing power, its protection by the Kennedy administration, and the rise of the Right Stuff astronaut as celebrity hid the steady growth of the Military-Industrial Complex that Eisenhower had warned about.
These anxieties — of monolithic social institutions controlling information, and the decline of US global empires — are the core of conspiracy theories claiming the historic Apollo moon landings were elaborately faked. The world was hoaxed.
NASA and Space – The Future vs. the Past
From SpaceRef.com:
In covering the uproar over the just-released NASA budget and its implications, the major media headlines have been trumpeting: “Lunar Program Can celled”. Yes, sadly the budget has canceled the current lunar program, based on the NASA designed Ares boosters and Orion capsule. However, as some other writers have pointed out, the Vision for Space Exploration program (VSE), which was conceived by a true government consensus after the Columbia disaster, was in effect hijacked in 2005 by the last person anyone of us would have ever suspected, the greatly respected aerospace engineer, Dr. Michael Griffin. That the VSE envisioned by the White House was hijacked is in little doubt, since the only representative of the space advocacy community specifically invited to attend the former President’s 2004 speech was Rick…
Hubble Detects Mysterious Spaceship-Shaped Object Traveling at 11,000 MPH
Jesus Diaz writes a very thought-provoking article on Gizmodo:
Hubble has discovered a mysterious X-shaped object traveling at 11,000mph. NASA says that P/2010-A2 may be a comet, product of the collision between two asteroids. Or a Klingon Bird of Prey. Either way, UCLA investigator David Jewitt is excited:
This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets. The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies.
OK, David, we will believe you until Jerry Bruckheimer finish his next movie, in which a “comet” suddenly stops, turns to Earth, and starts firing anti-matter rays…
Newly Discovered Amateur Video of Challenger Explosion
Grace Schneider writes in the Courier-Journal:
On a chilly January morning 24 years ago, Corydon optometrist Jack Moss raised his new video camera to the sky over central Florida and captured one of the darkest moments in American space exploration — the explosion of the shuttle Challenger.
In the videotape, a stream of white smoke behind the climbing shuttle shoots into view — but Moss, his wife and a neighbor noticed immediately that something was amiss when the channel separated into two streams.
“That’s trouble of some kind,” Moss can be heard saying. “That didn’t look right.”
Moments later, someone is heard telling Moss that the Challenger had blown up.
NASA Worried About Solar Threat To Earth?
One of the alarmist predictions for 2012 concerns the supposed cyclical climax of solar flare activity (see the Larry Joseph section in the disinformation documentary 2012: Science or Superstition). Although NASA felt moved to create a web page to deny this kind of story around the release date of Roland Emmerich’s 2012 disaster movie, apparently they are hedging their bets. Chris Hastings and Jonathan Leake report on a new NASA probe that could help scientists predict chaos-causing solar storms, in the Times:
NASA is to embark on one of its most ambitious missions in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the sun.
Following its launch in nine days’ time, the US space agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will spend five years in orbit trying to discover the causes of extreme solar activity,…
Obama Will Axe NASA’s Moon Mission
From the Orlando Sentinel:
NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way.
When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.
There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.
In their place, according to White House…
NASA Announces Designs for Personal Flying Suit
DAN SALTZSTEIN writes in the NY Times:
Forget the Segway. Leave that jet pack behind. NASA is working on a personal flying suit.
Conceptual designs for the experimental vehicle, called Puffin, were introduced by Mark D. Moore, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, at a meeting of the American Helicopter Society on Jan. 20 in San Francisco. The Puffin is designed to be 12 feet in length, with a total wingspan of 14 and a half feet; it would weigh in at 300 pounds (without a pilot).
Buy Your Very Own Space Shuttle, for the Rock-Bottom Price of $28 Million!
Reported by the AP via the NY Times:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Here is a recession bargain: the space shuttle. NASA has slashed the price of the 1970s-era spaceships to $28.8 million apiece from $42 million.
The shuttles are for sale once their flying days are over, which is scheduled to be this fall.
When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in December 2008 put out the call seeking buyers at museums, schools and elsewhere, the agency received about 20 inquiries. An agency spokesman, Mike Curie, said he expected more interest, especially with the discount.
“We’re confident that we’ll get other takers,” Mr. Curie said Friday.
The Discovery is already promised to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The Atlantis and the Endeavour are up for grabs. It is possible that the Enterprise, a shuttle…
Proof Of Martians ‘To Come This Year’
From Paul Sutherland on Scientific American:
Final proof that Mars has bred life will be confirmed this year, leading NASA experts believe. The historic discovery will come not on Mars itself but from chunks of the red planet here on Earth.
David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new microscopes and other instruments will establish whether features in martian meteorites are alien fossils.
He says evidence for life in the space rocks could have been claimed by the UK if British scientists had used readily-available electron microscopes. Instead, images of colonies of martian bacteria were collected by American scientists.
The NASA team is already convinced that colonies of micro-organisms are visible inside three martian rocks that landed on Earth. If so, this would have profound implications for our…
NASA Discovers Cocaine In Hangar Near Space Shuttle
From The Huffington Post:
ASA is investigating how a bag of cocaine got into the hangar that houses space shuttle Discovery at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said Thursday that the bag contained a tiny amount of the illegal substance. It was found by a worker in a secure part of the hangar that is accessible by about 200 NASA employees and contractors.
NASA is drug testing and interviewing workers, as well as using drug-sniffing dogs.
[Read more at The Huffington Post]
