NASA Shoots Down Triangular UFO Conspiracy Theory
The Week highlights NASA’s desire to squelch yet another bit of fun. First here’s the video footage that got certain people all excited:
A Cloaked UFO Next To Mercury?
Many who want to believe are claiming that this footage taken by NASA’s STEREO spacecraft shows a “cloaked” UFO appearing, and then disappearing, near the planet Mercury. Extraterrestrials on vacation?
Who Stole The Moon?
Olivine basalt collected by Apollo 15. Photo: Wknight94 (CC)
Dan Vergano writes in USA Today:
NASA hauled back loads of rocks and dust from the moon, but apparently hasn’t kept good track of those samples on Earth. The space agency has lost or misplaced more than 500 pieces of the lunar rocks and other space samples, NASA’s inspector general reported Thursday, making the case for better inventory controls.
Astronauts on the Apollo moon landings from 1969 to 1972 returned 842 pounds of lunar rock and soil to Earth. The space agency now loans samples, along with meteorite and comet dust, to about 377 researchers worldwide.
The space agency now lists 517 moon rock samples as missing or stolen. However, the inspector general audit suggests much more is missing, based on inquiries to a sample of 59 scholars loaned moon rocks, comet dust or meteorites. The audit found 19% could not locate all of their…
NASA: Solar Flare Can’t Destroy Earth
Feeling the heat from 2012 apocalypticists perhaps, NASA feels the need to reassure people that we won’t be fried in 2012. Mike Wall reports on NASA’s Nov. 10, 2011 statement, for Space.com:
If the world ends in 2012, the sun won’t be to blame, NASA officials say.
Contrary to what some doomsayers would have you believe, our star isn’t capable of blasting out a solar flare powerful enough to burn our planet to a crisp, according to the space agency.
“Most importantly, however, there simply isn’t enough energy in the sun to send a killer fireball 93 million miles to destroy Earth,” NASA officials wrote…
1970s NASA Space Colony Art
This could be your neighborhood. Via the Public Domain Review, think tank concepts for possible off-Earth colonies — a glorious glimpse at what could have been in an alternate reality:
In the 1970s the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University, held a series of space colony summer studies which explored the possibilities of humans living in giant orbiting spaceships. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed and a number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made.
DARPA’s Project To Send Humans To Another Star
The 100-Year Starship Study is collaboration between NASA and DARPA on the possibility and implications of someday sending a human being on a one-way space mission to distant star. The symbolic hope is that this might occur one century from now. They are not taking volunteers. Via Phenomenica:
Humans have sent probes to planets and asteroids throughout our solar system. But we’ve never come close to propelling a manmade object as far as another star.
But if NASA and DARPA – the agency responsible for some of the early innovations that led to the Internet – have their way, in the next 100 years, a spaceship would stand ready to visit another star.
The two agencies have teamed up on a 1 million-dollar project called the 100-Year Starship Study to begin contemplating technologies and organizational strategies to make the mission happen.
alled the 100-Year Starship Symposium, the public event will run Sept. 30 to…
Former NASA Employee Claims Alien Moon Cities Exist
Via Before It’s News:
Former National Aeronautics and Space Administration Data and Photo Control Department manager, Ken Johnston, who worked for the space agency’s Lunar Receiving Laboratory during the Apollo missions has been fired for telling the truth.
Johnston asserts NASA knows astronauts discovered ancient alien cities and the remains of amazingly advanced machinery on the Moon. Some of the technology can manipulate gravity. He says the agency ordered a cover-up and forced him to participate in it. Over the past 40 years other scientists, engineers and technicians have accused NASA of cover-ups and obscuring data.
The growing number of accusers’ allegations range from hiding information about anomalous space objects and lying about the discovery of artifacts on the surface of the Moon and Mars, to denying the evidence of life reported back by the Viking lander during the mid-1970s.
You Have A 1-in-3,200 Chance of Being Hit By A Falling Climate-Change Study Satellite This Month
And I thought all this space junk would just crash into itself up there. If you are struck, you can blame global warming! Andrew Hough writes in the Telegraph:
The $750 million (£468 million) Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) satellite, launched 20 years ago to study climate change, is set to breach the atmosphere within weeks.
In a new alert issued this week, officials warned pieces could land in densely populated areas on six continents including parts of Britain, Europe, North and South America and Asia.
Nasa claimed the risk to public safety from the “dead” satellite — which is orbiting just over 155 miles above the earth with an inclination of 57 degrees — was “extremely small”.
But senior space agency officials admitted they were “concerned” about the risk to billions of people when it starts falling uncontrolled out of orbit at any stage from later this month.
NASA admitted more than half a tonne…
Moon to Have No-Fly Zones
R. Prasad writes in the Hindu:
No-fly zones will come into effect on the moon for the very first time by the end of this month! Why, even buffer zones that spacecraft may have to avoid will come into existence. The reason: avoiding any spraying of rocket exhaust or dust onto certain historical sites and artifacts on the moon.
The historical sites are of course the Apollo landing sites and artifacts present on the moon. And the “recommendations” are for preserving and protecting these historical sites. There are currently more than three dozen historical sites that preserve the more than four-decade-old remains.
“Apollo 11 and 17 sites [will] remain off-limits, with ground-travel buffers of 75 meters and 225 meters from each respective lunar lander,” states the July 20 guidelines of NASA. Science journal had obtained the guidelines.
According to Science, by the end of this month NASA is expected to come up with a…
Lunar Orbiter Find Footprints On The Moon
Some people were in awe as they watched to first men walk on the moon in 1969. Others still remain in skepticism of the lunar landing. Taken by NASA’s lunar orbiter, new photographs have been released of landing sites, including footprints left on the surface. Via Reuters:
We Have to Clean Up Outer Space Now in Order to Safely Launch New Spacecraft
Via the BBC:
Scientists in the US have warned NASA that the amount of so-called space junk orbiting Earth is at tipping point. A report by the National Research Council says the debris could cause fatal leaks in spaceships or destroy valuable satellites.
It calls for international regulations to limit the junk and more research into the possible use of launching large magnetic nets or giant umbrellas. The debris includes clouds of minuscule fragments, old boosters and satellites.
Some computer models show the amount of orbital rubbish “has reached a tipping point, with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures,” the research council said in a statement on Thursday.
The Apollo 18 Moon Conspiracy
It’s probably just hype around the release of the “documentary” Apollo 18 that just opened in theaters across America, but Space.com is reporting on a purported conspiracy about the astronauts finding signs of alien life and that being the reason we never again sent humans to the moon:
Apologies to anyone whose bubble will burst, but “Apollo 18,” the film opening Friday (Sept. 2), is fictional.
The film, purporting to be produced from footage kept secret by NASA and leaked to the media, chronicles a NASA mission to the moon that went awry when astronauts encountered signs of alien life there.
Whether because the studio actually believes anyone will be fooled or simply because it makes for a fun marketing angle, the Weinstein Co., which produced the picture, is calling it a “documentary.”
“Decades-old found footage from NASA’s abandoned Apollo 18 mission, where two American astronauts were sent on a secret expedition, reveals the reason the…
Astronaut Suicides
This summer’s final NASA space shuttle mission marks the end of the 30-year era of the United States’ sending live explorers into outer space. Photographers Sara Phillips and Neil DaCosta created Astronaut Suicides, a series depicting the logical conclusion of the decision to render the astronaut an obsolete relic.
Global Warming ‘Could Trigger Alien Attack’
Emma Woolcott for TG Daily:
Maybe NASA believes that the little green men really are green – one of its scientists has collaborated on a report suggesting that the Earth’s rising levels of greenhouse gases could provoke an alien attack.
Using spectrometry, extraterrestrials could detect changes in Earth’s atmosphere and deduce that we’re out of control, the report suggests. It’s one of a number of scenarios discussed in the paper, written by Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and Pennsylvania State University academics.
“These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.
“A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilization may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand.”
In…
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Why Did We Stop Dreaming About Outer Space? (Video)
Astrophysicist and NOVA host Neil deGrasse Tyson laments the United States’ failure of imagination with its space program, from a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher:
The Space Colony That Should Have Been
As we close the book on the final U.S. space shuttle mission ever, it’s heartbreaking to watch NASA videos from the groovy 1970s, a time of incredible optimism regarding the final frontier in the aftermath of humankind’s first walk on the moon. Preliminary plans and concepts were being outlined for self-sustaining space colonies where people could live and work. A space station called Taurus would be home to 10,000 people, with dairy farms, manufacturing, vegetation, solar power stations… and then somewhere along the way we became sidetracked.
Volcanoes On The Moon
You knew there was more on the far side of the Moon than we were told. First up: volcanoes. From International Business Times:
Among mysteries lying on the far side of the Moon, which cannot be seen from Earth, are volcanoes as well, new photos from a NASA orbiter have revealed.
The volcanoes that litter the Moon’s ‘other side’ are of the rare silicate types, not the basaltic volcanoes seen on the visible side of the moon.
According to researchers, the new findings reveal that the Moon is home to more complex geological activity than initially thought. The findings also reveal that the Moon has not stopped throwing surprises after all!
A team led by Bradley L. Jolliff, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, has reported the latest findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.
According to Jolliff, the primary author of the report, most of the volcanic activity on the moon has…
Goodbye Space Shuttle
Via Modern Mythology:
Many of you know by now that the US space program, though not ended in its entirety, has been demonstrably downgraded, and now faces an uncertain privatized future.
This isn’t new, the dismantling of the shuttle program is just the external proof of something that has long been in the works: the continued ideology of privatization at work.
I was saddened by this news, but not so much because of the mothballing of a program that is admittedly mired in many ways in an abandoned past.
No. It further shows that our government either doesn’t understand the nature of the scientific endeavor, or more likely, simply doesn’t care. Short term profit has completely overtaken American mythology in the past few decades, and it is leading us into a death spiral from which there may be no escape until we reach the other side of the vortex.
I’ll admit my bias in this upfront:…
Asteroid Travels Close To Earth Today
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Sometimes asteroids come very close to home, about every six years. The latest asteroid to come closer to Earth than our own satellites appears today. Via Space.com:
An asteroid the size of a tour bus will fly past Earth today (June 27) so closely it will be beneath some of the planet’s satellites.
The rock, named asteroid 2011 MD will zoom by just 7,500 miles (12,000 km) above the planet, making a sharp turn forced by Earth’s gravity before winging off into space again. The flyby will occur at about 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT).
There is no risk of an impact, NASA scientists said. The space rock, estimated to be between 29 to 98 feet (9 to 30 meters) wide, is likely too small to survive a plunge through our atmosphere anyway. An asteroid this size, if it were mostly stony, would break apart and burn up before hitting the surface. Iron-heavy…
