Article by Anna Harnes September 27, 2020 (inquisitr.com)
• According to NPR, the International Space Station almost came into contact with space junk this past week for the third time this year. The debris usually consists of the broken pieces of satellites technology that have been used over the past 63 years of space exploration, travelling at 18,000 miles per hour. So even small objects can have dire consequences. Space debris is quickly becoming a major threat for satellites and extraterrestrial travel — and could have fatal implications.
• Raffi Khatchadourian, a reporter for The New Yorker, detailed the growing problem. One of the first signs that space debris would become an issue was back in 2015, when astronauts realized that an object was projected to hit the ISS at a staggering 31,000 miles per hour. The astronauts only had four hours to move the station, but it was too little time. So those on the craft had move into the capsule “lifeboat” and hope that the object missed. Fortunately, it did.
• “It’s estimated that there are 8,000 metric tons of sort of human-engineered mass zooming around the planet,” Khatchadourian explained. “About 26,000 of those (objects) are of a size that the US military can track, so 10 centimeters or larger. But when you get below the size of 10 centimeters, then you end up with, you know, something like a hundred million pieces that are the size of a millimeter or even a hundred trillion, the size of a micron. At the speeds we’re talking about, something the size of a grain of sand can destroy an entire spacecraft.”
• Scientists have not come up with a plan on how to clear the atmosphere, with suggestions ranging from lasers to nets to the seemingly sci-fi inspired “harpoons or robotic pincers.” Astronomers have long warned about ‘Kessler syndrome’, in which space becomes so crowded that it is unusable. This would have dire consequences for our modern world, which relies on satellites and other objects for a number of necessities.
Space debris is quickly becoming a major threat for satellites and extraterrestrial travel — and could have fatal implications for the latter if the issue is
Raffi Khatchadourian
not stopped.
According to NPR, the International Space Station (ISS) almost came into contact with space junk this past week for the third time this year. The debris usually consists of the broken pieces of technology that have been used over the past 63 years of space exploration — most often from satellites. The trash often travels at speeds of around 18,000 miles per hour, meaning that even small objects can have dire consequences.
In an interview, Raffi Khatchadourian, a reporter for The New Yorker, detailed the growing problem.
Khatchadourian explained that one of the first signs that space debris would become an issue was back in 2015, when astronauts realized that an object was projected to hit the ISS at a staggering 31,000 miles per hour. It was detected late, so the astronauts only had four hours to move the station. It was too little time, so those on the craft had move into the capsule “lifeboat” and hope that the object missed. Fortunately, it did.
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Article by Sabastian Kettely September 25, 2020 (express.co.uk)
• Knowing how radiation on the Moon affects the body is critical for long-term missions. The next generation of US astronauts is expected to return to the Moon by 2024 with NASA’s Artemis program. By 2028, the NASA hopes to establish a “sustained presence” on the Moon. But the further we travel into the solar system, the more that space radiation becomes a major threat. A journey to Mars, for instance, would last between six and eight months and expose astronauts to unprecedented levels of radiation.
• In January 2019, the Chinese Chang’e 4 probe, which landed on the far side of the Moon, took the first measurements of radiation levels on the lunar surface. The Moon might also be more hazardous than previously thought. According to the data received from German-built Lunar Lander Neutron and Dosimetry (LND) instrument attached to the Chinese probe, the Moon’s radiation levels are 60 microsieverts per hours, or more than 200 times higher than the radiation measurements on Earth.
• In space, most radiation is high-energy protons streaming from the Sun, traveling 93 million miles in less than an hour. On Earth, the planet’s magnetic bubble, or the ‘magnetosphere’, protects us from most of this radiation. But in space, spacecraft and spacesuits are much more vulnerable.
• Astronauts flying to the Moon would be exposed to the radiation for many days, which represents an additional risk. Ruthan Lewis, an engineer for NASA’s human spaceflight program, said, “The danger of radiation is always present, whether you’re in orbit, in transit, or on a planetary surface.” Christine Hellweg from the German Aerospace Center noted that by studying and preventing an astronaut’s exposure to radiation, their risk of getting cancer and other diseases could thus be reduced during long-term stays on the Moon. Dr Wimmer-Schweingruber of Kiel University added, “[I]f a manned mission departs to Mars, the new findings enable us to reliably estimate the anticipated radiation exposure in advance.”
• These findings will be critical for future missions to the Moon and Mars. Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber says, “We humans are not really made to withstand space radiation. “[A]stronauts can and should shield themselves as far as possible during longer stays on the Moon, for example, by covering their habitat with a thick layer of lunar soil.”
Chinese Chang’e 4 probe
The Moon is the farthest humans have ever travelled beyond Earth, starting and ending with NASA’s Apollo programme in the 1960s and 1970s.
Dr Robert Wimmer- Schweingruber
Further travel into the solar system is fraught by many perils, technological and natural alike, with space radiation being a major threat. A journey to Mars, for instance, would last between six and eight months and expose astronauts to unprecedented levels of radiation.
But the first measurements of radiation levels on the lunar surface show the Moon might also be more hazardous than previously thought.
Ruthan Lewis
The measurements were carried out in January 2019 by the Chinese Chang’e 4 probe that landed on the far side of the Moon.
In a new study published in Science Advances, Chinese and German scientists have reported the data the probe has collected.
And the results are stark – the Moon’s radiation levels are more than 200 times higher than on Earth.
The measurements were made by the German-built Lunar Lander Neutron and Dosimetry (LND) instrument attached to
Christine Hellweg
the Chinese probe.
The data was then used to calculate the so-called equivalent dose, which is the measure of the biological effect of radiation.
In space, most of this radiation is high-energy particles streaming from the Sun – protons that can travel 93 million miles in less than an hour.
On Earth, the planet’s magnetic bubble, the magnetosphere, protects us from most of this radiation.
But in space, spacecraft and spacesuits are much more vulnerable.
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Article by Chris Ciaccia September 24, 2020 (nypost.com)
• With its global ocean, unique chemistry and internal heat, Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, is a promising lead in the search for worlds where extraterrestrial life could exist.
• The NASA Cassini space probe spent 13 years circling Saturn, taking pictures and data of and its moons which were relayed to Earth before it was sent crashing into the planet in 2017. Researchers has used Cassini’s readings of its ‘on-board Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer’ (VIMS) to look at heat signatures on Enceladus to create a map of the moon.
• In 2005, Cassini observed that the southern hemisphere of Enceladus had more than 100 geysers shooting “out enormous plumes of ice grains and vapor from an ocean that lies under the icy crust,” according to a NASA statement. The new research, published in the scientific journal Icarus, revealed more recent images showing that the northern hemisphere of Enceladus has been resurfaced with ice.
• “The… south pole is young, which is not a surprise because we knew about the jets that blast icy material there,” said study co-author, Gabriel Tobie, VIMS scientist with the University of Nantes in France. “Now, thanks to these infrared eyes, you can go back in time and say that one large region in the northern hemisphere appears also young and was probably active not that long ago, in geologic timelines.” The southern geysers are believed to have caused the moon’s “tiger stripes” – evenly spaced fissures, approximately 81 miles long and 22 miles apart.
• It’s unclear how the icy resurfacing occurred or when it occurred. The ice could have come from icy geyser jets or by a more gradual movement of subsurface ocean rising to the surface through fractures in the crust. In 2017 Cassini detected the presence of hydrogen in Enceladus’ atmosphere, which could be meaningful as a “potential source for energy from any microbes,” said Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker. The next year, scientists announced that they had found complex organic molecules, the “building blocks” for life, on the moon.
• In June, NASA announced its ‘Dragonfly’ mission to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which could potentially host extraterrestrial life.
Enceladus ‘tiger stripes’
Enceladus, Saturn’s mysterious moon that could support life, could be more geologically active than previously thought, according to a new study.
The research, published in the scientific journal Icarus, looked at new images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and found the northern hemisphere of
Gabriel Tobie
Enceladus has been resurfaced with ice.
In 2005, Cassini observed that the southern hemisphere had more than 100 geysers shooting “out enormous plumes of ice grains and vapor from an ocean that lies under the icy crust,” according to a NASA statement. However, the new images point out it is happening in the northern hemisphere as well.
With its global ocean, unique chemistry and internal heat, Enceladus has become a promising lead in our search for worlds where life could exist.
The researchers used Cassini’s on-board Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) to look at heat signatures on Enceladus and created a new map of the moon to come up with their findings.
“The infrared shows us that the surface of the south pole is young, which is not a surprise because we knew about the jets that blast icy material there,” said study co-author, Gabriel Tobie, VIMS scientist with the University of Nantes in France, in the statement. “Now, thanks to these infrared eyes, you can go back in time and say that one large region in the northern hemisphere appears also young and was probably active not that long ago, in geologic timelines.”
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• On September 24th, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Kud-Sverchkov spoke at a press conference organized by the government news agency, Rossiya Segodnya. Flight engineer Kud-Sverchkov will join mission commander Sergei Ryzhikov and NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins in the ‘Expedition 64’ (all pictured above) to the International Space Station in October. This will be Kud-Sverchkov’s first flight to space.
• Russian scientists join with those from other countries in the search for extraterrestrial life, making plans to launch multiple new scientific missions to the Moon, Mars and Venus, and, earlier this year, announcing the construction of a high-powered telescope that can be used to search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations transmitted in the optical spectrum.
• In 2012, veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka told Chinese media that “detailed instructions” had been created at the United Nations “in case of first contact” with extraterrestrial beings. He added at the time that “sooner or later we will meet our like-minded brothers” from another planet.
• However, Kud-Sverchkov sats that Russian cosmonauts have not been given any special instructions when it comes to greeting aliens, but would try to do so in a diplomatic matter. “I think that when meeting intelligence extraterrestrial life, we will exhibit friendliness, goodwill and consideration, just as we do when meeting intelligent and unintelligent life on Earth,” the cosmonaut said.
• The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft will blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on October 14th upon a Soyuz-2.1 ‘carrier rocket’. The spacecraft expected to reach the ISS in a record 3 hours, 20 minutes. The mission will last until April 2021, during which the team will activate the Bartolomeo scientific platform outside the European Space Agency’s Columbus lab module. Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins will be joined by three more NASA astronauts and a Japanese astronaut, who will make their way to the ISS in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule shortly after the Soyuz craft’s arrival.
• A cosmonaut doll knitted by Kud-Sverchkov’s wife will become the expedition’s mascot, named Yuri after Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space. Mission commander Ryzhikov told reporters that he would take with him a miniaturized set of Gospels, as well as a handful of Russian soil and stones from Mount Tabor, which Christians believe was the site of the transfiguration of Jesus following his resurrection.
• NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins said she plans to collect thousands of microbial samples inside the space station, and revealed that she plans to vote in the US presidential election from aboard the ISS.
Sergei Kud-Sverchkov
As one of the world’s major space powers, Russia has done its part helping humanity search for extraterrestrial life,
Kathleen Rubins
recently beginning the construction of a powerful telescope capable of searching for signals coming from distant alien civilisations.
Russian cosmonauts have not been given any special instructions when it comes to greeting aliens, but would try to do so in a diplomatic matter, cosmonaut Sergei Kud-Sverchkov has said.
“I think that when meeting intelligence extraterrestrial life, we will exhibit friendliness, goodwill and consideration, just as we do when meeting intelligent and unintelligent life on Earth,” the cosmonaut said, speaking at a press conference organized by Rossiya Segodnya, on Thursday.
Kud-Sverchkov will join mission commander Sergei Ryzhikov in Expedition 64 to the International Space Station in
Sergei Ryzhikov
October as a flight engineer. This will be his first flight to space.
The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft will carry the two Russian cosmonauts and NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins to the ISS aboard a Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket blasting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on October 14,
Yuri Gagarin
with the spacecraft expected to reach its destination in a record 3 hours, 20 minutes.
Kud-Sverchkov says a knitted cosmonaut doll named Yuri will become the mascot for Expedition 64, with the doll knitted by his wife, and named after Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space.
Mission commander Ryzhikov told reporters that he would take with him a miniaturized Gospels, as well as a handful of Russian soil and stones from Mount Tabor, which Christians believe was the site of the transfiguration of Jesus following his resurrection.
For her part, NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins said her plans include work collecting thousands of microbial samples inside the space station, and revealed that she plans to vote in the US presidential election from aboard the ISS.
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Article by Eddie Irizarry and Deborah Byrd September 24, 2020 (earthsky.org)
• On September 17, 2020, astronomers at the Pan-STARRS1 telescope at Maui, Hawaii sighted a small asteroid on an unusually slow approach to Earth. Designated as ‘2020 SO’, the asteroid is expected to be captured by the Earth’s gravity – temporarily – from October 2020 perhaps until around May 2021. It wouldn’t be the first time Earth has captured a mini-moon, but this object is unusual and perhaps no ordinary asteroid. It might be a lost rocket from the Surveyor 2 mission launched from Earth to the Moon in the 1960s.
• The unmanned Surveyor 2 mission was meant to send the second unmanned lunar lander to explore the Moon. The Surveyor 2 spacecraft blasted into space atop an Atlas LV-3C Centaur-D rocket from Cape Kennedy, Florida on September 20, 1966. A mid-course correction failure caused space controllers to lose contact with the craft three days later, after a thruster failed to ignite. The failure caused the spacecraft to tumble and ultimately to crash near the Moon’s Copernicus crater. The 2020 SO object has an estimated size between 20 and 45 feet, a not-unreasonable match for the dimensions of an Atlas LV-3C Centaur-D rocket.
• How could we have lost an entire 41-foot-long rocket? Space archaeologist Alice Gorman of Flinders University in Australia told ScienceAlert that – before our modern era of reuseable rockets – the rockets that launched craft into space were surprisingly easy to lose. Said Gorman, “You have to keep tracking these things… [I]f they do something a little bit unpredictable, and you look the wrong way, then you don’t know where it’s gone. It is quite astonishing, the number of things that have gone missing.”
• This isn’t the first time Earth has captured a mini-moon. Once in a while, one of the many small asteroids out there will be temporarily captured by our planet’s gravity before being cast out back into the solar system at large. Two confirmed mini-moons are 2006 RH120 (in Earth orbit between 2006 and 2007), and 2020 CD3 (in our orbit between 2018 and 2020).
• Also, this isn’t the first time we’ve mistaken space junk for an asteroid. What was thought to be the asteroid WT1190F, initially detected in October 2015 on approach to Earth, disintegrated in our atmosphere on November 13, 2015. An analysis of the spectroscopy revealed that the object might be a spacecraft component or part of a spent rocket returning home.
• So is ‘2020 SO’ an ordinary asteroid? Or is it an old Earthly rocket returning home? We just don’t know yet. Scientists hope that further observations and spectroscopic observations of light reflected from its surface will allow us to know if it’s in fact a strange, slow space rock, or human-made space debris.
• [Editor’s Note] There seems to be a lot of unknown objects acting strangely within our solar system right now. While we’re speculating, I will add the possibility that we are seeing a fleet of spaceship and mother ships that are waiting for a grand consciousness event that will necessitate billions of people to be temporarily removed from planet Earth while the Earth itself transforms. A compelling proponent of this information is the Portland Oregon channeler, Allison Coe. See below a video of Allison providing some of this channeled information which she gave in a presentation at ECETI ranch.
A newly discovered “asteroid” may become a new mini-moon for Earth. Instead of an ordinary asteroid, it might be a lost rocket from the Surveyor 2 mission, launched from Earth more than 50 years ago.
An approaching space object – labeled 2020 SO – is about to briefly become a new “mini-moon” for Earth, captured by our planet’s more powerful
Alice Gorman
gravity. Orbit models show that both the low speed and trajectory of the approaching object indicate Earth will capture it, temporarily, from October 2020 perhaps until around May 2021. It won’t be the first time Earth has captured a mini-moon, but this object is unusual and perhaps no ordinary asteroid. It might be a lost rocket, originally launched from Earth more than 50 years ago.
Allison Coe-Dunn
On September 17, 2020, astronomers sighted the object on approach to Earth, using the 71-inch (1.8-meter) Pan-STARRS1 telescope at Maui, Hawaii. They designated it as asteroid 2020 SO and added it as an Apollo asteroid in the JPL Small-Body Database.
However, 2020 SO has some features that set it apart from ordinary asteroids. According to NASA/JPL calculations, the object will soon pass by Earth’s moon at a speed of 1,880 miles per hour (3,025 km/h) or 0.84 km per second (.5 mi/sec). That is an extremely slow speed for an asteroid.
These calculations also show the apparent “slow asteroid” orbiting the sun every 1.06 years (387 days). The low relative velocity, along with the Earth-like orbit, suggest it can be an artificial object that might have been launched from our planet.
Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, suggested the object might be the rocket booster of Surveyor 2, a robotic spacecraft that was launched to the moon on September 20, 1966.
42:31 Allison Coe [at 17:43] on the spaceships involved in “the Event” (‘Allison Coe’ YouTube)
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Article from Bloomberg News September 11, 2020 (scmp.com)
• Although NASA’s Artemis program aims to land astronauts on the Moon in 2024, the space agency has put out a general offer to procure Moon rocks from anyone who plans on going to the Moon before then, whether they be private corporations or other nations’ space programs. They’ll only get paid $15,000 to $25,000, but they don’t need to actually bring the rocks back to Earth. Just tag and document them as sold. NASA isn’t as interested in Moon rocks as they are in setting a legal precedent for mining resources on the lunar surface that would allow NASA to one day collect ice, helium or other materials useful to colonies on the Moon and, some day Mars.
• Activities beyond the Earth are governed by the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967, to which the U.S. is a signee. The 1967 Treaty bars extraterrestrial military bases or nuclear weapons, and basically requires nations to explore in peace and clean up their own mess. The treaty stipulates that outer space is not subject to “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”. But it does not specifically address space mining. “It’s time for regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources,” says NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.
• The winning bidder will collect about a pound of lunar regolith (ie: ‘rocks’), photograph it, document its location and then “conduct an ‘in-place’ transfer of ownership of the lunar or rocks to NASA. NASA will sort out the retrieval plans for the material at a later date. NASA will pay only for the lunar material that is collected. The contractor will be responsible for all costs associated with the mission.
• India is planning a second try at landing a rover on the Moon after its first attempt failed in September 2019. A $100M privately funded Israeli mission to land on the lunar surface failed in April 2019. In March 2018, Google and the XPrize Foundation ended its $30M lunar competition after multiple private teams were unable to launch and land a small rover on the Moon and to drive it at least 1,640 feet.
Nasa wants to buy some moon rocks, and it’s seeking out companies to make space mining trips so that it can establish a legal framework for its galactic aspirations.
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine
The agency is soliciting bids from explorers anywhere on Earth who are willing to finance their own trips to the moon and collect soil or rock samples without actually returning the material to earth. The effort is meant to set a legal precedent for mining on the lunar surface that would allow Nasa to one day collect ice, helium or other materials useful to colonies on the moon and, eventually, Mars.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration also wants to demonstrate the potential for “in situ resource utilisation”, or using locally sourced materials for future space missions, it said on Thursday. Nasa anticipates paying roughly between US$15,000 to US$25,000 per moon contract, agency Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, though final pricing will be determined by the competition.
Activities beyond the earthly plane are currently governed by the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Signed by the United States, it bars extraterrestrial military bases or nuclear weapons and basically requires nations to explore in peace and clean up their own messes.
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Article by Chris Ciaccia September 6, 2020 (foxnews.com)
• A study from the University of Hawaii, published in Science Advances, says that the Moon is rusting. “It’s very puzzling,” said the study’s lead author, Shuai Li. The rust may be a result of water discovered on the Moon, but it’s still shocking, given the lack of oxygen and dearth of water on the lunar satellite.
• Li was looking at data from the JPL Moon Mineralogy Mapper when he realized the instrument detected “spectra – or light reflected off surfaces – that revealed the Moon’s poles had a very different composition than the rest of it. The polar surfaces showed spectra that matched the mineral hematite (aka ‘iron oxide’ or ‘rust’), according to the study’s abstract. (see here)
• According to the study, “Our analyses of the Moon Mineralogy Mapper data show that hematite, a ferric mineral, is present at high latitudes on the Moon… and is more prevalent on the nearside than the farside.” But the hematite is not near any of the water ice that has been discovered on the Moon, adding another layer of complexity to the findings. “It could be that little bits of water and the impact of dust particles are allowing iron in these bodies to rust,” said study co-author, NASA JPL planetary geoscientist Abigail Fraeman.
• “At first, I totally didn’t believe it. It shouldn’t exist based on the conditions present on the Moon,” said Fraeman. “But since we discovered water on the Moon, people have been speculating that there could be a greater variety of minerals than we realize if that water had reacted with rocks.”
• With no atmospheric oxygen on the Moon and the Sun’s solar wind delivering hydrogen – which should act as a “reducer” to prevent oxidation – scientists are baffled where the rust is coming from. However, they believe it could stem from Earth, given the Moon does have “trace amounts of oxygen” thanks to Earth’s magnetic field.
• According to a study published in March 2019, the Moon actually loses water when meteoroids smack its surface. NASA’s ARTEMIS mission revealed that solar winds greatly impact the lunar surface and expose it to radiation from the Sun, leaving scars on the surface, akin to a “sunburn,” due to the Moon’s weak magnetic field. (see here)
• A study published in August 2019 suggested the Moon was 100 million years older than previously believed, basing their findings on analyzing the lunar rocks taken by the Apollo astronauts. (see here)
• And a study published in January 2019 suggested that a 4.1-billion-year-old chunk of Earth may have been found and dug up on the Moon by Apollo astronauts. (see here)
• [Editor’s Note] The Moon is rusting, and scientists don’t know why? Could it be because the Moon is an ancient artificial construct that is hollow or honeycombed, and was parked next Earth for some reason? And now its superstructure is rusting?
Shuai Li
A newly published study notes that the moon is “rusting,” leaving experts perplexed by the discovery.
Abigail Fraeman
The research, published in Science Advances, notes that the rust may be a result of water discovered on the moon, but it’s still shocking, given the lack of oxygen and dearth of water on Earth’s celestial satellite.
“It’s very puzzling,” the study’s lead author, Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii, said in a statement. “The moon is a terrible environment for hematite to form in.”
Li was looking at data from the JPL Moon Mineralogy Mapper when the researcher realized the instrument detected “spectra – or light reflected off surfaces – that revealed the Moon’s poles had a very different composition than the rest of it,” the statement added.
The polar surfaces showed spectra that matched the mineral hematite (Fe2O3), according to the study’s abstract.
“Although oxidizing processes have been speculated to operate on the lunar surface and form ferric iron–bearing minerals, unambiguous detections of ferric minerals forming under highly reducing conditions on the Moon have remained elusive,” the researchers wrote in the study’s abstract. “Our analyses of the Moon Mineralogy Mapper data show that hematite, a ferric mineral, is present at high latitudes on the Moon, mostly associated with east- and equator-facing sides of topographic highs, and is more prevalent on the nearside than the farside.”
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Article by Brandon J. Weichert September 3, 2020 (washingtontimes.com)
• China yearns to displace the United States as the dominant space power, and to inspire its people to make China a global hub of scientific research and development – the cornerstone of a knowledge-based economy. By placing the first rover on the dark side of the Moon in 2019, and by being the first nation to construct a lunar colony or to land ‘taikonauts’ on Mars, China is telling the world that it is truly the leader of today’s knowledge-based economy.
• But as China ascends, America is in decline. In 2019, on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landings, a Harris Poll asked young people in both the United States and China what they wanted to be when they grow up. Most of the American youth surveyed said they wanted to be professional “Vlogger/YouTubers” when they grow up. The Chinese youth overwhelmingly aspired to be astronauts.
• In the 1970s and 80s, China made great wealth by becoming the world’s sweatshop. In the 1990s, China invested that wealth in infrastructure to build a large middle class and a stable economy. This was all part of China’s long-term plan to ultimately become the dominant knowledge-based economy in the world. Today, China is at the forefront of quantum computing, biotech, alternative energy, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and space technologies.
• In 2018, the head of China’s lunar program, Ye Peijian, put their national space ambitions this way: “The universe is an ocean, the Moon is [an island], Mars is [an island]. If we don’t get to [these islands] now, even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough [to go to the Moon and beyond].”
• Meanwhile, American leadership oscillates between indifference and abdication on the matter of space policy. President Donald J. Trump has developed a truly robust national space policy, but his policies and his new military branch, Space Force, are only met with derision by bureaucratic lawmakers. Democrats on Capitol Hill have already stated that Trump’s plans to return American astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024 will not be fiscally possible. NASA’s director of manned spaceflight challenges the very notion of successfully returning astronauts to the Moon before the decade is over.
• The future belongs to the country that wants it more. Without higher levels of funding, the Space Force will never mature into the robust force it must become to defend American interests in the strategic high ground of space. The American nationalist call to greatness is being squelched by the globalist demand for mediocrity. Without the embrace of nationalism in the United States, the country’s national mission in space will end in failure and its people will stop dreaming. America’s greatness will erode at every level.
• [Editor’s Note] How could America fall behind in the space race you ask? It was by design. Just after the Roswell crash in July 1947, Truman appointed twelve military, intelligence and scientific officials to form a secret group whose purpose was to hide from the public all evidence of the advanced extraterrestrial beings that were visiting the Earth, and to hide the fact that we were building our own space fleets and colonizing the solar system. This group is known as Majestic 12, and it still exists in the dark corridors of the deep state government’s power elite.
MJ-12 would use any means available to keep the truth from the American public, from ridiculing anyone who claimed to have seen a UFO or an alien being (and basically ruining their lives), to directing deep state funded media, scientists and academia to never take sightings seriously. The result has been generations of Americans who are conditioned to scoff at and ignore anything pertaining to UFOs and extraterrestrials. The deep state government doesn’t want people interested in exploring space. The deep state driven military hawks and corporate owners want to have space all to themselves – and the advanced space technology that goes with it. They simply deny that any of it exists. Deep state legislators routinely reject spending on space endeavors and laugh at the notion of a Space Force. They want to keep a lid on the enormous fraud that has been perpetrated on an unwitting public since World War II.
On the other hand, the Chinese have encouraged space exploration for both its national pride and to usurp American geopolitical and exopolitical dominance. Indeed, the deep state has become entrenched within the Chinese government as well, and will try to keep its space empire a secret. But how long can it be before countries such as China, Russia and India have pushed their way into deep space, and these ubiquitous deep state Secret Space Programs become obvious? The deep state won’t be able to hide the truth for very much longer.
On the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landings, Harris Poll asked young people in the United States and China what they wanted to be when they grew up. The results were strange. Most American youth surveyed — the young people who belonged to the only country to have ever placed astronauts on the lunar surface — admitted that they wanted to be professional “Vlogger/YouTubers” when they grew up. It was the Chinese youth
Ye Peijian
who overwhelmingly aspired to be astronauts.
Speaking to Chinese state media in 2018, the head of China’s lunar program, Ye Peijian, outlined the Chinese view of their national space strategy in explicit geopolitical terms, specifically in naval terminology: “The universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands [sic], Mars is Huangyan Island. If we don’t get there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough [to go to the moon and beyond].”
China made great wealth by becoming the world’s sweatshop in the 1970s and ’80s. Throughout the 1990s, it reinvested that wealth into building out the infrastructure needed to both support an enlarged middle class and to ensure that China moved up the international development ladder.
China’s leadership never intended to remain just an industrial power subordinated to the United States in the post-industrial, knowledge-based
economy. China planned to become the dominant knowledge-based economy in the world. They have pioneered many innovations in the new industrial economy, notably 5G Internet, but are also heavily invested in quantum computing, biotech, alternative energy, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and space technologies.
For China, these new scientific innovations are not merely about making more money or even gaining a military edge over the West (Beijing certainly does care about those things). More than that, though, China yearns to displace the United States and dominant space power simply out of national pride.
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Article from Kyodo News August 26, 2020 (english.kyodonews.net)
• In August 26th, US and Japanese officials met in Tokyo to further discuss Japan’s role in the NASA-led joint lunar exploration project culminating in a return to the Moon in 2024, actual exploration of the lunar surface beginning in 2028, and ultimately the international ‘Artemis’ lunar habitat project. This will be the first time that humans walk on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
• The meeting was attended by Scott Pace, executive secretary of the US National Space Council, Gen. John Raymond, chief of Space Force, and Japanese government officials from the Cabinet Office, Defense Ministry and other Japanese agencies.
• Pursuant to a lunar cooperation accord signed in July 2020, the US and NASA acknowledged opportunities for “Japanese crew activities” on the ‘Gateway’, a small spaceship that will orbit the Moon, as well as participate in activities on the lunar surface.
• US officials also acknowledged Japan’s new ‘Space Operation Squadron’, an Air Self-Defense Force space unit monitoring threats to Japanese satellites in outer space. Japanese officials acknowledged the significance of the US Space Command and Space Force.
• Tokyo and Washington also touched on “growing concern for threats to the continuous, safe and stable use of outer space,” a veiled reference to the growing space capabilities of countries such as China and Russia.
Scott Pace
Japan and the United States on Wednesday pledged to work closely on a lunar exploration project led by
Gen. John Raymond
the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration after Tokyo joined it last month.
In a joint statement issued after a meeting in Tokyo, the two governments said they “reaffirmed their commitment to Artemis,” the multilateral project intended to return humans to the Moon by 2024 and establish sustainable lunar surface exploration with NASA’s commercial and international partners by 2028.
The two sides “also acknowledged opportunities for Japanese crew activities” on the Gateway, a small spaceship that will orbit the Moon, as well as on the lunar surface, as highlighted in a lunar cooperation accord they signed in July, the statement said.
The last humans to walk on the Moon were American astronauts from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
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Article by Shepard Ambellas August 21, 2020 (intellihub.com)
• In 2017, NASA and FEMA initiated a supposed fictitious response scenario for an asteroid hitting southern California on September 20, 2020. But is it just a drill? Or is it actual preparation for a real event while avoiding public panic?
• We have seen past situations when such a “drill” actually went “live”. In July 2017, a bombing drill became the actual London bombing. On September 11, 2001, a ‘military exercise’ became the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center buildings in NYC. Last March, in a White House press conference, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blurted out that the coronavirus pandemic was a “live exercise” playing out. (see video here) In the background, a disgusted President Trump is heard to mutter, “You should have let us know.”
• The ‘exercise’ goes like this: A fictitious asteroid is discovered in the fall of 2016 heading in the direction of the Earth. The asteroid is estimated to be between 300 and 800 feet in size. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory gives it a 2 percent chance of impacting the Earth on September 20, 2020. NASA tracks the asteroid over the following three months using ground-based telescope observations, and the probability of impact climbs to 65 percent. The observations are put on hold for another four months due to the asteroid’s position relative to the Sun. When the observations resume in May 2017, the impact probability jumps to 100 percent. By November 2017, the asteroid’s impact is calculated to hit somewhere in Southern California or just off the coast in the Pacific Ocean.
• However, NASA recently listed a real asteroid, dubbed 2017 SL16 discovered in 2017 (see here), as making a close approach to Earth on September 20, 2020. This raises a major red flag.
• NASA, FEMA, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories, the U.S. Air Force, and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services have all been participating in this four year ‘exercise’. “By working through our emergency response plans now, we will be better prepared if and when we need to respond to such an event,” said FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate.
• Previous tabletop simulations included a scenario where the asteroid is somehow deflected away from the Earth. But in this scenario, NASA JPL said that “the time to impact was too short for a deflection mission to be feasible”. Instead, they role play the forced mass evacuation of Los Angeles.
• “Scientists from JPL, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and The Aerospace Corporation predicted impact footprint models, population displacement estimates, information on infrastructure that would be affected…” according to the NASA simulation report, “… as well as other data that could realistically be known at various points throughout the exercise scenario.”
• “[U]nlike any other time in our history, we now have the ability to respond to an impact threat through continued observations, predictions, response planning and mitigation,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “It’s not a matter of if – but when – we will deal with such a situation.”
The National Aeronautics Space Administration and FEMA in 2017 devised and initiated a supposed fictitious scenario in which the two agencies would drill down on an asteroid that’s set to impact the Earth in or just off the coast of California on September 20, 2020, but is this so-called “exercise” really just a drill?
Craig Fugate
NASA claims “the simulation was designed to strengthen the collaboration between the two agencies, which have Administration direction to lead the U.S. response” but could the drill actually go live like so many other drills have in the past? (i.e. the July 7, 2007, London bombing, the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and others)
Thomas Zurbuchen
“It’s not a matter of if–but when–we will deal with such a situation,” Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Thomas Zurbuchen said. “But unlike any other time in our history, we now have the ability to respond to an impact threat through continued observations, predictions, response planning and mitigation.”
The exercise was designed to create “a forum for the planetary science community to show how it would collect, analyze and share data about a hypothetical asteroid predicted to impact Earth. Emergency managers discussed how that data would be used to consider some of the unique challenges an asteroid impact would present-for preparedness, response and public warning,” according to NASA.
Representatives from NASA, FEMA, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories, the U.S. Air Force, and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services attended the initial meeting and will be participating throughout the 4 year long exercises which is set to come to a head on Sept 20, 2020.
“It is critical to exercise these kinds of low-probability but high-consequence disaster scenarios,” FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said. “By working through our emergency response plans now, we will be better prepared if and when we need to respond to such an event.”
The exercise simulates a possible impact four years from now in which, according to NASA, “a fictitious asteroid imagined to have been discovered this fall with a 2 percent probability of impact with Earth on Sept. 20, 2020. The simulated asteroid was initially estimated to be between 300 and 800 feet (100 and 250 meters) in size, with a possibility of making impact anywhere along a long swath of Earth, including a narrow band of area that crossed the entire United States.”
12:11 minute video on the 11/20/20 asteroid simulation (‘End Times Productions’ YouTube)
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Article by Samantha McDaniel-Ogletree August 12, 2020 (myjournalcourier.com)
• When Jacksonville, Illinois native Susan Gorton was in high school, she and her family took a vacation to Houston where she decided she wanted to be a part of NASA. Today she is the manager of the Revolution Vertical Lift Technology Project which helped design the helicopter ‘Ingenuity’ that is now on its way to Mars with the Rover Perseverance. It is scheduled to land on Mars in February.
• Gorton was approached by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop a helicopter that could fly in the Mars atmosphere. A helicopter allows more exploration than a rover alone could provide. “The rover can only see ahead like 10 meters, so they wanted something that could act like an aerial scout,” said Gorton. The softball sized helicopter was conceptualized by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and developed and tested by Gorton’s team starting in 2013. In 2018, NASA announced it was moving forward with the project. “I never would have guessed that this is where I’d end up,” said Gorton.
• The Ingenuity helicopter is softball-sized, (four pounds heavy, with twin 4-foot rotor blades). Because no one would be directly in control of its operations, the helicopter needed to have some autonomy to correct its flight patterns and balance. Among the problems the team had to navigate were an atmosphere that is 95% carbon dioxide and temperatures that range from minus 14 degrees to minus 117 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. The helicopter will be able to communicate with the rover and send pictures, which the rover will relay to NASA Mission Control. Mission Control will relay instructions to the helicopter through the rover.
• This demonstration model will prove whether a helicopter can operate on Mars. Another model will be developed if it is functional. “It’s an exciting time — a feeling of ‘boy, I hope this works,’” Gorton said. “We won’t know for sure if we did it until it reaches Mars.” “If it is successful, [it opens] up the landscape of another planet, the ability to explore much more of [a] planet. It’s a leap forward in extraterrestrial exploration.”
• [Editor’s Note] I think that NASA is exaggerating the atmospheric conditions with which the Ingenuity helicopter must contend. A 95% carbon dioxide atmosphere shouldn’t affect the air pressure. But several secret space program whistleblowers have said that the Martian air is breathable, so long as you aren’t running wind sprints. They would typically carry along an small oxygen tank on the surface of the planet for whenever they felt they needed more oxygen. And the Mars sky is blue, which is an indication of an oxygen-rich atmosphere. So Mars likely contains more oxygen than NASA is letting on. Also, whistleblowers do not report that Mars’ temperature never gets above minus 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature on Mars is much more comfortable than NASA is telling us. For some reason, NASA doesn’t want the public to know just how hospitable Mars really is. Is this a ploy to delay public exploration of Mars for as long as possible? Do they not want us to find out that not only are there over a dozen Interplanetary Corporate Conglomerate (deep state) human work colonies and an allied Nazi ‘Dark Fleet’ Mars Defense Force already established on Mars (below ground), but several indigenous races still living on the planet as well?
As a Routt Catholic High School sophomore on summer vacation with her family in Houston, Susan Gorton found her dream.
She wanted to be a part of NASA.
Susan Gorton
For the Jacksonville native, seeing the space agency’s visitor center started her along a path that took her to manager of the Revolution Vertical Lift Technology Project.
Now, a softball-size helicopter she helped design and test is making its way through space on its way to Mars.
“I never would have guessed that this is where I’d end up,” Gorton said. “I wouldn’t have guessed something I helped with would be in space.”
Gorton said most people think of just astronauts and space when they think of NASA, but the program is also studying aeronautics, such as airplanes and helicopters.
“We do a lot with research on how to make vehicles better,” Gorton said.
In her department, Gorton focuses on vertical-lift vehicles, making them faster, quieter and safer.
Gorton was approached by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory about a project to fly a helicopter in the Mars atmosphere. The goal is to allow aerial scouting and more exploration than a rover would be able to provide.
“They were developing a rover going to Mars and they were working on how to get something on Mars that can move ahead of the rover,” Gorton said. “The rover can only see ahead like 10 meters, so they wanted something that could act like an aerial scout.”
She and her team helped develop the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, which launched as a part of the Mars 2020 Rover Perseverance on an Atlas V rocket on July 30. It is scheduled to land on Mars in February.
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Article by Elizabeth Howell August 11, 2020 (forbes.com)
• In 2018, the NASA Dawn mission detected strange bright spots on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres (the largest object in the Asteroid Belt). Dawn also collected data on Ceres’ gravity before the space probe exhausted its fuel supply and retired. Subsequent analysis of this date has revealed that the bright spots were reflecting salty brine water in a reservoir 25 miles and hundreds of miles wide. What’s more, the water appears underneath a giant crater known as the Occator Crater (pictured above).
• “The bulk of the salts were supplied from a slushy area just beneath the surface, that was melted by the heat of the impact that formed the crater about 20 million years ago,” said Carol Raymond, Dawn principal investigator for NASA. “The impact heat subsided after a few million years. However, the impact also created large fractures that could reach the deep, long-lived reservoir, allowing brine to continue percolating to the surface.”
• Icy worlds with probable flowing water are largely located on moons of large gas giant planets like Jupiter that supply the energy needed to keep water flowing. The new discovery suggests that water could be found in places that are not so obviously active. Scientists are now scouring our solar system to look for other possibilities, to reach a better understanding of how water is so prevalent on Earth, and where water may be lurking in our solar system.
• Water, of course, is an indicator for life. The Hubble Space Telescope recently demonstrated how we might find signatures of ozone on distant exoplanets as another indicator of life. (see previous ExoArticle here) Astronomers are also looking at the Earth-sized planets in the Trappist-1 system for signs of life. But the new Ceres data shows that we can’t rule out our own solar system for potentially habitable environments.
• The icy moons of Jupiter will see more close-up action with the forthcoming Europa Clipper mission at NASA, and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) from the European Space Agency. NASA’s Perseverance rover also lifted off for Mars in late July to look for rock samples to return to Earth for closer analysis. These investigations will allow us to better learn about where we should look for life in the coming decades.
• [Editor’s Note] “Where to look for life in the coming decades??” This statement tells us how long the deep state plans to drag out ‘full disclosure’. We know that the universe is teeming with extraterrestrial life, and our solar system is no exception. After the watery ‘super-Earth’, Tiamat, blew up to form the Asteroid Belt, the largest object in the belt, Ceres, with a radius of 294 miles (584 mile diameter) apparently retained enough gravity to capture and hold a sizable amount of water.
According to ‘Dark Fleet’ space program whistleblower Tony Rodrigues, there is a large, highly populated German colony within Ceres that is modeled after a typical early 20th century Bavarian city. Tony worked in maintenance and cargo supporting Nazi Dark Fleet spacecraft as a slave-worker in the Ceres colony for over ten years. Tony says that the Occator Crater, where NASA discovered a ‘brine water’ reservoir, is actually the location of a geyser that Tony was very familiar with. (see video below for a fascinating interview of Tony Rodrigues talking about the Ceres colony)
Hopefully, the white hat Alliance will soon defeat the deep state, and these secrets can be revealed to the public.
We finally have a better sense of the “origin story” of strange bright spots that appear on dwarf planet Ceres.
Carol Raymond
It turns out they come from liquid, salty water that is underneath the ground. Studying the data further could tell us more about the story of how water was distributed in our solar system — telling us more about life in general.
The new insight comes from analyzing old data from a now-defunct spacecraft. The NASA Dawn mission collected data in 2018 about Ceres’ gravity showing that there is a zone on the planet with a brine reservoir, roughly 25 miles or 40 kilometers deep and hundreds of miles wide. What’s more, the water appears underneath a giant crater known as Occator, showing that the violent impact had long-lasting effects on Ceres’ history.
“The bulk of the salts were supplied from a slushy area just beneath the surface, that was melted by the heat of the impact that formed the crater about 20 million years ago,” Carol Raymond, Dawn principal investigator, said in a NASA statement. “The impact heat subsided after a few million years. However, the impact also created large fractures that could reach the deep, long-lived reservoir, allowing brine to continue percolating to the surface.”
We know of icy worlds with probable flowing water all over the solar system, which are largely located near large gas giant planets like Jupiter that supply the energy needed to keep water flowing. The new discovery suggests that water could be found in places that are not so obviously active.
42:10 minute video of Tony Rodrigues discussing the Ceres colony (‘Salubrious Events’ YouTube)
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Article by Claire Bugos August 10, 2020 (smithsonianmag.com)
• In January 2019, there was a total lunar eclipse. During a two-day period, light from the Sun passed through the Earth’s atmosphere and hit the Moon, and was reflected back toward the Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope was able to intercept and gather data from this ultraviolet light. Though similar ground-based studies have been done before, this is the first time that scientists have used a space telescope to capture ultraviolet wavelengths. From this data, scientists from NASA and the European Space Agency are able to analyze the Earth’s own atmospheric spectrum. They reported their findings in an article published August 6 in The Astronomical Journal. (see 3-minute NASA video below)
• The main focus was on the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Ozone absorbs ultraviolet radiation. During the eclipse, Hubble detected lower amounts of UV radiation from the light reflected off the Moon than is present from unfiltered sunlight. Therefore, the Earth’s atmosphere absorbed some of it. If they can simulate this with a distant exoplanet, they can determine whether that planet’s atmosphere contains ozone. And along with oxygen, the detection of an ozone layer is considered an indication of possible life on that planet.
• Using this unique method, scientists can simulate observations of exoplanets. When an exoplanet crosses in front of its star, the star light is filtered through the planet’s atmosphere, creating a “halo” effect. Chemicals in the atmosphere filter out certain colors of starlight. Therefore, scientists can determine that planet’s atmospheric composition.
• “But how would we know a habitable or an uninhabited planet if we saw one?” queries Allison Youngblood of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and lead researcher of Hubble’s observations. By developing a model of the Earth’s chemical spectrum, scientists can use this as a template for categorizing the atmospheres of exoplanets in other solar systems.
• The age of the planet is also be taken into account when determining its ability to host life. Earth had low concentrations of oxygen for more than a billion years, while organisms used photosynthesis to build the ozone layer. So it may be challenging to detect ozone in younger planets. Still, ultraviolet may be “the best wavelength to detect photosynthetic life on low-oxygen exoplanets,” says Giada Arney of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a co-author of the study.
• The Hubble telescope was launched in 1990, even before astronomers first discovered exoplanets. While its ability to observe extraterrestrial atmospheres is “remarkable,” NASA says future observations of Earth-sized planets will require much larger telescopes and longer observational periods, which the James Webb Space telescope, scheduled to launch in 2021, will provide.
In the quest to discover life beyond Earth, scientists are harnessing a very large and proximate tool—the moon.
Allison Youngblood
During a total lunar eclipse in January 2019, the moon acted like a giant mirror, reflecting sunlight that had passed
Hubble Telescope
through our atmosphere back toward Earth, reports Chelsea Gohd for Space.com. The Hubble Space Telescope, which was positioned between the Earth and moon, intercepted the reflected ultraviolet light for scientists to analyze.
Scientists from NASA and the European Space Agency studied the reflected light from a lunar eclipse during a two-day window. They reported their findings in an article published August 6 in The Astronomical Journal.
For the first time, scientists used a space telescope to capture ultraviolet wavelengths. Though similar ground-based studies have been done before, using a space telescope for this observation allows scientists to simulate future observations of exoplanets, Space.com reports.
Giada Arney
The goal was for the telescope to detect the Earth’s ozone layer. The ozone molecule that makes up the Earth’s protective layer absorbs ultraviolet radiation. During the eclipse, Hubble detected lower amounts of UV radiation from the light reflected off the moon than is present from unfiltered sunlight, meaning the Earth’s atmosphere must have absorbed some of it, according to a NASA press release.
If scientists are able to detect an ozone layer or oxygen on a neighboring exoplanet, there’s a possibility that the planet may harbor life. On Earth, oxygen is often produced by life forms, especially those that photosynthesize. If scientists detect an oxygen-rich atmosphere on an exoplanet, especially if the amount of oxygen varies seasonally, there is a chance that it also hosts life. But scientists would need to further analyze the atmosphere using other tools before determining if it’s life-hosting, Allison Youngblood of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and lead researcher of Hubble’s observations, says in the press release.
3-minute video “Hubble Views Moon to Study Earth” (‘NASA Goddard’ YouTube)
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Article by Chris Ciaccia July 29, 2020 (nypost.com)
• On July 30th, NASA’s $2.1 billion ‘Perseverance’ rover (pictured above) set out for Mars, along with the first helicopter to travel to Mars, known as ‘Ingenuity’. Among other tasks, the rover and the helicopter will be looking for signs of extraterrestrial life. The Perseverance will land at the Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021, joining the still-functioning Curiosity rover and the now-deceased Opportunity rover. NASA’s long-term goal is to send a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s.
• Like its predecessors, Perseverance is powered by a nuclear energy system known as ‘Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator’ thanks to the US Department of Energy. Says Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and National Nuclear Security Administratior Lisa E. Gordon-Hagerty, “From preparing astronauts for cratered terrain to building boxes for moon rocks to providing electricity from nuclear sources, I’m proud to say that we’ve lent our unique expertise for exploration of the solar system… for nearly 60 years.”
• In 2014, the Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy with Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory were tasked to construct the multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator and its plutonium fuel to power the Perseverance rover. But the Department of Energy partnership with NASA goes back to the 1960s when the DoE provided radioisotope power systems to the Apollo missions, said DoE Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar to Fox News.
• Radioisotope power systems provide a steady power source in parts of the solar system that are dark or dusty. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers used Radioisotope Heater Units with a mission life of 7 and 14 years respectively, significantly longer than the 3-month primary mission lifetime. Curiosity is still going strong 7 years, over 3 times the primary mission timeline. The two longest-operating radioisotope power system missions are Voyager I and II, which are still in operation 43 years later.
• Perseverance’s ‘SuperCam’ was designed, built and tested at DoE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in partnership with the French space agency, Centre national d’études spatiales (National Center for Space Studies). It uses laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy to study mineral composition, hardness and texture of Martian rocks and soils and will search for organic compounds related to Mars’ geologic past.
• The DoE’s Office of Science facilities also support the study of materials returned from NASA space missions to Mars, including the use of X-ray and electron imaging to study the form and shape of rock samples and various spectroscopy techniques to reveal the chemical composition.
Lisa E. Gordon-Hagerty
After it was delayed three times to iron out issues, NASA’s Perseverance rover is slated on July 30 to head to Mars, where it will perform a number of tasks, including looking for fossilized evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Paul Dabbar
The $2.1 billion rover will also come with the first helicopter, known as Ingenuity, that will let researchers understand the viability and potential of heavier-than-air vehicles on the Red Planet. NASA’s long-term goal is to send a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s.
Once Perseverance lands on Mars at the Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, it will join the still functioning Curiosity rover and the now-deceased Opportunity rover on the Red Planet.
Similar to its predecessors, Perseverance is being powered by a nuclear energy system known as Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), thanks to the Department of Energy. However, using nuclear power isn’t anything new for NASA.
The National Nuclear Security Administration has “supported NASA missions for nearly 60 years,” Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA Administrator Lisa E. Gordon-Hagerty told Fox News.
“From preparing astronauts for cratered terrain to building boxes for moon rocks to providing electricity from nuclear sources, I’m proud to say that we’ve lent our unique expertise for exploration of the solar system,” Gordon-Hagerty added.
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• In 1962, President John F Kennedy called for a mission to the Moon, calling it a “new frontier”. On July 20, 1969, NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong realized this dream as he became the first man to set foot on the Moon, followed by pilot Buzz Aldrin 19 minutes later. As Armstrong famously proclaimed, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. Armstrong, Aldrin and the pilot, Michael Collins, returned to Earth as heroes.
• But what if the 1969 Moon mission was not a success? In his book Shoot For The Moon, author Jim Donovan revealed how NASA prepared for the worst-case scenario. “I discovered that the Moon landing was even more dangerous than anyone outside Mission Control knew,” writes Donovan. “When the primitive Apollo Guidance Computer – with just 72kB of memory and a processing speed millions of times slower than today’s average smartphone – began to blare alarms at 40,000ft it took incredible skill on the part of the controllers not to abort the entire mission.”
• There were 18 different plans in place if something went wrong. Collins kept a notebook with all 18 emergency procedures pinned to the front of his space suit. If something went wrong, Collins was ordered to leave Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon to die. Writes Donovan, “Collins developed tics in both eyes at the thought of being unable to retrieve his two comrades and having to turn homeward and leave them on the Moon or circle it until they perished.”
• One the day of the actual mission, Collins said he was “sweating like a nervous bride” waited for Armstrong and Aldrin to get in touch. He believed if he had to return to Earth alone he would be a marked man for life.
• Knowing the risk of disaster, NASA had President Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire, prepare the words for such an eventuality: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace.”
author, Jim Donovan
In 1962, President John F Kennedy called for a mission to the Moon. It was, he said, a “new frontier”. Talk of frontiers
was a throwback to the nineteenth century, but it made a certain sense.
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin
The prospect of claiming the Moon – vast, uninhabited, strategically useful and mineral-rich – is precisely the sort of thing the would have made the world conquerors of old salivate.
British arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes once mused: “I would annex the planets if I could. I often think of that.”
NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong eventually realised this dream to some extent 51 years ago, on July 20, 1969.
He became the first man to set foot on the Moon, followed by pilot Buzz Aldrin 19 minutes later.
As he took his first steps on the lunar surface, Armstrong uttered the now immortal phrase “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”.
And after Armstrong, Aldrin and the pilot who had taken them to the lunar surface, Michael Collins, returned to Earth all three were given a hero’s welcome.
The mission was hailed a huge success – but it could have been very different.
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• Upcoming NASA science missions such as the Mars 2020 and Europa Clipper missions, and NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission, NASA’s Artemis program’s Gateway lunar orbital outpost, Human Lander System, and Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, all will need to be in compliance with planetary protection standards. ‘Planetary Protection’s’ role is to protect both Earth and mission destinations from biological contamination.
• NASA has awarded the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, a $4.7 million ‘indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity’ contract for five years to head NASA’s Planetary Protection Program beginning July 1st. To ensure compliance with planetary protection standards, SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). The SETI Institute will work with NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection to provide technical reviews and recommendations, validate biological cleanliness on flight projects, provide training for NASA and its partners, develop guidelines for implementation of NASA requirements, and disseminate information to stakeholders and the public.
• “The depth of mission experience and breadth of knowledge on the SETI Institute team will help NASA meet the technical challenges of assuring forward and backward planetary protection on the anticipated path of human exploration from the Moon to Mars,” said Lisa Pratt, NASA’s planetary protection officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
• “[P]lanetary protection [has become] an increasingly important component of mission planning and execution,” said Bill Diamond, president and chief executive officer of the SETI Institute. “We are proud to be NASA’s partner for this mission-critical function, protecting Earth from backward contamination, and helping ensure that the life we may find on other worlds, didn’t come from our own.”
• NASA and the SETI Institute have worked together on planetary protection for more than a decade and have developed a strong relationship and core competency in this area. SETI Institute scientists have extensive experience in understanding microbial life and how it can affect missions, even in the extreme conditions of spaceflight and extraterrestrial environments.
• [Editor’s Note] “SETI Institute scientists have extensive experience in understanding microbial life and how it can affect missions”? Really? Isn’t SETI the deep state pseudo-agency puppet that has been monitoring radio waves for signs of extraterrestrial signals since Frank Drake in 1960? Is this the same SETI who had to turn to private financing because of the ridicule they were taking from Congress? Now we learn that these astronomers who peer through telescopes all day, also have a knack for detecting microbial contamination on NASA spacecraft traveling to and from the Moon and Mars. The only thing that SETI has ever been tasked to do is to pretend to search for intelligent ETs and never find any, when everyone knows that they’re all around us and have been for the past century. Now, another deep state pseudo-agency puppet, NASA, is giving SETI the responsibility of preventing REAL microbial contamination in REAL space? Is this a joke? Or is it just a money transfer between two deep state toadies for some other agenda?
SETI’s Bill Diamond
NASA has awarded the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, a contract to support all phases of current and future planetary protection missions to ensure compliance with planetary protection standards.
The SETI Institute will work with NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection (OPP) to provide technical reviews and recommendations, validate biological cleanliness on flight projects, provide training for NASA and its partners, as well as develop guidelines for implementation of NASA requirements, and disseminate information to stakeholders and the public. The role of OPP is to promote responsible exploration of the solar system by protecting both Earth and mission destinations from biological contamination.
NASA’s Lisa Pratt
“The depth of mission experience and breadth of knowledge on the SETI Institute team will help NASA meet the technical challenges of assuring forward and backward planetary protection on the anticipated path of human exploration from the Moon to Mars,” said Lisa Pratt, NASA’s planetary protection officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Planetary protection preserves environments, as well as the science, ensuring verifiable scientific exploration for extraterrestrial life. Some of the upcoming NASA science missions that will be supported by this contract include the Mars 2020 and Europa Clipper missions, and preparations for NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission. In addition, future human spaceflight exploration under NASA’s Artemis program, such as the Gateway lunar orbital outpost, the Human Lander System, and Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, will be supported under this contract, as part of America’s Moon to Mars exploration approach.
The contract is a fixed-price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract with a maximum award value of $4.7 million over a five-year period that began July 1.
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Article by Sean Martin July 7, 2020 (express.co.uk)
• The United States, China and the United Arab Emirates all have Mars launches scheduled this month.
• Between July 20 and July 25th, the China National Space Agency will launch an orbiter known as Tianwen-1, which translates to ‘the quest for heavenly truth’ to circle the Red Planet for a year. The rocket will also carry a rover vehicle that will land on the Martian surface and collect soil samples. The oribter will serve as a communications relay for the lander.
• The UAE will launch an orbiter named ‘The Hope’, which will spend two years orbiting Mars. The UAE’s primary objective is to flex its financial muscle and show the world that it is capable of in space exploration.
• On July 30th, NASA will send the Perseverance Rover to roam the Red Planet looking for signs of life – both past and present. The main instrument, the ‘Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals’ (or ‘SHERLOC’), will be mounted on the end of one of the Mars rover’s robotic arms. SHERLOC will emit a quarter-sized ultraviolet laser at the ground, and scientists will measure how the light scatters when it hits the ground to determine its mineral and chemical compounds. This will identify the spectral “fingerprint” of certain alien organic material for signs of past or present life. “Life is clumpy,” said NASA’s Luther Beegle. “If we see organics clumping together on one part of a rock, it might be a sign that microbes thrived there in the past.”
• Earth and Mars are currently at their closest orbital points in the solar system. So now is the optimal time to make the relatively short journey – which will still take up to six months.
China’s Tianwen-1
THREE countries are set to launch rockets to Mars this months as the search for life on the Red Planet is turned up a notch.
The UAE’s ‘The Hope’ orbiter
China, the US and the UAE are all gearing up for historic Mars launches this month with the hopes of discovering more about Earth’s dusty neighbour. Starting with China, the new space force will be launching an orbiter known as Tianwen-1, which translates to ‘the quest for heavenly truth’ to circle to Red Planet. The orbiter will spend a year around Mars, serving as a communication relay for humanity’s eventual arrival with the launch date scheduled between July 20 and July 25.
Alongside the orbiter, China will send a rover to roam the surface of the Red Planet and collect soil samples.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover
China National Space Agency (CNSA) chief mission architect Zhang Rongqiao said: “Our goal is to explore and gather as much scientific data as possible.”
The UAE is also launching an orbiter named The Hope, which will spend two years orbiting Mars, following a 200-day journey.
According to The Hill, the UAE’s primary objective is to flex its financial muscle and show the world what it is capable of in the space exploration industry as the appeal of oil, which UAE has in abundance, loses its appeal.
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Article by Sebastian Kettley July 3, 2020 (express.co.uk)
• NASA’s Gemini 4 mission, in June 1965, was the tenth American spaceflight and the second crewed spaceflight. (Astronauts James McDivitt and Ed White circled the Earth 66 times in four days.) On the second day of the mission, as White was sleeping, McDivitt recalled seeing an unidentified object outside the Gemini spacecraft.
• McDivitt said in 1975, “We were in drifting flight… there was something out in front of me or outside the spacecraft that I couldn’t identify and I never have been able to identify it.” It was “a white cylindrical shape with a white pole sticking it out of one corner of it – it looked like a beer can with a smooth pencil sticking out.”
• McDivitt guessed that the object was close to the spacecraft since he could easily see it. He grabbed two cameras and took photos of the UFO. “As the sun shone on the window, I could no longer see out and the thing just disappeared,” said McDivitt. “(Later) they checked NORAD records to see what they had up on radar and there wasn’t anything within very close range of us.”
• After the astronauts returned to Earth and the mission’s photographs were processed, the pictures failed to reveal what the astronaut has seen. “I went back and went through each frame of all of the pictures that we took and there wasn’t anything in there like what I had seen,” said McDivitt. Some journalists speculated that the astronaut may have seen a secret Soviet satellite. Or it could have been ‘orbital debris’ from the Gemini 4 launch.
• Former space engineer and rocket scientist James Oberg said the Gemini 4 was the only one of 10 manned flights in which a rendezvous was attempted (and nearly accomplished) with a beer can-shaped target (ie: the upper stage of the Titan II rocket that had been floating in space for 50 hours). It is likely the astronaut witnessed the Titan’s booster stage.
• Oberg noted that McDivitt “refused to believe he could have misidentified that object – but both his degraded eyesight and different viewing angle at the time of the sighting eliminate any reliability from that claim.” “[Y]ears of UFO research have taught us the surprising lesson that pilots re, in truth, among the poorest observers of UFOs,” said Oberg, “because of their instinctive pattern of perceiving visual stimuli primarily in terms of threats to their own vehicles.”
The NASA astronaut encountered the UFO on the second day of the Gemini 4 mission in June 1965. Gemini 4 was the second crewed spaceflight in the Gemini programme and the tenth American spaceflight. On the second day of the mission, which saw Mr White perform the first US EVA or spacewalk, Mr McDivitt recalled seeing an object outside the Gemini spacecraft.
astronaut James McDivitt
He said back in 1975: “At the time I saw it, I said there was something out in front of me or outside the spacecraft that I couldn’t identify and I never have been able to identify it, and I don’t think anybody ever will.
“We were in drifting flight and my partner, Ed White, was asleep.
“I couldn’t see anything out in front of me except just the black sky.
“And it was rotating around, I noticed something out in front that was a white cylindrical shape with a white pole sticking it out of one corner of it – it looked like a beer can with a smooth pencil sticking out.”
The astronaut then grabbed his camera and took a few photos of the object.
But he did not correctly focus or expose the photographs to properly capture the UFO.
He did, however, later guess the object was floating fairly close to his spacecraft since it was visible to him.
The astronaut said: “I grabbed two cameras and took pictures of it.
“As the sun shone on the window, I could no longer see out and the thing just disappeared.
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July 2, 2020 (wionews.com) • The Japanese government announced the country’s 10-year ‘Basic Plan on Space Policy’. Japan aims to double its space industry budget from $11 billion to $22 billion by the early 2030s, and work with the United States to track missiles and use intelligence-gathering satellites during natural disasters.
• One of the key components of the plan is to put a Japanese man on the Moon by 2024, while working with NASA. Japan plans to utilize its resources to strengthen its space policy through the ‘whole-of-government’ approach, while promoting public-private collaborations.
• Japan recently inaugurated the first ‘Space Operations Squadron’ at Fuchu Air Base in Tokyo as an “Air Self-Defense Force”, which will become fully operational by 2023. The squadron will work with the US Space Command to protect the country’s satellites from damage, including armed attacks according to the ‘Basic Space Law’.
• Japan already operates the ‘Quasi-Zenith Satellite System’ to enhance the US’s Global Positioning System in the Asia-Oceania regions. Japan plans to launch a new GPS navigation system of its own in 2023 with 7 satellites. It is concerned over China’s capability to jam or attack satellites with other neighboring countries North Korea and Russia capable of upsetting the regional balance in arms technology.
• In January 2019, China became the first nation to land a rover on the dark side of the lunar surface. This month, China plans to launch a mission to remote-controlled robot on the surface of Mars. The US has already sent four exploratory vehicles to Mars, and intends to launch a fifth this summer which should arrive around February 2021.
• China recently completed its own GPS-type geolocation system which it began in the early 1990s. 120 countries including Pakistan and Thailand are using the Chinese GPS system for port traffic monitoring, to guide rescue operations during disasters and other services, according to Chinese state media.
• When Donald Trump announced the creation of the new Space Force in December, Russia accused the US of seeing space as a place to wage war. In return, the US accused China and Russia of developing tools for jamming and cyberattacks that directly threaten US satellites.
• The Pentagon has stressed that it intends to maintain superiority in space to protect its GPS satellites. In the midst of an escalating space war, the US and Japan have strengthened their “space relations” to build their joint space network and strengthen their satellite force over the next 10 years.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Japanese government for the first time in five years updated its Basic Plan on Space Policy while outlining the country’s 10-year basic space policy. It will work with the United States to not only track missiles but use intelligence-gathering satellites during natural disasters.
Japan’s President, Shinzo Abe, and US President Donald Trump
Japan aims to double its space industry by the early 2030s, which currently stands at $11 billion.
One of the key components of the plan is to put a Japanese man on the Moon by 2024 while working with NASA scientists.
Experts say Japan’s space policy is being led as a reaction to China’s 2013 Jade Rabbit lunar rover mission.
Public-private collaboration
“The Government of Japan, recognizing such huge potential of outer space and the severe situation that it is facing, hereby decides a basic plan on space policy for coming ten years with the view of the next two decades, and will secure sufficient budgetary allotments and other necessary resources, and effectively and efficiently utilize these resources to strengthen its space policy through the whole-of-government- approach, while promoting public-private collaborations,” the Japanse government said in a statement.
Air Self-Defense Force
Japan recently inaugurated the first Space Operations Squadron in Tokyo at Fuchu Air Base as an “Air Self-Defense Force” which will become fully operational by 2023.
It is meant to protect the country’s satellite from damage, including armed attacks while working with the US Space Command.
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Article by Sebastian Kettley June 30, 2020 (www.express.co.uk)
• In 1972, Apollo 16 was NASA’s fifth successful Moon landing. As astronauts John Young, Thomas Mattingly and Charles Duke were leaving the Moon, looking out of the Command Module window they saw a UFO – “saucer-shaped object with a dome top” – passing over the Moon.
• Said NASA: “The object appears momentarily near the Moon. As the camera pans, it moves out of the field of view. It reappears as the camera pans back.” The object was only seen for four seconds, but was recorded on a 16mm video camera, appearing in about 50 frames of the film.
• UFO expert Donald Ryles says, “This footage, if it is authentic, is quite amazing.” And in a 2003 article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Japanese engineer Hiroshi Nakamura says, “We believe that the object is a large extraterrestrial artefact. This is the only hypothesis that is consistent with the data.”
• But in a 2004 analysis report, using digitized Apollo 16 footage with high-resolution scans for a detailed analysis, NASA’s official explanation was that the object was not an alien UFO, but rather an extravehicular activity floodlight boom sticking out from the Command Module. “[T]he object appeared to move slightly with respect to the Moon, because of parallax brought about by slight camera motions and the nearness of the object to the camera. Said NASA: “All of the evidence in this analysis is consistent with the conclusion that the object in the Apollo 16 film was the EVA (spacewalk) floodlight/boom. There is no evidence in the photographic record to suggest otherwise.”
astronauts John Young, Thomas Mattingly and Charles Duke
The unidentified object (UFO) was briefly filmed by the crew of NASA’s Apollo 16 mission in 1972 – the fifth successful Moon landing. Peering through the window of NASA’s Command Module spacecraft, an alien object appears to pass over the Moon. According to the US space agency, some have described the UFO as a “saucer-shaped object with a dome top”.
NASA said: “Beginning their return from the Moon to an April 27, 1972, splashdown, astronauts John Young, Thomas Mattingly and Charles Duke captured about four seconds of video footage of an object that seemed to look a lot like Hollywood’s version of a spacecraft from another world.”
The UFO was recorded on a 16mm video camera, appearing in about 50 frames of the film.
NASA said: “The object appears momentarily near the Moon.
“As the camera pans, it moves out of the field of view. It reappears as the camera pans back.”
In total, the object was only seen for four seconds through the Command Module’s window.
But the brief appearance was enough for alien enthusiasts to get excited.
UFO expert Donald Ryles said: “This footage, if it is authentic, is quite amazing.”
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Article by Chris Ciaccia June 30, 2020 (foxnews.com)
• NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory notes on its website that researchers are developing a soccer-ball sized robot known as SPARROW (Steam Propelled Autonomous Retrieval Robot for Ocean Worlds) that “would use steam propulsion to hop across the sort of icy terrains found on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.”
• “The terrain on Europa is likely highly complex,” said Gareth Meirion-Griffith, JPL roboticist and the lead researcher of the concept. “It could be porous, it might be riddled with crevasses, there might be meters-high penitentes” – long blades of ice known to form at high latitudes on Earth – “that would stop most robots in their tracks. But SPARROW has total terrain agnosticism; it has complete freedom to travel across an otherwise inhospitable terrain.” By using steam to power the robot, SPARROW could thrive in the “low-gravity environment” of Enceladus and Europa, hopping “many miles over landscapes that other robots would have difficulty navigating.”
• Enceladus and Europa both likely have oceans that exist under a layer of ice crust. In 2019, researchers determined Enceladus’ ocean is likely 1 billion years old. In 2018, researchers acknowledged they had found complex organic molecules, the “building blocks” for life on Enceladus.
• The SPARROW concept is dependent upon a lander to serve as a home base, which would “mine ice and melt it”, later heating it to create the steam necessary to power the SPARROW. It’s possible “many SPARROWs could be sent together, swarming around a specific location or splitting up to explore as much alien terrain as possible,” says NASA. • In June, NASA announced the latest mission in its New Frontiers program known as Dragonfly, to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which could also potentially host extraterrestrial life. NASA has also confirmed a future mission to Europa.
Gareth Meirion-Griffith
NASA’s plans to explore the ice moons of the Solar System are getting more detail as the space agency is developing a robot that would use steam to power itself in deep space.
In a post to its website, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory notes researchers are developing a soccer-ball sized robot known as SPARROW (Steam Propelled Autonomous Retrieval Robot for Ocean Worlds) that “would use steam propulsion to hop across the sort of icy terrains found on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.”
“The terrain on Europa is likely highly complex,” said Gareth Meirion-Griffith, JPL roboticist and the lead researcher of the concept, in the statement. “It could be porous, it might be riddled with crevasses, there might be meters-high penitentes” – long blades of ice known to form at high latitudes on Earth – “that would stop most robots in their tracks. But SPARROW has total terrain agnosticism; it has complete freedom to travel across an otherwise inhospitable terrain.”
Both moons have been mentioned as candidates to possibly host life previously, including one study published in December 2019 that suggested they could be “indigenous.”
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Article by Nadia Drake June 22, 2020 (nationalgeographic.co.uk)
• In the spring of 1960, with a budget of less then $2,000 and access to an 85-foot radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, a 29-year-old astronomer named Frank Drake set out to look for signs of intelligent alien life beyond Earth. For three months, the telescope scanned its targets and found nothing more than cosmic static.
• Back in the 1960s, astronomers knew of no worlds beyond our solar system. But Drake reasoned that other worlds might be populated by civilizations advanced enough to broadcast their presence to the cosmos, as we on Earth had been doing for decades. “Searching for intelligent life was considered bad science in those days,” says Drake, who just turned 90 years old.
• So Drake designed an experiment called Project Ozma, after the princess in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. Even though Ozma failed to find evidence of extraterrestrial technologies, the project was the first step toward solving a monumental mystery. In 1961, the National Academy of Sciences asked Drake to convene a meeting at Green Bank to further discuss the search for intelligent life. While organizing that meeting, he casually came up with the now-famous ‘Drake Equation’, a framework for estimating how many civilizations might be detectable in the Milky Way galaxy.
• Project Ozma was transformed into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or ‘SETI’. “There were radio astronomers all over the place who wanted to do SETI searches,” says Drake. But SETI projects in the US, Australia and Europe failed to gain ground. “It still had this problem of being considered flaky stuff.”
• In the Soviet Union, however, astronomers learned of Ozma and eagerly started scanning stars for signs of life. “There were far fewer restrictions on what Soviet scientists could do. They had kind of steady budgets because of the way the centralized communist government worked. They could kind of do whatever they wanted,” said science historian Rebecca Charbonneau of the University of Cambridge.
• The Soviets and Americans would meet to exchange ideas about searching for intelligent life. While the Cold War raged, U.S. and Soviet astronomers worked congenially in competition to first detect extraterrestrial life. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the relationship morphed into friendship within a global community.
• SETI had been funded by NASA. But by the 1990s, Congress began to cut federal funding for SETI projects, calling it “Martian hunting” and a waste of taxpayer dollars. The nonprofit SETI Institute, founded in 1984 at the University of California, Berkeley, was on its own.
• But in 1995, astronomers discovered the first ‘exoplanet’ outside of our own solar system. It was a Jupiter-like world, called 51 Pegasi b, orbiting a sun-like star. But it was considered inhospitable for life as we know it. Since then, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets with many having conditions favorable to life. We’ve learned that planets vastly outnumber stars in the Milky Way, providing billions of places for intelligent alien civilizations to exist.
• In 2015, a 10-year, $86 million project called Breakthrough Listen was funded by Silicon Valley tech investor Yuri Milner to harnesses the world’s sharpest radio telescopes, such as the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Observatory in Australia, to search the nearest million stars for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Now, halfway through its tenure, it has yet to find any. It will soon add to its search the MeerKAT array of radio dishes in South Africa.
• Astronomers have expanded their search parameters beyond interstellar radio signals. They now also look for optical pulses, waste heat generated by powerful civilizations, and any other signs known as ‘technosignatures’. One of these projects is called PANOSETI, designed to scan the entire sky for fleeting but intense flashes of optical and infrared light. Led by Shelley Wright, an astronomer at the University of California, San Diego, the project will capture information about transient astronomical phenomena such as supernovae —and, just maybe, artificial transmissions.
• Today, some say that SETI is in the midst of a renaissance. Large projects are kicking off, funds are materializing, and astronomy courses now include a broader perspective on humanity’s place in the universe. If SETI can maintain its current momentum, astronomers are optimistic that future projects could be even more ambitious – maybe even installing a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon, the only place in the solar system where Earth’s constant transmissions don’t overwhelm radio signals from the cosmos.
• SETI astronomers believe that they may soon discover another extraterrestrial civilization. Or we may be the only active civilization at this moment in time. Other civilizations may have risen and fallen during the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe. It make take a few million more years for nascent lifeforms on exoplanets to evolve complex metabolisms and technological intelligence.
• In any case, the answer to Frank Drake’s question of “where are the extraterrestrials” has the potential to change the course of humanity’s future. Drake says that he didn’t anticipate how captivating the search would be, or how SETI would grow into the enterprise it is today, although it still hasn’t completely shed the “giggle factor”. Public funding is difficult. The field has relatively few dedicated practitioners, and it has yet to fully infiltrate the halls of academia. But momentum is gathering.
• [Editor’s Note] I have no doubt that Frank Drake was sincere in his initial Ozma quest to detect errant radio signals from space to try to discover other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Likewise, Frank’s daughter Nadia has every reason to be proud of her father. But just like the rest of us, the Drakes and other honest astronomers have been obstructed by the deep state. While from the 60s to the 80s, the deep state allowed NASA funding of SETI efforts, they knew that technology embargo and the ‘giggle factor’ which the deep state had imposed on the scientific community would prevent SETI from finding anything or being taken seriously. By the 1990s, conventional technology was rapidly developing, so the deep state government cut off funding and infiltrated these programs with counter-productive deep state operatives. Those who now run SETI are only interested in using the project for disinformation purposes – to satisfy the public that smart people are working diligently but fruitlessly to discover evidence of another intelligent civilization in our galaxy, because these extraterrestrial beings simply don’t exist. In reality, intelligent extraterrestrial worlds permeate this galaxy and the entire universe. The elite deep state hierarchy has secretly been working with these extraterrestrials since World War II. During the past seventy years, they have developed a handful of secret space programs, including bases and colonies on the Moon, on Mars, and on celestial bodies throughout the solar system and beyond. As Richard Dolan famously put it, our shadow government has created a ‘breakaway civilization’, concealed from the people on Earth who serve as unwitting slaves to generate an industrial economy for these elite ‘puppet masters’ to utilize for their own purposes, which excludes the rest of us.
Frank and Nadia Drake
In the spring of 1960, a 29-year-old astronomer with streaks of preternaturally white hair and a devil-may-care attitude set out to tackle one of humanity’s most existential questions: Are we alone in the universe?
Frank Drake, then an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, was gearing up to search for radio whispers from faraway civilizations that might be sailing the cosmic sea. For such a grand quest, he had a budget of £1,600 and access to a radio telescope thought to be sensitive enough to detect transmissions from any potentially broadcasting extraterrestrials.
Nadia Drake
“Searching for intelligent life was considered bad science in those days,” says Drake, who just turned 90 years old—and is better known to me as Dad.
At the time, looking for evidence of alien technologies was still squarely in the camp of schlocky science fiction. But for my dad, it was worth taking a risk to find out if the cosmos is as richly populated as Earth’s teeming oceans—or if humanity is adrift in a profoundly quiet interstellar expanse.
Humble and curious, with a knack for quiet mischief, Dad is committed to his science, still writing research papers and serving on committees. My early memories are full of trips to observatories and conferences, and the singular pleasure of staring through telescopes at the twinkling sky. I was never bitten by the academic astronomy bug, though.
Rebecca Charbonneau
It wasn’t until I began working as a science journalist that I realised just how risky and revolutionary Dad’s early work really was.
First light
Astronomers knew of no worlds beyond our solar system back in the 1960s, but Drake reasoned that if planets like Earth orbited stars like the sun, then those worlds might be populated by civilisations advanced enough to broadcast their presence to the cosmos. His logic made sense: For the last century, Earthlings have been making these sorts of announcements all the time in the form of TV and radio broadcasts, military radar, and other communications that leak into space.
Shelley Wright
So he designed an experiment to search for signals coming from worlds that could be orbiting the nearby stars Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. He named the experiment Project Ozma, after the princess in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series—an homage to an adventure tale populated by exotic and unearthly beings.
Before sunrise on April 8, 1960, Drake climbed an 85-foot radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, jammed himself inside a trash-can-size piece of equipment, and launched humanity’s first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence—now known as SETI. For three months the telescope scanned its targets and found nothing more than cosmic static. The stars were stubbornly quiet.
“That was a disappointment,” Dad told me a few years ago. “We’d hoped that, in fact, there were radio-transmitting civilisations around almost every star.”
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Article by Chris Ciaccia June 22, 2020 (nypost.com)
• NASA researchers have published a study in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific saying that more than a quarter of the 53 exoplanets outside our solar system may be “ocean worlds” having significant amounts of water.
• “Plumes of water erupt from Europa and Enceladus, so we can tell that these bodies have subsurface oceans beneath their ice shells and they have energy that drives the plumes, which are two requirements for life as we know it,” said the study’s lead author Lynnae Quick, a NASA planetary scientist. “So if we’re thinking about these places as being possibly habitable, maybe bigger versions of them in other planetary systems are habitable too.” As such, Europa and Enceladus, moons that orbit Jupiter and Saturn, respectively, are icy celestial bodies that could harbor extraterrestrial life.
• Quick and the other researchers looked at exoplanets similar in size to Earth, along with exoplanets’ density, orbit, temperature, mass and distance from their star to reach their conclusions. These “ocean worlds” could release more energy than even Enceladus and Europa.
• Although studies tend to focus on exoplanets like ours that have a global biosphere so abundant it’s changing the chemistry of the whole atmosphere, NASA Goddard astrophysicist and study co-author Aki Roberge says, “(Within our) solar system, icy moons with oceans, which are far from the heat of the Sun, still have shown that they have the features we think are required for life.”
• Future missions searching for exterritorial life within our solar system include the Europa Clipper mission set to launch as soon as 2023, which will explore the surface of Europa. “If we find chemical signatures of life, we can try to look for similar signs at interstellar distances,” Quick added.
• As of June 2020. More then 4,000 exoplanets have been identified, approximately 50 of which were believed to be potentially habitable. A study published earlier this month suggested that there could be 36 alien civilizations in the Milky Way (see ExoArticle here). Another study this month suggested there could be as many as 6 billion “Earth-like” planets in the galaxy (see ExoArticle here).
Aki Roberge
A newly published study from NASA researchers suggests that there may be planets in the Milky Way galaxy other than Earth that have an ocean.
The research, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, notes more than a quarter of the 53 exoplanets — planets outside the Solar System — that were studied could potentially be “ocean worlds,” planets that have significant amounts of water.
Lynnae Quick
“Plumes of water erupt from Europa and Enceladus, so we can tell that these bodies have subsurface oceans beneath their ice shells and they have energy that drives the plumes, which are two requirements for life as we know it,” Lynnae Quick, NASA planetary scientist and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “So if we’re thinking about these places as being possibly habitable, maybe bigger versions of them in other planetary systems are habitable too.”
Europa and Enceladus, moons that orbit Jupiter and Saturn, respectively, are icy celestial bodies that could potentially be home to extraterrestrial life.
Quick, who specializes in volcanism and ocean worlds and the other researchers looked at exoplanets similar in size to Earth, including a group of seven in the TRAPPIST-1 system, 39 light-years from Earth. A light-year, which represents distance in space, is the equivalent of about 6 trillion miles.
In addition to size, they looked at density, orbit, temperature, mass and how far the planets are from their star to come up with their conclusions.
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Article by Jamie Carter June 19, 2020 (forbes.com)
• In the first NASA non-radio technosignatures grant ever awarded, and the first NASA grant in over three decades connected with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), NASA has awarded the University of Rochester (NY), Harvard University and the Smithsonian funding for a study entitled: Characterizing Atmospheric Technosignatures, to find ‘technosignatures’ that would indicate the presence of life on exoplanets within another star system.
• Technosignatures are scientific evidence of past or present technology similar to the type that we produce here on Earth. “Such signatures might include industrial pollution of atmospheres, city lights, photovoltaic cells (solar panels), megastructures, or swarms of satellites,” said Harvard’s Avi Loeb. The study will focus first on finding evidence of solar panels and chemical pollution. The presence of chlorofluorocarbons in exoplanetary atmospheres could indicate the presence of industrial activity.
• “There are only so many forms of energy in the Universe,” said Adam Frank at the University of Rochester. Any alien civilization is bound to have thought of solar power generation. “The nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, hosts a habitable planet, Proxima b. The planet is thought to be tidally locked with permanent day and night sides,” said Loeb. “If a civilization wants to illuminate or warm up the night side, they would place photovoltaic cells on the day-side and transfer the electric power gained to the night side.”
• Some astronomers believe that technosignatures may be simpler to find than evidence of microbial life—known as ‘biosignatures’ – which detect chemicals such as oxygen and methane. Says Loeb, “If another civilization had been doing it for much longer than we have, then their planet’s atmosphere might show detectable signs of artificially produced molecules that nature is very unlikely to produce spontaneously.”
• In the past five years, many thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, some of which are in their star systems’ habitable zones and could have water vapor in their atmospheres. “Now we know where to look. We have thousands of exoplanets including planets in the habitable zone where life can form,” says Frank. “The game has changed.” Loeb’s hope is that “[by] using this grant, we will quantify new ways to probe signs of alien technological civilizations that are similar to or much more advanced than our own.” The scientists eventually want to begin an online library of technosignatures that astrophysicists can use when gathering data.
• [Editor’s Note] This is just more time and money wasted by deep state-controlled institutions such as Harvard and the Smithsonian (and now add the University of Rochester to the list) who only want to hide the fact that since at least WWII, the US government and the cabal elite have known of the presence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings and civilizations permeating our galaxy and universe, and have been secretly studying and working with these beings to their own ends, which has nothing to do with elevating human development here on Earth. They have no intention of “discovering” and revealing to the public any extraterrestrial civilizations.
Space agency NASA has awarded a grant to a group of astronomers to search the Universe for signs of alien civilizations via “technosignatures”—and it will focus first on finding evidence of solar panels and chemical pollution.
Adam Frank
Technosignatures are scientific evidence of past or present technology, which of course would indicate the presence of life in another star system. Some think that these technosignatures may be simpler to find than direct evidence of microbial life—known as biosignatures.
Avi Loeb
“Technosignatures relate to signatures of advanced alien technologies similar to, or perhaps more sophisticated than, what we possess,” said Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard. “Such signatures might include industrial pollution of atmospheres, city lights, photovoltaic cells (solar panels), megastructures, or swarms of satellites.”
Put simply, the scientists at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian, and the University of Rochester, will look for exactly the same technosignatures that we produce.
It’s believed that other civilizations would probably use solar panels to produce energy, and also probably pollute their planet’s atmosphere with artificial chemicals and gases.
How and why to find solar panels around distant planets
How does an astronomer look for sunlight reflected off solar panels around a distant exoplanet? As long as they know the wavelength band to search in—which is what this study will try to establish—astronomers training their telescopes on exoplanets may be able to spot these technosignatures.
Any alien civilisation is bound to have thought of solar power generation, think the scientists. “There are only so many forms of energy in the Universe,” said Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, and the primary recipient of the grant. “Aliens are not magic.”
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. ExoNews.org distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107. Please contact the Editor at ExoNews with any copyright issue.
NASA’s plans to explore the ice moons of the Solar System are getting more detail as the space agency is developing a robot that would use steam to power itself in deep space.
