PLANET EARTH PASSENGER 2.0

WHERE IS THE CENTER OF SPACE AND TIME - THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE

2012-01-01T20:00:00.019+01:00

Hi Passengers !

We know that in the scale of the universe earth and humans are inconsequential, we are living on a little dot lost in one corner of the space surrounded by billions of galaxies expanding in all directions since a long time.

WHERE IS THE CENTER OF SPACE AND TIME ?

It´s very difficult to understand this expanding of galaxies when we don´t even know our position in the cosmos, are we near of the center or far away ? Does a center exist ?

Here are two questions crossing my mind all the time when i look deep into the space every night from my window...

Text : John Gregorio

Discover now some informations about the expanding universe with the following numeric report made by Universum Observatorium on WEB 2.0

The Expanding Universe

For thousands of years, astronomers wrestled with basic questions about the size and age of the universe. Does the universe go on forever, or does it have an edge somewhere? Has it always existed, or did it come to being some time in the past? In 1929, Edwin Hubble, an astronomer at Caltech, made a critical discovery that soon led to scientific answers for these questions: he discovered that the universe is expanding.

The ancient Greeks recognized that it was difficult to imagine what an infinite universe might look like. But they also wondered that if the universe were finite, and you stuck out your hand at the edge, where would your hand go? The Greeks' two problems with the universe represented a paradox - the universe had to be either finite or infinite, and both alternatives presented problems.

After the rise of modern astronomy, another paradox began to puzzle astronomers. In the early 1800s, German astronomer Heinrich Olbers argued that the universe must be finite. If the Universe were infinite and contained stars throughout, Olbers said, then if you looked in any particular direction, your line-of-sight would eventually fall on the surface of a star. Although the apparent size of a star in the sky becomes smaller as the distance to the star increases, the brightness of this smaller surface remains a constant. Therefore, if the Universe were infinite, the whole surface of the night sky should be as bright as a star. Obviously, there are dark areas in the sky, so the universe must be finite.

But, when Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity, he realized that gravity is always attractive. Every object in the universe attracts every other object. If the universe truly were finite, the attractive forces of all the objects in the universe should have caused the entire universe to collapse on itself. This clearly had not happened, and so astronomers were presented with a paradox.

When Einstein developed his theory of gravity in the General Theory of Relativity, he thought he ran into the same problem that Newton did: his equations said that the universe should be either expanding or collapsing, yet he assumed that the universe was static. His original solution contained a constant term, called the cosmological constant, which cancelled the effects of gravity on very large scales, and led to a static universe. After Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, Einstein called the cosmological constant his "greatest blunder."

At around the same time, larger telescopes were being built that were able to accurately measure the spectra, or the intensity of light as a function of wavelength, of faint objects. Using these new data, astronomers tried to understand the plethora of faint, nebulous objects they were observing. Between 1912 and 1922, astronomer Vesto Slipher at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona discovered that the spectra of light from many of these objects was systematically shifted to longer wavelengths, or redshifted. A short time later, other astronomers showed that these nebulous objects were distant galaxies.

The Discovery of the Expanding Universe

Meanwhile, other physicists and mathematicians working on Einstein's theory of gravity discovered the equations had some solutions that described an expanding universe. In these solutions, the light coming from distant objects would be redshifted as it traveled through the expanding universe. The redshift would increase with increasing distance to the object.

In 1929 Edwin Hubble, working at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, measured the redshifts of a number of distant galaxies. He also measured their relative distances by measuring the apparent brightness of a class of variable stars called Cepheids in each galaxy. When he plotted redshift against relative distance, he found that the redshift of distant galaxies increased as a linear function of their distance. The only explanation for this observation is that the universe was expanding.

Once scientists understood that the universe was expanding, they immediately realized that it would have been smaller in the past. At some point in the past, the entire universe would have been a single point. This point, later called the big bang, was the beginning of the universe as we understand it today.

The expanding universe is finite in both time and space. The reason that the universe did not collapse, as Newton's and Einstein's equations said it might, is that it had been expanding from the moment of its creation. The universe is in a constant state of change. The expanding universe, a new idea based on modern physics, laid to rest the paradoxes that troubled astronomers from ancient times until the early 20th Century...

Read more on skyserver.sdss.org

Picture courtesy - img.ibtimes.com

PHOBOS-GRÜNT : SIGNAL RECEIVED FROM LOST SPACECRAFT ORBITING EARTH...

2011-11-23T20:00:00.027+01:00

Hi Passengers !

On November 9, Roscosmos (the Russian Federal Space Agency) launched an unmanned mission to Mars and its larger moon Phobos. Onboard will be a Chinese microsatellite to orbit the red planet for a year, but the real star will be the Russian Phobos-Grunt lander, which will touch down onto the surface of Phobos, retrieve a soil sample and return it to Earth by 2014.

The Planetary Society is also contributing to the mission with a payload of live microorganisms to test the hypothesis that life can survive in space after being blasted off planets from meteor impacts.
Credit: Russian Federal Space Agency

Read more on www.roscosmos.ru

Few minutes after it arrival on orbit around earth, spacecraft was not anymore available for contact with it communication systems, Phobos-Grunt was then lost in space, until...

ESA tracking station receives signal from Russia's Phobos Mars mission

STATUS REPORT : Source: European Space Agency

On Tuesday, 22 November at 20:25 UT, ESA's tracking station at Perth, Australia, established contact with Russia's Phobos-Grunt spacecraft.

This was the first signal received on Earth since the Mars mission was launched. ESA teams are now working closely with engineers in Russia to determine how best to maintain communications with the spacecraft.

More news will follow later on www.spaceref.com

Discover now some informations about Phobos Grunt design with the following numeric report made by Orbital Passenger on WEB 2.O

Phobos-Grunt design

Traditionally for the Russian planetary exploration program, NPO Lavochkin serves as the prime developer of the spacecraft platform, while the Institute of Space Research, IKI, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, leads the development of the science program, involving numerous institutions inside and outside Russia. A total of five billion rubles were reportedly spent for the Phobos-Grunt program.

The main platform of the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft (often referred to as spacecraft bus) was developed from scratch, however its architects hoped it could serve as a base for future missions to the Moon and planets, following Phobos-Grunt. The design went through several incarnations before starting to appear in metal.

All systems of the spacecraft were placed in unpressurized compartments and were designed to function in the vacuum of space. The main cruise stage of the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft combines the functions of the spacecraft itself and of a space tug, which reportedly enabled weight savings of around 300 kilograms.

The largest planetary probe built in the former USSR, Phobos-Grunt consisted of three major components:

The Cruise Stage, PM, (a.k.a. Flagman)
The Return Vehicle, VA, carrying a landing capsule (SA) with soil samples from the surface of Phobos back to Earth.
The Main Propulsion Unit, or MDU

Cruise Stage, PM (a.k.a. Flagman)

The Cruise Stage, PM - (from Pereletny Modul) is sometimes referred to as Flagman. It was newly developed for the Phobos-Grunt mission, but its basic architecture was promised to be the base for a whole generation of future planetary missions, including Luna-Glob, Luna-Resurs and Luna-Grunt to the Moon; Venera-D to Venus; Mars-NET and Mars-Grunt to Mars and, possibly, Sokol-Laplas to Jupiter. The platform's developer - NPO Lavochkin - stressed that in different configuration, the same bus could be adapted as an orbiter or as a lander.

The cruise stage would sport its own propulsion system and a newly developed flight control system or BKU (Bortovoy Kompleks Upravleniya). As one of the most technically challenging and controversial aspects of the project, BKU was developed internally at NPO Lavochkin, with major avionics components supplied by Tekhkom, itself a spinoff of NPO Argon design bureau. Although, the new-generation BKU introduced progressive and mass-saving technologies, problems in its development were primarily responsible for pushing the launch date of the Phobos-grunt mission from 2009 to 2011.

The cruise stage would also be equipped with the following systems:
Onboard Radio Complex, BRK (Bortovoi Radio Kompleks);
Star tracker unit, BOKZ-MF (Blok Opredeleniya Koordinat Zvezd);
Optical Sun trackers, OSD (Optichesky Solnechy Datchik);
Baseless Inertial unit, BIB-FG (Besplatformenny Inertsialny Blok);
For the Phobos-Grunt mission, the cruise stage would be equipped with a 13-kilogram radar, known as DISD - Doppler Measurer of Velocity and Range developed by OAO Vega. Its data would be used for the final approach and landing on Phobos. Particularly, DISD would be used to determine the exact timing of final maneuvers during descent.

For purposes of science and flight navigation, the cruise stage would be equipped with a Television System of Navigation and Observation, TSNN. Data from the TSNN would be complemented by measurements from the star tracker unit, BOKZ-MF.

Read more on www.russianspaceweb.com

Picture courtesy - www.russianspaceweb.com

CLIMATE CHANGE : BIRTH, EVOLUTION AND DEATH OF A TORNADO ON EARTH

2011-11-16T20:00:00.002+01:00

Hi Passengers !

Looks like Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" as it ropes out. Roger's incredible book "Hunting Nature's Fury"...

Available at http://www.wildernesspress.com

I found today this wonderful video about a birth, evolution and death of a tornado on channel : http://www.youtube.com/user/SpaceRip - Thanks Thomas for the publishing of this masterwork.

There is an obvious increase in tornado frequency between 1950-1999. This could be due to increased detection. Also this could be due to changing climatic conditions. Looking at the raw data we have seen that there are generally less tornadoes in El Nino years compared to La Nina Years. But, since we were unable to get climate data, we were unable to see if the change in the frequency was due to climate factors.

Discover now some information about tornados and climate change with the following numeric report made by Planet Earth on WEB 2.O

The Effect of Climate Change on Tornado Frequency and Magnitude

Courtesy - Michael Pateman and Drew Vankat

Abstract

Our research project concerns the phenomena of tornadoes, their frequency and magnitude, and possible correlations between that and climate. Investigations will be made into the effect of events such as El Nino and La Nina in regards to tornado occurrence and strength. Research will be conducted with data from 1950 to 1999, and in several geographic regions: Texas, Nebraska, and Ohio. We hope this will give us both a broad overview of the topic, as well as more localized data showing what happens to locations regularly experiencing tornadoes, and those that lack much pronounced tornado activity. Relationships in our data could assist authorities in preparation for aid to families and businesses, as well as further strengthen the belief that we must reduce emission of harmful pollutants into the environment.

Results from data show a stronger correlation in tornado magnitudes by state over the 1950-1999 time period, as well as in El-Nino and La-Nina years. This suggests that those events affect our three states in similar manners.

Results pertaining to frequency are less conclusive, as p-values tend to either be split a slight tendency to show a significant difference in data sets and rank orders, as detailed in our report. This means that there is a lack of strong evidence to relate tornado frequency to El-Nino or La-Nina years. Variations in this generalized conclusion are detailed in the results and conclusion sections.

Introduction

Tornadoes have struck every U.S. state, including Alaska and Hawaii. But most tornadoes form in a belt from Nebraska southward through central Texas known as Tornado Alley and in the Southeast. Wind speeds in tornadoes can vary from 72 to almost 300 mph.

When the El Nino/Southern Oscillation peaked in 1997 and 1998, much talk was given to the theory of global warming and its possible connection to an increase in extreme weather. In some areas of the United States, tornadoes are and have been a serious risk to property and lives. Are tornadoes a part of this web of phenomena possibly related to the theory of global warming? Could a possible increase or decrease (depending on the area) be an indicator of global warming?

Our hypothesis is that the increase in greenhouse gases plays a role in the formation of tornadoes. This means that we are experiencing more tornadoes and tornadoes of greater magnitude as a result of both global warming and strengthened cycles such as El Nino and La Nina. We are cautious, however, not to underestimate the advances in forecasting and detection technology which may have led to an increase especially in the number of tornadoes reported.

Definitions

What is El Nino ?
El Nino is a disruption of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Tropical Pacific having important consequences for weather and climate around the globe. These consequences can include increased rainfall in some areas (which can lead to flooding) and extreme drought in others.

What is La Nina ?
La Nina is characterized by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific, compared to El Nino, which is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific.

What is a tornado ?
A tornado is officially defined as an intense, rotating column of air extending from the base of a thunderstorm cloud to the ground. Most tornadoes form under the southwestern section of the thunderstorm cloud. Air moves very rapidly upward around a tornado center. This distinguishes tornadoes from microbursts, which often do tornado-like damage and are often mistaken for tornadoes. Microbursts, on the other hand, features air blasting downward from thunderstorms. The large hail that often precedes tornadoes forms as a result of the intense updraft feeding the thunderstorm.

The United States is the world capital for tornadoes as conditions favorable for tornado development most often occur over the Plains during spring and summer. A typical tornado outbreak often features an intense upper-level disturbance moving across the Plains during spring. This disturbance provides the strong vertical wind shear that gives an updraft its twisting motion, turning a normal thunderstorm into a potentially tornado spawning supercell. Although, the United States has the most tornadoes of any nation in the world, tornadoes do occur in other locations such as Australia and Europe.

What are favorable conditions for tornado formation?
A convective cap is a layer of hot, dry air in the middle layers of the atmosphere above the surface. Often, temperatures increase with height in this layer and relative humidities are extremely low. As you can see in the graphic above, warm humid air in the lower layers of the atmosphere near the surface is heated by the sun, but is not allowed to rise and initiate clouds and precipitation because of the hot, dry air above it. As the air near the surface continues to heat up, it builds up an enormous amount of energy much the same way boiling water in a pot with a heavy lid on it would. If a triggering mechanism, such as a cold front or dryline, moves into the area, the convective cap may weaken enough to allow the heated, humid air near the surface to burst through the cap and initiate extremely violent convection. Supercells, along with intense tornadoes, often form as a result of this violent convection.

Read more on jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu

Picture courtesy - media.treehugger.com

VY CANIS MAJORIS & THE BIGGEST STARS OF THE MILKY WAY

2011-11-12T20:00:00.002+01:00

Hi Passengers !

VY Canis Majoris is until now the biggest star observed in our milky way, it size is so large that it would take for an airplane flying at the speed of 9OO miles per hour, 11OO years to travel around it.

VY Canis Majoris (VY CMa) is also one of the most luminous. Located in the constellation Canis Major, it is a red hypergiant, between 1800 and 2100 solar radii, 8.4–9.8 astronomical units in radius, about 3.0 billion km or 1.9 billion miles in diameter, and about 1.5 kiloparsecs (4,900 light years, 4.6×1016 km or 2.9×1016 mi) distant from Earth. Unlike most hypergiant stars, which occur in either binary or multiple star systems, VY CMa is a single star. It is categorized as a semiregular variable and has an estimated period of 2,000 days. It has an average density of 0.000005 to 0.000010 kg/m3.

Placed at the centre of our solar system, VY Canis Majoris's surface would extend beyond the orbit of Saturn, although the astrophysicists Philip Massey, Emily Levesque and Bertrand Plez disagree about the star's stated radius, suggesting it is smaller: merely 600 times the size of the Sun, extending past the orbit of Mars.

In another places space and large telescopes have discovered all along these last years many new red, blue, white and orange giants populating the dark space. They are billions around us ready to be observed... Here are the most known by astronomers since the beggining of astronomy on Earth.

Alpha Centauri
Sirius
Pollux
Arcturus
Alderaban
Rigel
Antares
Betelgeuse
Mu Cephei
Ww Cephei

Let's make now some knowledge about these monsters of gas and fire with the following numeric report made by Universum Observatorium on WEB 2.O

Types of stars - by Fraser Cain on January 28, 2009

A star is a star, right? Well, not exactly. There are many different types of stars, from the tiny brown dwarfs to the red and blue supergiants. There are even more bizarre kinds of stars, like neutron stars and Wolf-Rayet stars. Let’s take a look at all the different types of stars there are.

Protostar
A protostar is what you have before a star forms. A protostar is a collection of gas that has collapsed down from a giant molecular cloud. The protostar phase of stellar evolution lasts about 100,000 years. Over time, gravity and pressure increase, forcing the protostar to collapse down. All of the energy release by the protostar comes only from the heating caused by the gravitational energy – nuclear fusion reactions haven’t started yet.

T Tauri Star
A T Tauri star is stage in a star’s formation and evolution right before it becomes a main sequence star. This phase occurs at the end of the protostar phase, when the gravitational pressure holding the star together is the source of all its energy. T Tauri stars don’t have enough pressure and temperature at their cores to generate nuclear fusion, but they do resemble main sequence stars; they’re about the same temperature but brighter because they’re a larger. T Tauri stars can have large areas of sunspot coverage, and have intense X-ray flares and extremely powerful stellar winds. Stars will remain in the T Tauri stage for about 100 million years.

Main Sequence Star
The majority of all stars in our galaxy, and even the Universe, are main sequence stars. Our Sun is a main sequence star, and so are our nearest neighbors, Sirius and Alpha Centauri A. Main sequence stars can vary in size, mass and brightness, but they’re all doing the same thing: converting hydrogen into helium in their cores, releasing a tremendous amount of energy.

A star in the main sequence is in a state of hydrostatic equilibrium. Gravity is pulling the star inward, and the light pressure from all the fusion reactions in the star are pushing outward. The inward and outward forces balance one another out, and the star maintains a spherical shape. Stars in the main sequence will have a size that depends on their mass, which defines the amount of gravity pulling them inward.

The lower mass limit for a main sequence star is about 0.08 times the mass of the Sun, or 80 times the mass of Jupiter. This is the minimum amount of gravitational pressure you need to ignite fusion in the core. Stars can theoretically grow to more than 100 times the mass of the Sun.

Red Giant Star
When a star has consumed its stock of hydrogen in its core, fusion stops and the star no longer generates an outward pressure to counteract the inward pressure pulling it together. A shell of hydrogen around the core ignites continuing the life of the star, but causes it to increase in size dramatically. The aging star has become a red giant star, and can be 100 times larger than it was in its main sequence phase. When this hydrogen fuel is used up, further shells of helium and even heavier elements can be consumed in fusion reactions. The red giant phase of a star’s life will only last a few hundred million years before it runs out of fuel completely and becomes a white dwarf.

White Dwarf Star
When a star has completely run out of hydrogen fuel in its core and it lacks the mass to force higher elements into fusion reaction, it becomes a white dwarf star. The outward light pressure from the fusion reaction stops and the star collapses inward under its own gravity. A white dwarf shines because it was a hot star once, but there’s no fusion reactions happening any more. A white dwarf will just cool down until it because the background temperature of the Universe. This process will take hundreds of billions of years, so no white dwarfs have actually cooled down that far yet.

Red Dwarf Star
Red dwarf stars are the most common kind of stars in the Universe. These are main sequence stars but they have such low mass that they’re much cooler than stars like our Sun. They have another advantage. Red dwarf stars are able to keep the hydrogen fuel mixing into their core, and so they can conserve their fuel for much longer than other stars. Astronomers estimate that some red dwarf stars will burn for up to 10 trillion years. The smallest red dwarfs are 0.075 times the mass of the Sun, and they can have a mass of up to half of the Sun.

Neutron Stars
If a star has between 1.35 and 2.1 times the mass of the Sun, it doesn’t form a white dwarf when it dies. Instead, the star dies in a catastrophic supernova explosion, and the remaining core becomes a neutron star. As its name implies, a neutron star is an exotic type of star that is composed entirely of neutrons. This is because the intense gravity of the neutron star crushes protons and electrons together to form neutrons. If stars are even more massive, they will become black holes instead of neutron stars after the supernova goes off.

Supergiant Stars
The largest stars in the Universe are supergiant stars. These are monsters with dozens of times the mass of the Sun. Unlike a relatively stable star like the Sun, supergiants are consuming hydrogen fuel at an enormous rate and will consume all the fuel in their cores within just a few million years. Supergiant stars live fast and die young, detonating as supernovae; completely disintegrating themselves in the process.

Read more on www.universetoday.com

Picture courtesy - upload.wikimedia.org

Y DWARF STAR - BROWN DWARFS ARE COOLER THAN AN HUMAN BODY

2011-08-25T20:00:00.000+02:00

Hi Passengers !

Scientists have discovered the coldest type of star-like bodies known, which at times can be cooler than the human body.

Astronomers had unsuccessfully pursued these dark entities, called Y dwarfs, ever since their existence was theorized more than a decade ago. They are nearly impossible to see relying on visible light, but with the infrared vision of NASA's WISE space telescope, researchers finally detected the faint glow of six Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years.

Y dwarfs are the coldest members of star-like bodies known as brown dwarfs, which are odd objects sometimes known as failed stars.

Brown dwarfs are too puny to force atoms to fuse together and release nuclear energy, and so they have only the little heat they were born with. This heat fades over time until all the light they do emit is at infrared wavelengths.

So far, WISE has helped find 100 new brown dwarfs.

Courtesy - www.space.com

Discover now some information about Y Dwarf Stars with the following numeric report made by Universum Observatorium on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

The coldest "failed stars"

To see how cool the coldest of these Y dwarfs was, the researchers used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to analyze its pattern of light. They found this coldest Y dwarf, known as WISE 1828+2650, was colder than 80 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius).

"The brown dwarfs we were turning up before this discovery were more like the temperature of your oven," said astronomer Davy Kirkpatrick, a WISE science team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and lead author of a study on the 100 new brown dwarfs. "With the discovery of Y dwarfs, we've moved out of the kitchen and into the cooler parts of the house."

The closest of these Y dwarfs, WISE 1541-2250, is 9 light-years distant. In comparison, the alien star closest to us, Proxima Centauri, is about 4 light-years away. [Video: Getting WISE to Brown Dwarfs]

"Finding brown dwarfs near our sun is like discovering there's a hidden house on your block that you didn't know about," said astronomer Michael Cushing, a WISE team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and lead author of the study on the Y dwarfs. "It's thrilling to me to know we've got neighbors out there yet to be discovered. With WISE, we may even find a brown dwarf closer to us than our closest known star."

The coldest brown dwarfs until now were the T dwarfs, which get as cool as about 440 degrees Fahrenheit (225 degrees C). First uncovered in sizable numbers in the late 1990s, the dwarfs led astronomers to ask whether there could be dwarfs even cooler, Kirkpatrick told SPACE.com — for instance, ones that might be older and thus with more time to cool off, or less massive and with less heat to begin with, or both.

Classifying brown dwarfs

Scientists name stars and brown dwarfs based on their temperatures, "with 'O' stars being the hottest, and now 'Y' dwarfs being the coldest,'" Cushing explained.

Most of the letters of the alphabet already have strong associations with other astronomical objects, so "after eliminating these 'used' letters from consideration, there are really only a few left, and those are H, Y, and Z," Cushing added. "Since Y comes after T, we felt it was the appropriate choice. Using Y also leaves room for an additional 'Z' class if astronomers discover even colder objects."

Better understanding Y dwarfs could shed light on how stars and planets form.

"Brown dwarfs in general, and Y dwarfs specifically, are a wonderful bridge between stellar and planetary astrophysics, because we think brown dwarfs form like stars, but in many respects look more like gas giant planets like Jupiter," Cushing told SPACE.com. "So when we study Y dwarfs, we are not only learning about stars, but also about the conditions of gas giant exoplanets.

"Brown dwarfs are also much easier to observe because in general, they aren't lost in the glare of an exceedingly bright parent star like the majority of exoplanets are."

"Our ultimate goal is to determine what is the least massive brown dwarf that nature can form and how many of these cold brown dwarfs exist near the sun," Cushing added. "This information will help us understand how low-mass stars and brown dwarfs form in general. So we will be continuing to search the sky using WISE for even colder Y dwarfs. We also want to start studying the known Y dwarfs in more detail to determine more-precise temperature estimates, estimate their masses, determine if any of them are actually binary systems and so on.

"The largest obstacle in studying Y dwarfs is that they are extremely faint, so we require the absolute largest telescopes on Earth and the Hubble Space Telescope ? and in some cases these telescopes are probably still not sensitive enough."

The scientists detailed their findings about the Y dwarfs in a paper appearing in the Astrophysical Journal and about the 100 new brown dwarfs in a study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

Read this on http://coldest-failed-stars-brown-dwarfs

This artist's conception illustrates what a "Y dwarf" might look like. Y dwarfs are the coldest star-like bodies known, with temperatures that can be even cooler than the human body.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Picture courtesy - i.space.com/images

QUEST OF GOD PARTICLE - HINT OF HIGGS BOSON FROM (LHC)

2011-07-25T20:00:00.049+02:00

Hi Passengers !

Scientists think they are getting closer to finding the Higgs boson particle, as they speed particles around the Large Hadron Collider at near light-speed. Here, the lines represent possible paths of particles produced by collisions in the detector, as part of the ALICE experiment.

Image - CREDIT: CERN
Courtesy - www.space.com

Discover now some information about the quest of Higgs Boson with the following numeric report made by Earth Science on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

Hint of Higgs Boson? 'God Particle' Buzz Rises

A few anomalous blips of data are giving scientists hope that the elusive Higgs boson, or "God" particle, might soon be found, though it's too early to say whether a discovery is imminent.

Researchers presented their findings at the International Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics in Grenoble, France. According to The Guardian newspaper, two independent teams at the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reported strange data spikes that could hint at the existence of the Higgs boson particle.

In April, a leaked note from one of the teams suggested that a Higgs boson announcement might be forthcoming.

The LHC, a 17-mile (27-kilometer) long underground circular tunnel near Geneva, was built in large part to hunt out the Higgs boson particle. According to the Standard Model, the theory of physics that explains the dynamics of subatomic particles, the Higgs boson is the particle thought to give mass to all particles. By smashing particles into each other at close to the speed of light in the LHC, scientists can break those particles down into more mysterious particles that are impossible to observe any other way.

One of these particles, the Higgs boson, would be a big "get" for physics, because particles with mass are an integral component of the physical world. The particle's ability to explain so much about the universe earned it the moniker the "God particle." [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]

Now, two separate LHC teams report that they've seen spikes in their data consistent with the Higgs boson. The particle is thought to have a mass between 114 and 185 gigaelectronvolts, or GeVs. (One GeV is equivalent to the mass of a proton, the positively charged particle in the nucleus of an atom.)

The unexplained data spikes occur between 120 and 140 GeV, the LHC teams reported. These bumps could be the first observable hint of the Higgs boson, but they could also be statistical glitches or computer model flaws.

"We cannot say anything today, but clearly it's intriguing," LHC physicist Fabiola Gianotti told The Guardian.

Nonetheless, the new data spurred excitement at CERN.

"Discovery or exclusion of the Higgs particle, as predicted by the Standard Model, is getting ever closer," CERN's Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, said in a statement. “Both occurrences will be great news for physics, the former allowing us to start the detailed study of the Higgs particle, the latter being the first proof of the incompleteness of the Standard Model, requiring new phenomena to be happening within the reach of the LHC.”

Read more on http://www.space.com

Read Michio Kaku's take on the Higgs Boson: http://bit.ly/dSGenh

PLUTO - NASA'S HUBBLE TELESCOPE DISCOVERS ANOTHER MOON

2011-07-22T20:00:00.031+02:00

Hi Passengers !

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite – temporarily designated P4 -- was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet.

The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km).

"I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with Hubble.

Courtesy - www.nasa.gov

Discover now more information about the discovery of a new Pluto's moon with the following numeric report made by Solar System Passenger on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto

The finding is a result of ongoing work to support NASA's New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. The mission is designed to provide new insights about worlds at the edge of our solar system. Hubble's mapping of Pluto's surface and discovery of its satellites have been invaluable to planning for New Horizons' close encounter.

"This is a fantastic discovery," said New Horizons’ principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "Now that we know there's another moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it during our flyby."

The new moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, which Hubble discovered in 2005. Charon was discovered in 1978 at the U.S. Naval Observatory and first resolved using Hubble in 1990 as a separate body from Pluto.

The dwarf planet’s entire moon system is believed to have formed by a collision between Pluto and another planet-sized body early in the history of the solar system. The smashup flung material that coalesced into the family of satellites observed around Pluto.

Lunar rocks returned to Earth from the Apollo missions led to the theory that our moon was the result of a similar collision between Earth and a Mars-sized body 4.4 billion years ago. Scientists believe material blasted off Pluto's moons by micrometeoroid impacts may form rings around the dwarf planet, but the Hubble photographs have not detected any so far.

"This surprising observation is a powerful reminder of Hubble's ability as a general purpose astronomical observatory to make astounding, unintended discoveries," said Jon Morse, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

P4 was first seen in a photo taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on June 28. It was confirmed in subsequent Hubble pictures taken on July 3 and July 18. The moon was not seen in earlier Hubble images because the exposure times were shorter. There is a chance it appeared as a very faint smudge in 2006 images, but was overlooked because it was obscured.

Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc. in Washington.

Read more on http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

http://hubblesite.org/news

Picture courtesy - www.nasa.gov/images

ADVANCED LIGHT SOURCE - X-RAY MICRODIFFRACTION BY TAMURA NOBUMICHI

2011-07-20T20:00:00.001+02:00

Hi Passengers !

July 15, 2008 Berkeley Lab lecture: Molecular movies of chemical reactions and material phase transformations need a strobe of x-rays, the penetrating light that reveals how atoms and molecules assemble in chemical and biological systems and complex materials. Roger Falcone, Director of the Advanced Light Source,will discuss a new generation of x ray sources that will enable a new science of atomic dynamics on ultrafast timescales.

Courtesy - www-esg.lbl.gov

Discover now more information about X-ray microdiffraction with the following numeric report made by Sciences news on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

Welcome to the x-ray microdiffraction facility at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

X-ray diffraction is a powerful experimental technique that is routinely used to investigate the structural properties of materials. We use x-rays focused to a spot size of one micron or less to perform x-ray diffraction experiments with very high spatial resolution. X-ray microdiffraction is providing new insights in the fields of materials and environmental science. The ALS X-ray microdiffraction facility is currently undergoing a major upgrade with its move from the bending magnet end-station 7.3.3. to the superbend beamline 12.3.2. The new end-station with its enhanced capabilities including brighter beam, smaller spot size, better strain sensitivity and larger energy range is expected to be operational in June 2007.
Why use x-ray microdiffraction?
- Materials properties such as strength and fatigue resistance are highly dependent on microstructure. X-ray microdiffraction can measure local variations in stress, orientation, and plastic deformation between grains and within individual grains, helping us understand mechanical properties at this critical length scale.
- In microelectronics and related industries, the dimensions of the constitutive devices range from a few microns to submicron. Confinement and interfaces make thin film mechanical properties drastically different than bulk materials. With x-ray microdiffraction, we can measure local characteristics such as texture and stress within individual devices, offering an experimental counterpart to computer simulations.

- Samples such as soils are highly complex and are a challenge for spatially resolved characterization. X-ray microdiffraction allows for structural identification of small amounts of phases imbedded in a heterogeneous matrix.

Read more on www-esg.lbl.gov

Nobumichi Tamura
Advanced Light Source
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
1 Cyclotron Road MS 2R0200
Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel: 510-486-6189
Fax: 510-486-7696
Email: NTamura@lbl.gov

Picture courtesy - www-esg.lbl.gov

STS 135 - ATLANTIS FINAL FLIP & DOCK WITH ISS

2011-07-11T20:00:00.034+02:00

Hi Passengers !

Atlantis and its STS-135 crew performed the rendezvous pitch maneuver (for the last time) prior to docking to the international space station on July 10, 2011.

HOUSTON — The space shuttle Atlantis arrived at the International Space Station for one final visit, a historic connection that marked the last time a shuttle will ever link up with the orbiting lab.

Atlantis docked at the space station at 11:07 a.m. EDT (1507 GMT) after spending two days in an orbital chase that helped the shuttle close in on the massive complex.

Shuttle commander Chris Ferguson skillfully backed the orbiter to its destination in a flawless docking that occurred precisely on schedule. "Atlantis arriving. Welcome to the International Space Station for the last time," station astronaut Ron Garan radioed to the shuttle crew as the two spacecraft sailed over the Pacific Ocean, east of New Zealand.

Credit: NASA

Read more on www.space.com

Discover now the last news from ISS & Atlantis STS 135 with the following numeric report made by Orbital Passenger on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

Worst Space Debris Events of All Time
Photos of NASA's Last Space Shuttle Launch

NASA Tracking Potentially Dangerous Space Junk Near Shuttle, Space Station

HOUSTON – NASA is tracking a piece of space junk that could fly close to the International Space Station and the connected shuttle Atlantis, officials announced today (July 10).

Mission managers were notified of the potentially threatening piece of space trash this morning, and are continuing to observe the object to determine whether they need to take any action to avoid a collision.

"We will work through our normal procedures and processes for dealing with that," LeRoy Cain, chair of Atlantis' mission management team, said in a news briefing today. "What we were told today was very preliminary."

This potentially threatening piece of space junk is debris from a defunct Russian satellite that was launched in 1970, and is part of a known catalog of derelict objects in orbit. After further analysis, NASA will better understand the size and orbit of the debris, and whether or not it poses a threat to the shuttle and station.

Based on initial assessments, the object is expected to make its closest approach at 12:59 p.m. EDT (1659 GMT) on Tuesday (July 12), during a scheduled spacewalk by station astronauts Ron Garan and Mike Fossum.

If deemed necessary, mission managers will use small thrusters aboard Atlantis to maneuver the shuttle and station out of harm's way, and allow both the shuttle and station crews to press ahead with their mission objectives.

"In all likelihood, it would not interfere with what we're doing on the spacewalk," Cain said.

Space junk, which consists mostly of spent rocket parts and pieces of broken satellites ranging in size, is an ongoing threat to spacecraft and satellites in orbit. Today, more than 22,000 pieces of space junk are constantly being tracked in Earth orbit.

NASA and its space station partners have procedures in place to deal with potentially threatening pieces of orbital debris if they fly within a preset safety perimeter around the station and any attached spacecraft. With advance notice, thrusters on the space station itself, or any attached vehicles such as the shuttle or Russian Soyuz spacecraft, can be used to move the complex to a higher orbit to get out of the way, for example.

NASA maintains a pizza box-shaped safety zone that measures just over 15 miles (25 kilometers) around the space station and about a half-mile (0.75 km) above and below the outpost.

"It's not uncommon," Cain explained. "There's a lot of junk in orbit. We have a very good process for knowing where they are and how to avoid them in cases where we need to avoid them. It's not unusual to have to deal with it."

Source : Denise Chow - July 10, 2011

Courtesy - www.space.com

The space shuttle Atlantis is pictured shortly after it docked to the International Space Station for the final time. Atlantis and its four astronauts arrived at the orbiting outpost for one final visit, in what will also be the final time a shuttle is parked at the massive complex - CREDIT: NASA TV

Picture courtesy - i.space.com

RESEARCH FROM NASA INSTITUTE - LUNAR SCIENCE FORUM

2011-07-09T20:00:00.001+02:00

Hi Passengers !

There will be a Commercial Lunar Focus Group meeting on July 20, 2011 from noon till 2:00. The meeting will occur during the focus group session during the second day of the NASA Lunar Science Forum that will be held at NASA Ames on July 19-21.

The meeting will be held at the Space Portal in Building 555 in the NASA Research Park. There will be variety of commercial lunar topics discussed including an overview of the International Lunar Research Park concept as well as an update on the Google Luna X Prize competition and the NASA Innovative Lunar Demonstration Data contracts.

If you are registered for the Lunar Science Forum you can pick up your box lunch and bring it over to the Portal. If you are not attending the conference we will have lunch stuff here at the Portal.

Commercial Lunar Focus Group Meeting Announcement
Source: Ames Research Center - Saturday, July 9, 2011

Courtesy - www.spaceref.com

Discover now some information about the Lunar science meeting with the following numeric report made by Blogger Mail on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

LUNAR SCIENCE FORUM

The NASA Lunar Science Institute is pleased to announce the 4th annual NASA Lunar Science Forum on July 19-21, 2011. This year's forum will feature sessions on the latest scientific results from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Lunar Crater Observation Sensing Satellite, a side conference for lunar graduate students and young professionals, as well as the presentation of the annual Shoemaker Medal and associated keynote lecture. As in past years, science sessions are structured to report on both recent results and future opportunities for lunar science, education and outreach.

The conference will review the state of knowledge, and opportunities for science:
Of the Moon: Investigating the composition, structure and history of the Moon as each relates to the evolution of the Earth, Moon and Solar System.
On the Moon: Investigating the effects of lunar material and the environment on terrestrial life and robotic equipment.
From the Moon: Exploring science that is uniquely enabled by being on or near the Moon, including celestial and Earth observations.
Presentations on elements of education and public outreach are included to better understand how lunar exploration can be used to stimulate public interest in space exploration and improve science literacy.

Science Organizing Committee

Chair - Jeffrey Moore, NASA Ames Research Center
Gwen Barnes, University of Idaho
Ross Beyer, NASA ARC/The SETI Inst.
William Bottke, SwRI
Adrian Brown, The SETI Inst.
Roy Christoffersen, Center for Lunar Science & Exploration/USRA - LPI
Barbara Cohen, NASA MFSC
Geraint Harker, U of Colorado
Jerome Johnson, U of Alaska
Cass Runyon, College of Charleston
Richard Vondrak, NASA GSFC
Michael Wargo, NASA
Kevin Zahnle, NASA ARC
Francis Nimmo, University of California Santa Cruz
Sponsors
NASA Lunar Science Institute
NASA Ames Research Center
NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD)
NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD)

Read more on lunarscience2011.arc.nasa.gov

Picture courtesy - 1.bp.blogspot.com

ANIMALS TRAVELING TROUGH AFRICA - THE GREAT MIGRATION

2011-07-07T20:00:00.066+02:00

Hi Passengers !

Africa is the mother continent – the core from which all others tore away 270 million years ago. Straddling the equator, this mighty block of land stands alone. Nowhere else has such a breathtaking variety of animals and plants flourished so successfully.

This major project is the first comprehensive exploration of Africa for 15 years. The award-winning camera team have sought out the most exciting and remote locations to generate stylish and original footage.

Developed by the BBC Natural History Unit, known for its world leading natural history programming, this series promises to reveal to the viewer why Africa is the richest and most diverse continent in the world for wildlife.

Courtesy - earth.bbcknowledge.com

Discover now some information about animal migration with the following numeric report made by Planet Earth on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

Bird migration
Insect migration
Lepidoptera migration
Human migration
Diel vertical migration
Tracking animal migration

ANIMAL MIGRATION

Animal migration is the relatively long-distance movement of individuals, usually on a seasonal basis. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon, found in all major animal groups, including birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and crustaceans. The trigger for the migration may be local climate, local availability of food, the season of the year or for mating reasons. To be counted as a true migration, and not just a local dispersal or irruption, the movement of the animals should be an annual or seasonal occurrence, such as birds migrating south for the winter, or a major habitat change as part of their life, such as young Atlantic salmon leaving the river of their birth when they have reached a few inches in size.

Definition

Migration can take very different forms in different species and as such, there is no simple accepted definition of migration. One of the most commonly used definitions, proposed by Kennedy is “Migratory behavior is persistent and straightened out movement effected by the animal’s own locomotory exertions or by its active embarkation upon a vehicle. It depends on some temporary inhibition of station keeping responses but promotes their eventual disinhibition and recurrence.” Migration has also been described as a term that describes the four related concepts :

persistent, straight, movement behavior
relocation of an individual on a greater scale (both spatially and temporally) than its normal daily activities
seasonal ‘to-and-fro’ movement of a population between two areas
movement leading to the redistribution of individuals within a population
Migration Types

Migration can be either obligate, meaning individuals must always migrate, or facultative, meaning individuals can choose to migrate or not.

Within a migratory species or even within a single population, often not all individuals migrate. Complete migration is when all individuals migrate, partial migration is when some individuals migrate while others do not, and differential migration is when the difference between migratory and non-migratory individuals is based on age or sex (for example).

While most migratory movements occur on an annual cycle, some daily movements are also referred to as migration. For example, many aquatic animals make a vertical migration (Diel vertical migration), travelling a few hundred metres up and down the water column. Similarly, some jellyfish make daily horizontal migrations, traveling a few hundred metres across a lake.

Multiple generation migration

In some insect species, such as the monarch butterfly, the whole migration is not carried out by one individual. Instead the butterflies mate and reproduce on the journey, and successive generations travel the next stage of the migration.

Human cultural responses to animal migration

Before the phenomenon of animal migration was understood, various folklore and erroneous explanations sprang up to account for the disappearance or sudden arrival of birds in an area. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle proposed that robins turned into redstarts when summer arrived. The barnacle goose was explained in European Medieval bestiaries and manuscripts as either growing like fruit on trees, or developing from goose barnacles on pieces of driftwood. Another example is the swallow, which at various times was suggested to hibernate either underwater, buried in muddy riverbanks, or in hollow trees.

Read more on en.wikipedia.org

Wildebeest Connochaetes taurinus crossing a river in East Africa.

Picture courtesy - upload.wikimedia.org

BEFORE TIME AND SPACE - THE BIG BANG THEORY

2011-07-01T20:00:00.026+02:00

Hi Passengers !

No explosion beats the Big Bang -- even if it was completely silent. It may be possible to glimpse before the supposed beginning of time into the universe prior to the Big Bang, researchers now say. Unfortunately, any such picture will always be fuzzy at best due to a kind of "cosmic forgetfulness."

The Big Bang is often thought as the start of everything, including time, making any questions about what happened during it or beforehand nonsensical. Recently scientists have instead suggested the Big Bang might have just been the explosive beginning of the current era of the universe, hinting at a mysterious past.

To see how far into history one might gaze, theoretical physicist Martin Bojowald at Pennsylvania State University ran calculations based on loop quantum gravity, one of a number of competing theories seeking to explain how the underlying structure of the universe works.

Past research suggested the Big Bang was preceded by infinite energies and space-time warping where existing scientific theories break down, making it impossible to peer beforehand. The new findings suggest that although the levels of energy and space-time warping before the Big Bang were both incredibly high, they were finite.

Scientists could spot clues in the present day of what the cosmos looked like previously. If evidence of the past persisted after the Big Bang, its influence could be spotted in astronomical observations and computational models, Bojowald explained.

However, Bojowald also figures some knowledge of the past was irrevocably lost. For instance, the sheer size of the present universe would suppress precise knowledge of how the universe changed in size before the Big Bang, he said.

"It came as a big surprise that some properties of the universe before the Big Bang may have only such a weak influence on current observations that they are practically undetermined," Bojowald said of findings detailed online July 1 in the journal Nature Physics.

One implication of this "cosmic forgetfulness," as Bojowald calls it, is that history does not repeat itself—the fundamental properties of the current era of the universe are different from the last, Bojowald explained. "It's as if the universe forgot some of its properties and acquired new properties independent of what it had before," he told SPACE.com.

"The eternal recurrence of absolutely identical universes would seem to be prevented by the apparent existence of an intrinsic cosmic forgetfulness," he added.

These findings differ from a cyclic model of the cosmos from cosmologist Paul Steinhardt at Princeton and theoretical physicist Neil Turok at Cambridge, which envisions an infinite series of Big Bangs preceding our universe caused by additional membranes or "branes" of reality perpetually colliding and bouncing off each other. Steinhardt said he felt Bojowald's calculations were concrete, but needed further elaboration to include the interplay of different kinds of matter and radiation.

Cosmologist Carlo Rovelli at the Center of Theoretical Physics in Marseilles, France, found it "remarkable" that the new work could delve past the Big Bang. He added the work had to lead to predictions that could be compared to cosmological observations "in order to become credible."

Source : Glimpse of Time Before Big Bang Possible by Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience - Date: 01 July 2007.

Courtesy - www.space.com

Discover now more information about the Big Bang theory with the following numeric report made Blogger Mail on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

You Can't Travel Back in Time, Scientists Say

THE BIG BANG THEORY

The Big Bang was the very beginning of our Universe, and it probably happened about 13.73 billion years ago, because that's how old the oldest stars are, and we think that stars began to form almost immediately after the Big Bang.

Nobody knows what was there before the Big Bang. Possibly there was no time before the Universe got started, so nothing happened. Another way of looking at it is to say that somehow, in the very first micro-second of the Big Bang, some space actually changed into time, so that time got started. There might have been other universes before this one, or there might be other ones at the same time as this one.

When the Big Bang happened, it let loose a huge amount of energy into a small Universe. The Universe immediately started to get bigger and bigger and making more space (and it is still getting bigger today). Inside the Universe, the energy (in the form of photons (light) and bosons) went zipping around like crazy all over the place.

These super-energetic photons and bosons sometimes broke up into smaller particles. The photons broke down into an electron and a positron, which is like the opposite of an electron. The bosons broke down into a proton and an anti-proton, or neutrons and anti-neutrons. Then they would lose energy and eventually glue themselves back together into protons and bosons again.

But at some point, some of the positrons and anti-protons (the anti-matter) seem to have gotten lost somewhere, leaving a bunch of lonely electrons and protons with no matches. These electrons and protons got together with each other, forming the first hydrogen atoms. Once there were clouds of these hydrogen atoms floating around together, they formed nebulas, which soon developed into the first stars.

Read more on www.historyforkids.org

Picture courtesy - seedmagazine.com

VOYAGER 1 & 2 ARE REACHING BUBBLING WORLDS

2011-06-29T20:00:00.073+02:00

Hi Passengers !

NASA's Voyager probes are truly going where no one has gone before. Gliding silently toward the stars, 9 billion miles from Earth, they are beaming back news from the most distant, unexplored reaches of the solar system.

Mission scientists say the probes have just sent back some very big news indeed.

It's bubbly out there.

Discover now more informations about those bubbling worlds with the following numeric report made by Voyager New Horizons on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

A Big Surprise from the Edge of the Solar System

According to computer models, the bubbles are large, about 100 million miles wide, so it would take the speedy probes weeks to cross just one of them. Voyager 1 entered the "foam-zone" around 2007, and Voyager 2 followed about a year later. At first researchers didn't understand what the Voyagers were sensing--but now they have a good idea. "The sun's magnetic field extends all the way to the edge of the solar system," explains Opher. "Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina's skirt. Far, far away from the sun, where the Voyagers are now, the folds of the skirt bunch up." When a magnetic field gets severely folded like this, interesting things can happen.

Lines of magnetic force criss-cross, and "reconnect". (Magnetic reconnection is the same energetic process underlying solar flares.) The crowded folds of the skirt reorganize themselves, sometimes explosively, into foamy magnetic bubbles. "We never expected to find such a foam at the edge of the solar system, but there it is!" says Opher's colleague, University of Maryland physicist Jim Drake. Theories dating back to the 1950s had predicted a very different scenario: The distant magnetic field of the sun was supposed to curve around in relatively graceful arcs, eventually folding back to rejoin the sun.

The actual bubbles appear to be self-contained and substantially disconnected from the broader solar magnetic field. Energetic particle sensor readings suggest that the Voyagers are occasionally dipping in and out of the foam—so there might be regions where the old ideas still hold. But there is no question that old models alone cannot explain what the Voyagers have found. Says Drake: "We are still trying to wrap our minds around the implications of these findings." The structure of the sun's distant magnetic field—foam vs. no-foam—is of acute scientific importance because it defines how we interact with the rest of the galaxy.

Researchers call the region where the Voyagers are now "the heliosheath." It is essentially the border crossing between the Solar System and the rest of the Milky Way. Lots of things try to get across—interstellar clouds, knots of galactic magnetism, cosmic rays and so on. Will these intruders encounter a riot of bubbly magnetism (the new view) or graceful lines of magnetic force leading back to the sun (the old view)?

The case of cosmic rays is illustrative. Galactic cosmic rays are subatomic particles accelerated to near-light speed by distant black holes and supernova explosions. When these microscopic cannonballs try to enter the solar system, they have to fight through the sun's magnetic field to reach the inner planets. "The magnetic bubbles appear to be our first line of defense against cosmic rays," points out Opher. "We haven't figured out yet if this is a good thing or not." On one hand, the bubbles would seem to be a very porous shield, allowing many cosmic rays through the gaps.

On the other hand, cosmic rays could get trapped inside the bubbles, which would make the froth a very good shield indeed. So far, much of the evidence for the bubbles comes from the Voyager energetic particle and flow measurements. Proof can also be obtained from the Voyager magnetic field observations and some of this data is also very suggestive. However, because the magnetic field is so weak, the data takes much longer to analyze with the appropriate care. Thus, unraveling the magnetic signatures of bubbles in the Voyager data is ongoing. "We'll probably discover which is correct as the Voyagers proceed deeper into the froth and learn more about its organization," says Opher. "This is just the beginning, and I predict more surprises ahead."

From Dr. Tony Phillips - NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Read watch and listen more on www.nasa.gov

Old and new views of the heliosheath. Red and blue spirals are the gracefully curving magnetic field lines of orthodox models. New data from Voyager add a magnetic froth (inset) to the mix. Credit: NASA

Picture courtesy - www.nasa.gov

VAPOURTRAIL, DISTRAIL, CONTRAIL OR CHEMTRAIL IN THE EARTH SKY

2011-06-26T20:00:00.050+02:00

Hi Passengers !

There are many different things out there that make people question and comment on, this section will be on chemtrails. TheWeatherSpace.com was given a link to a video today and it was of interest because it was a chemtrail hazard YouTube channel of some sort.

While I can comment deeply into the subject, TWS Meteorologist Kevin Martin is more suited for such but at the time could not give a quote. The channel, similar in style to "Dutchsinse" is named "GovernmentForecasts" and seems to be giving some type of HAARP and chemtrail hazard maps and their effects.

Chemtrails are a tough subject I rather not get into and will wait but I had to share what was sent to TWS earlier in the evening.

TWS is not too much into the conspiracy stuff, however some people that may have an interest in the subject may like to follow the Government Forecast page and report back anything about it for a future story.

Source : Do Government chemtrail and HAARP forecasts exist out there
Published on June 26, 2011 By Dave Tole - Writer

Courtesy - www.theweatherspace.com

Discover now some information about Chemtrail, Contrail & Distrail with the following numeric report made by Planet Earth on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

CHEMTRAIL

The chemtrail conspiracy theory holds that some trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.

As a result of the popularity of the theory, official agencies have received thousands of complaints from people who have demanded an explanation. The existence of chemtrails has been repeatedly denied by government agencies and scientists around the world, who say the trails are normal contrails.

The United States Air Force maintains that the theory is a hoax which "has been investigated and refuted by many established and accredited universities, scientific organizations, and major media publications". The United Kingdom's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has stated that chemtrails "are not scientifically recognised phenomena". The Canadian Leader of the Government in the House of Commons has stated that "The term 'chemtrails' is a popularised expression, and there is no scientific evidence to support their existence."

The term chemtrail is derived from "chemical trail" in the similar fashion that contrail is a portmanteau of condensation trail. It does not refer to common forms of aerial spraying such as crop dusting, cloud seeding, skywriting, or aerial firefighting. The term specifically refers to aerial trails allegedly caused by the systematic high-altitude release of chemical substances not found in ordinary contrails, resulting in the appearance of uncharacteristic sky tracks. Supporters of this theory speculate that the purpose of the chemical release may be for solar radiation management, population control, weather control, or biological warfare/chemical warfare and claim that these trails are causing respiratory illnesses and other health problems.

CONTRAIL

or vapour trails are artificial clouds that are the visible trails of condensed water vapour made by the exhaust of aircraft engines. As the hot exhaust gases cool in the surrounding air they may precipitate a cloud of microscopic water droplets or, if the air is cold enough, tiny ice crystals.

The wingtip vortices which trail from the wingtips and wing flaps of aircraft are sometimes partly visible due to condensation in the cores of the vortices. Each vortex is a mass of spinning air and the air pressure at the centre of the vortex is very low. These wingtip vortices are not the same as contrails.

Depending on atmospheric conditions, contrails may be visible for only a few seconds or minutes, or may persist for many hours which may affect climate.

DISTRAIL

A 'distrail' is short for dissipation trail. Where an aircraft passes through a cloud, it can clear a path through it; this is known as a distrail. Because the plane's contrail is not yet visible (contrails usually form above 26,000 feet, depending on the temperature and other factors) the distrail looks like a tunnel through the cloud if the cloud is very thin.

Distrails are created by the elevated temperature of the exhaust gases absorbing the moisture from the cloud. Clouds exist where the relative humidity is 100% but by increasing the temperature the air can hold more moisture and the relative humidity drops below 100%, even for the same absolute moisture density, causing the visible water droplets in the cloud to be converted back into water vapour.

Read more on en.wikipedia.org

A distrail is the opposite of a contrail.

Picture courtesy - upload.wikimedia.org

INFINITY - IS THE UNIVERSE WITHOUT END ?

2011-05-16T20:00:00.061+02:00

Hi Passengers !

How far do the stars stretch out into space? And what's beyond them? In modern times, we built giant telescopes that have allowed us to cast our gaze deep into the universe. Astronomers have been able to look back to near the time of its birth. They've reconstructed the course of cosmic history in astonishing detail.

From intensive computer modeling, and myriad close observations, they've uncovered important clues to its ongoing evolution. Many now conclude that what we can see, the stars and galaxies that stretch out to the limits of our vision, represent only a small fraction of all there is.

Does the universe go on forever? Where do we fit within it? And how would the great thinkers have wrapped their brains around the far-out ideas on today's cutting edge?

For those who find infinity hard to grasp, even troubling, you're not alone. It's a concept that has long tormented even the best minds.

Over two thousand years ago, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his followers saw numerical relationships as the key to understanding the world around them.

But in their investigation of geometric shapes, they discovered that some important ratios could not be expressed in simple numbers.

Take the circumference of a circle to its diameter, called Pi.

Computer scientists recently calculated Pi to 5 trillion digits, confirming what the Greeks learned: there are no repeating patterns and no ending in sight.

The discovery of the so-called irrational numbers like Pi was so disturbing, legend has it, that one member of the Pythagorian cult, Hippassus, was drowned at sea for divulging their existence.

A century later, the philosopher Zeno brought infinity into the open with a series of paradoxes: situations that are true, but strongly counter-intuitive.

In this modern update of one of Zeno's paradoxes, say you have arrived at an intersection. But you are only allowed to cross the street in increments of half the distance to the other side. So to cross this finite distance, you must take an infinite number of steps.

In math today, it's a given that you can subdivide any length an infinite number of times, or find an infinity of points along a line.

What made the idea of infinity so troubling to the Greeks is that it clashed with their goal of using numbers to explain the workings of the real world.

To the philosopher Aristotle, a century after Zeno, infinity evoked the formless chaos from which the world was thought to have emerged: a primordial state with no natural laws or limits, devoid of all form and content.

But if the universe is finite, what would happen if a warrior traveled to the edge and tossed a spear? Where would it go?

It would not fly off on an infinite journey, Aristotle said. Rather, it would join the motion of the stars in a crystalline sphere that encircled the Earth. To preserve the idea of a limited universe, Aristotle would craft an historic distinction.

On the one hand, Aristotle pointed to the irrational numbers such as Pi. Each new calculation results in an additional digit, but the final, final number in the string can never be specified. So Aristotle called it "potentially" infinite.

Then there's the "actually infinite," like the total number of points or subdivisions along a line. It's literally uncountable. Aristotle reserved the status of "actually infinite" for the so-called "prime mover" that created the world and is beyond our capacity to understand. This became the basis for what's called the Cosmological, or First Cause, argument for the existence of God.

Courtesy SpaceRip

Cosmic's journey is a serie of podcasts provided since long months now by a webfriend (Space Rip) with a lot of data to watch, read and listen on this blogger or on it YouTube channel (Click here to join).

Discover now some information about infinity with the following numeric report made by Universum Observatorium on WEB 2.0

INFINITY IN COSMOLOGY

In ancient cosmologies, the sky was perceived as a solid dome, or firmament. In 1584, Bruno proposed an unbounded universe in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds: "Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds."

Cosmologists have long sought to discover whether infinity exists in our physical universe: Are there an infinite number of stars? Does the universe have infinite volume? Does space "go on forever"? This is an open question of cosmology. Note that the question of being infinite is logically separate from the question of having boundaries. The two-dimensional surface of the Earth, for example, is finite, yet has no edge. By travelling in a straight line one will eventually return to the exact spot one started from. The universe, at least in principle, might have a similar topology; if one travelled in a straight line through the universe perhaps one would eventually revisit one's starting point.

If, on the other hand, the universe were not curved like a sphere but had a flat topology, it could be both unbounded and infinite. The curvature of the universe can be measured through multipole moments in the spectrum of the cosmic background radiation. As to date, analysis of the radiation patterns recorded by the WMAP spacecraft hints that the universe has a flat topology. This would be consistent with an infinite physical universe. The Planck spacecraft launched in 2009 is expected to record the cosmic background radiation with 10 times higher precision, and will give more insight into the question of whether the universe is infinite or not.

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ALAN SHEPARD (USA) - FIRST MAN IN SPACE (1961)

2011-05-05T20:00:00.000+02:00

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Commander Alan Shepard has been recovered from his space capsule in the Atlantic after becoming the first American in space. Three weeks ago, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly into space.

This morning, 37-year-old Cdr Shepard of the US Navy was launched into sub-orbital flight from Cape Canaveral in Florida in a Mercury 3 capsule attached to a Redstone rocket.

He travelled 115 miles into space and landed in the Atlantic just 15 minutes later. His first words after he was picked up by a helicopter were: "Boy, what a ride!"

President Kennedy telephoned to congratulate the astronaut a few minutes after he was flown to aircraft carrier Lake Champlain.

In a veiled reference to last month's achievement by the USSR's space programme, the president said: "This is an historic milestone in our own exploration into space. But America still needs to work with the utmost speed and vigour in the further development of our space programme."

During the flight, Cdr Shepard maintained constant communication with ground control. He opened his periscope, reported on cloud cover over Florida and North Carolina and commented, "Oh, what a beautiful view."

As he re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, the experienced test pilot was subjected to 11 times the force of gravity and travelled at 5,100mph but managed to report that he was "OK".

The space capsule, which appears undamaged except for some heat scars, is being returned to Cape Canaveral for examination.

Source - 1961: Shepard becomes first US astronaut.

Courtesy - news.bbc.co.uk

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Alan Shepard - first US man in space

A remarkable story of a man who wouldn't give up on his chance to walk on the moon. One of my prized possessions is an autograph, signed simply "To Anthony, Alan Shepard". I keep it very safe. But who was this Alan Shepard, and what was he famous for ?

Alan Shepard was supposed to have been on board the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, which as many people will know having seen the movie of the same name starring Tom Hanks, never got to land on the Moon and barely made it back to earth. This story of this remarkable astronaut, who died in 1998, is compelling.

Born in 1923, Shepard hit the world headlines on May 5th, 1961, when he became the first American in space in the tiny Mercury space capsule called Freedom 7. He was one of the original seven astronauts, who have become known as the "Mercury 7".

He was lifted off at 9:34am on that morning and fired 116 miles into the air, travelling 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral. He hit a top speed of 5,100 miles per hour before dropping into the Atlantic Ocean. He was only 23 days late - Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin got there before him, but Shepard, and the Americans, would get revenge.

A man full of self-confidence and with nerves of steel, he was to be bitterly disappointed to be taken off the Apollo Moon landing programme when he developed an inner ear infection. However, fate was kind to Shepard - he was originally pencilled in for the Apollo 13 mission which ended in disaster.

Ten years after his first suborbital history-making flight, Shepard overcame the serious ear infection and returned to space for only his second, and his last, flight as the commander of Apollo 14. He became only the fifth person to walk on the surface of the Moon, and the oldest at 47 years of age.

Shepard spent 33 hours on the moon during the third lunar landing mission and became the only lunar golfer, playfully whacking golf balls with a six-iron. On that flight, Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa spent nine days in space; Mitchell and Shepard stayed on the moon for two days.

The first ball he hit was a bit of an embarrassment, but the second one connected and Shepard endeared himself to millions of golfers, and TV viewers, across the globe with his amusing antics.

He is remembered today as a great man, and a true American hero.

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YURI GAGARIN (RUSSIA) - FIRST MAN IN SPACE (1961)

2011-04-12T20:00:00.040+02:00

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The query keeps cropping up here and there in the media, particularly in outlets targeting absolutely ignorant audiences. Here is an example. We took it from the book "Cosmonaut One" by the Russian journalist Golovanov.

"November 10th 1960. Russian Cosmonaut Bielokonev reports from board his ship: "I can observe strange glowing particles through my light hole". His ground control instructs him to take samples. "I'll try", he answers, "although I have no idea of how to go about this". A day later the man reports: "I'm lucky. I have a sample! What? Radiation? I never thought about this. Are they dangerous?" One more day later, Bielokonev voice trembles with fear: "I can't hear you! The batteries are down. There is complete darkness on board. All gauges are out of order. Oxygen! Comrades!" His speech becomes unintelligible and finally fades away altogether.

Never since has anyone heard of that brave Bielokonev guy. Who can tell how many others went down the same road? Americans keep wondering whether Yuri Gagarin was indeed the first to travel to space ..."

Sounds like an extract from substandard science fiction. The American youth weekly WEEKEND, however, attempted to sell this monstrous nonsense as a genuine wireless intercept.

This is apparently worse than just another gutter press fabrication. It's rather part of a coordinated propaganda campaign to pour slander on the great country that sent Gagarin to space. His flight was a great political as well as scientific coup and Western analysts were fully appreciative of that. THE NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE said at the time that the first man in space weighs more than 100 army divisions or a dozen of targeted intercontinental ballistic missiles prepared for take-off. Naturally, a hunt for the darker sides of the Soviet space program was launched.

A journalist writing in THE US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT in 1961 argued that the first human space traveler had gone into space and perished a few days before Gagarin's flight. A certain Isztvan Nemeri insists he had access to secret sources which say Gagarin never in his life was in orbit. In his book "Gagarin: a Space Lie" (out in Budapest in the early 1990s), Mr Nemeri names the Russian test pilot Vladimir Ilyushin as the first man in space. Ilyushin allegedly orbited the Earth several days before April 12 1961 and received serious injuries when he touched down. The Soviet leaders chose Yuri Gagarin as a pin-up substitute. Later, Nemeri writes, they brutally disposed of both men, killing Ilyushin in an engineered road accident in 1961 and Gagarin, in a similar air crash in 1968. The dead never disclose secrets that were known to them. Mr Nemeri even quotes rumors of Gagarin dying in a top secret Soviet psychiatric ward in the spring of 1990.

These horror stories hardly deserve serious discussion. All remember that all radio exchanges between Gagarin and his ground controllers were open to the whole world. The famous British radio astronomer Sir Bernard Lowell, who was at the time on the staff of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, said he had no evidence of a botched and then hushed up manned Soviet mission to outer space.

Despite convincing dismissals from a number of competent sources, rumors of hidden Soviet failures in space continued to circulate, stirred by reports in dozens of mainly American newspapers and magazines such as THE WASHINGTON EVENING STAR, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE BALTIMORE SUN, THE SCIENCE BUSINESS DAILY and, ironically, TRUE (all reputedly serious when it comes to reporting fact). The Soviet death toll in space was estimated at 5 to 14.

Director of the Russian National Medicine and Biology Centre Professor Anatoli Grigoryev told our radio that the pre-Gagarin Soviet space travelers included mannequins. Each was habitually referred to as Ivan Ivanovich, a very common name synonymous with the Russian man in the street.

Professor Grigoryev explains

"Those dummies served to test physiological sensors and find the right ways of fixing them. They also carried gauges for evaluating the possible effects of space radiation on this or that body part. Knowledge thus gained was of immense value for preparing manned missions.

As for Gagarin, he was the first. None of the Soviet cosmonauts ventured out before him, on either suborbital or orbital mission. and none could have perished in space before the 12th of April 1961 !"

You can't black out the Sun, a Russian proverb says. Hard facts are impossible to disprove. The patent office of history registered the Soviet Air Force pilot Yuri Gagarin as the first man in space.
Courtesy - www.vor.ru

In the race to reach the outer space, it was the Russian Yuri Gagarin who did it the first on April 12, 1961; so three weeks before the Americans in May 5, 1961.

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YURI GAGARIN THE FIRST MAN IN SPACE

1961: Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to enter space and orbit the Earth, helping boost the Soviet space program and intensify the space race with the United States.
The diminutive Gagarin, who stood a mere 5-foot-2, appeared ready to pursue a career as an industrial worker but found his passion for flying while attending technical school. He entered military flight training and earned his pilot’s wings at the controls of a MiG-15. In 1960, he was selected as one of the Soviet Union's first class of 20 cosmonauts. He excelled in the training and so was chosen to be the first man to enter space -- and perhaps partly because the Vostok-1 capsule was so cramped.

Space flight being very much a crapshoot at the time, Soviet authorities figured Gagarin was just as likely to die upon re-entering the atmosphere as he was to return safely. But return he did and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who hoped to use Gagarin’s success to strengthen the Soviet Union’s ballistic missile program, rushed to his side to bask in a little reflected glory.
Twenty-three days later, on May 5, Alan Shepard became the first American to enter sub-orbital space but it took nearly a year before a U.S. astronaut -- John Glenn aboard Friendship 7 -- successfully orbited the Earth.

Gagarin returned to flying jet aircraft and was killed in a training accident in 1968.
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NEW HORIZONS & CASSINI REVEAL MYSTERIES OF JUPITER AND SATURN RINGS

2011-03-31T20:00:00.000+02:00

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In a celestial forensic exercise, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons missions have traced telltale ripples in Saturn and Jupiter's rings to specific collisions with cometary fragments that occurred decades, not millions of years, ago.

Jupiter's ripple-producing culprit was comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. The comet's debris cloud hurtled through the thin Jupiter ring system on a collision course into the planet in July 1994. Scientists attribute Saturn's ripples to a similar object - likely another cloud of comet debris - plunging through the inner rings in 1983. The findings are detailed in two papers published Thursday in the journal Science.

"We're finding evidence that a planet's rings can be affected by specific, traceable events that happened in the last 30 years, rather than a hundred million years ago," said Matthew Hedman, a Cassini imaging team associate, lead author on one of the papers, and a research associate at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "The solar system is a much more dynamic place than we gave it credit for."

Courtesy - www.prnewswire.com

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MYSTERIES OF JUPITER AND SATURN RINGS

Scientists learned about the patchy patterns in Jupiter's rings in the late 1990s from Galileo's visit to Jupiter. Unfortunately, the images from that mission were fuzzy, and scientists didn't understand why such patterns would occur. Not until Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 and started sending back thousands of images did scientists have a better picture of the activity. A 2007 science paper by Hedman and colleagues first noted corrugations in Saturn's innermost ring, dubbed the D ring.

A group including Hedman and Mark Showalter, a Cassini co-investigator based at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., saw that the grooves in the D ring appeared to wind together more tightly over time. Playing the process backward, Hedman demonstrated the pattern originated when something tilted the D ring off its axis by about 300 feet (100 meters) in late 1983. The scientists found Saturn's gravity on the tilted area warped the ring into a tightening spiral.

Cassini imaging scientists received another clue around August 2009 when the sun shone directly along Saturn's equator and lit the rings edge-on. The unique lighting conditions highlighted ripples not previously seen in another part of the ring system. Whatever happened in 1983 was big - not a small, localized event.

The collision tilted a region more than 12,000 miles (19,000 kilometers) wide, covering part of the D ring and the next outermost ring, called the C ring. Unfortunately, spacecraft were not visiting Saturn at that time, and the planet was on the far side of the sun out of sight from ground or space-based telescopes.

Hedman and Showalter, the lead author on the second paper, wondered whether the long-forgotten pattern in Jupiter's ring system might illuminate the mystery. Using Galileo images from 1996 and 2000, Showalter confirmed a similar winding spiral pattern by applying the same math they had applied to Saturn and factoring in Jupiter's gravitational influence. Galileo was launched on a space shuttle in 1989 and studied Jupiter until 2003.

Unwinding the spiral pinpointed the date when Jupiter's ring was tilted off its axis between June and September 1994. Shoemaker-Levy plunged into the Jovian atmosphere in late July. The Galileo images also revealed a second spiral, which was calculated to have originated in 1990. Images taken by New Horizons in 2007, when the spacecraft flew by Jupiter on its way to Pluto, showed two newer ripple patterns, in addition to the fading echo of the Shoemaker-Levy impact.

"We now know that collisions into the rings are very common – a few times per decade for Jupiter and a few times per century for Saturn," Showalter said. "Now scientists know that the rings record these impacts like grooves in a vinyl record, and we can play back their history later."

Launched in Oct. 15, 1997, Cassini began orbiting Saturn in 2004 and sends back data daily.

"Finding these fingerprints still in the rings is amazing and helps us better understand impact processes in our solar system," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Cassini's long sojourn around Saturn has helped us tease out subtle clues that tell us about the history of our origins."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. For more information about Cassini, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini

Pluto New Horizons launched in 2006 on the first mission to study Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The mission is managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., for NASA. The mission is part of the New Frontiers program managed at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. For more information about Pluto New Horizons, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons

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DISCOVERY OF A NEW EXOPLANETARY SYSTEM (KEPLER 11)

2011-02-28T20:00:00.000+01:00

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Kepler-11, an exoplanetary system which will open soon new gates of space exploration. The quest of an earth alike into the deep space.

Since the 90's exoplanets are discovered every day by powerful telescopes, Kepler-11 is one of the most alike star system found until now by NASA space missions.

Text : John Gregorio

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KEPLER-11

Kepler-11 is a sun-like star in the constellation Cygnus, located some 2,000 light years from Earth. It is located within the field of vision of the Kepler spacecraft, the satellite that NASA's Kepler Mission uses to detect planets that may be transiting their stars. Announced on February 2, 2011, the star system is the most compact yet discovered and is the flattest known. It is the first discovered case of a star system with six planets. All discovered planets are larger than Earth, with the larger ones being about Neptune's size.

Kepler-11 and its planets were discovered by NASA's Kepler Mission, a mission tasked with discovering planets in transit around their stars. The transit method that Kepler uses involves detecting dips in brightness in stars. These dips in brightness can be interpreted as planets whose orbits move in front of their stars from the perspective of Earth. Kepler-11 is the first discovered exoplanetary system with more than three transiting planets.

Kepler-11 is named for the Kepler Mission: it is the 11th star with confirmed planets discovered by Kepler. The planets are named alphabetically, starting with the innermost: b, c, d, e, f, and g, distinguishers that are tagged onto the name of their home star.

Kepler-11 is a G-type star that is approximately 95% the mass of and 110% the radius of the Sun. It has a surface temperature of 5680 (± 100) K and is 8 (± 2) billion years old. In comparison, the Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and has a surface temperature of 5778 K.
The star's apparent magnitude, or how bright it appears from Earth's perspective, is 13.7. Therefore, it cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Read more on en.wikipedia.org

Kepler Mission Discover's Earth-size Exoplanets

Stocktrek Images releases new photos of NASA's latest discovery of six Earth-sized exoplanets in a new planetary system rotating around a sun-like star called Kepler-11.

Tampa, Fla (PRWEB) February 10, 2011

NASA scientists recently discovered six Earth-sized planets in a new planetary system rotating around a sun-like star called Kepler-11. NASA's Kepler Discovery has reignited excitement among scientists exploring the farthest reaches of the universe for life beyond the Milky Way.

Scientists discovered a group of six Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting a sun-like star named Kepler-11, approximately 2,000 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Cygnus. The discovery marks the first such candidates in the so-called habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. The Kepler-11 system is the most planet-rich system known outside the Earth's solar system. The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified so far by Kepler to over 1,200. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are two to three times the size of Earth; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter, and 19 are larger than Jupiter.

“Kepler-11 is a remarkable planetary system whose discovery has helped us learn more about the diversity of planets in the universe, and develop science fiction into today's reality,” said Ryan Rossotto, President of Stocktrek Images.

The Kepler 11 system was discovered by the space based observation telescope Kepler, using the transit method, which means that the telescope looks for the characteristic dimming of the starlight, which occurs when a planet passes in front of the star in our line of sight. To verify the existence of a planet the space telescope needs to observe the planet at least three times.

As time progresses Kepler may find even more planets around the star Kepler 11. Keep in mind that planets in our own solar system may take as long as 165 years, such as Neptune, to orbit the sun once, and that Kepler 11 may very well host planets that take years to complete one orbit.

For royalty-free stock images of Kepler-11 and the planets rotating around it, Stocktrek Images is a single stop destination for pictures of the new planetary system along with images of earth, the armed forces, weather, the environment, and all aspects of space exploration. All pictures are available from Low-Res to Super-Res and beyond.

About Stocktrek Images

Stocktrek Images specializes in striking stock images highlighting all facets of the Earth, the Armed Forces and space exploration, with a special focus on unique images of military operations and astonomical images of the universe. Stocktrek Images keeps their collection fresh by adding new entries to the encyclopedic library every week. Their seasoned team of image librarians will even seek out images to meet customer special requests. For more information, visit stocktrekimages.com

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ECHELON (SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE) - UK-USA MILITARY COMMUNICATION

2010-10-10T20:00:00.004+02:00

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ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UK-USA Security Agreement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, known as AUSCANZUKUS). It has also been described only as the software system which controls the download and dissemination of the intercept of commercial satellite trunk communications.

The system has been reported in a number of public sources. Its capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001, and by author James Bamford in his books on the National Security Agency of the United States.

In its report, the European Parliament states that the term ECHELON is used in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicates that it was the name for a signals intelligence collection system. The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks and microwave links. The committee further concluded that "the technical capabilities of the system are probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed".

Bamford describes the system as the software controlling the collection and distribution of civilian telecommunications traffic conveyed using communication satellites, with the collection being undertaken by groundstations located in the footprint of the downlink leg.
Organization

UKUSA Community
Australia
Canada
New Zealand
United Kingdom
United States
The UKUSA intelligence community is assessed by the European Parliament to include the signals intelligence agencies of each of the member states - the National Security Agency of the United States, the Government Communications Headquarters of Britain, the Communications Security Establishment of Canada, the Defence Signals Directorate of Australia, and the Government Communications Security Bureau of New Zealand. The EP report concludes that it seems likely that ECHELON is a method of sorting captured signal traffic, rather than a comprehensive analysis tool.

Courtesy - en.wikipedia.org

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ECHELON Capabilities

The ability to intercept communications depends on the medium used, be it radio, satellite, microwave, cellular or fiber-optic. During World War II and through the 1950s, high frequency ("short wave") radio was widely used for military and diplomatic communication, and could be intercepted at great distances.

The rise of geostationary communications satellites in the 1960s presented new possibilities for intercepting international communications. The report to the European Parliament of 2001 states: "If UKUSA states operate listening stations in the relevant regions of the earth, in principle they can intercept all telephone, fax and data traffic transmitted via such satellites."

The role of satellites in point-to-point voice and data communications has largely been supplanted by fiber optics. As of 2006, 99 percent of the world's long-distance voice and data traffic is carried over optical-fiber. The proportion of international communications accounted for by satellite links is said to have decreased substantially over the past few years in Central Europe to amount to between 0.4 and 5%.

Even in less developed parts of the world, communications satellites are used largely for point-to-multipoint applications, such as video. Thus the majority of communications cannot be intercepted by earth stations, but only by tapping cables and intercepting line of sight microwave signals, which is possible only to a limited extent. One approach is to place intercept equipment at locations where fiber optic communications are switched.

For the Internet, much of the switching occurs at a relatively small number of sites. There have been reports of one such intercept site, Room 641A, in the United States. In the past, much Internet traffic was routed through the U.S. and the UK; this is less true today, with, for example, 95 percent of intra-German Internet communications being routed via the DE-CIX Internet exchange point in Frankfurt in 2000.

Thus for a worldwide surveillance network to be comprehensive, either illegal intercept sites would be required on the territory of friendly nations or cooperation of local authorities would be needed.

The report to the European Parliament points out that interception of private communications by foreign intelligence services is not necessarily limited to the American or British foreign intelligence services. Most reports on ECHELON focus on satellite interception, with no credible evidence for other capabilities.

Controversy

Reportedly created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early sixties, today ECHELON is believed to search also for hints of terrorist plots, drug dealers' plans, and political and diplomatic intelligence. But some critics claim the system is also being used for large-scale commercial theft, international economic espionage and invasion of privacy.

British journalist Duncan Campbell and New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager asserted in the 1990s that the United States was exploiting ECHELON traffic for industrial espionage, rather than military and diplomatic purposes. Examples alleged by the journalists include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie.

An article in the Baltimore Sun reported in 1995 that French aerospace company Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994 after the NSA reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract.

In 2001, the Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System recommended to the European Parliament that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy.

Bamford provides an alternate view, highlighting that legislation prohibits the use of intercepted communications for commercial purposes, although does elaborate on how intercepted communications are used as part of an all-source intelligence process.

Ground stations

Some of the ground stations suspected of belonging to or participating in the ECHELON network include:

Likely satellite intercept stations - The following stations are listed in the European Parliamentary report (p.54 ff) as likely to have a role in intercepting transmissions from telecommunications satellites:

Hong Kong (since closed)
Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station (Geraldton, Western Australia)
Menwith Hill (Yorkshire, UK) Map
Misawa Air Base (Japan)
GCHQ Bude, formerly known as GCHQ CSO Morwenstow, (Cornwall, UK) Map
Pine Gap (Northern Territory, Australia - close to Alice Springs) Map
Sugar Grove (West Virginia, US) Map
Yakima Training Center (Washington, US) Map
GCSB Waihopai (New Zealand)

Other potentially related stations - The following stations are listed in the EP report (p.57 ff) as ones whose roles "cannot be clearly established":

Ayios Nikolaos (Cyprus - UK)
Bad Aibling Station (Bad Aibling, Germany - US) - moved to Griesheim in 2004[citation needed]
Buckley Air Force Base (Denver, Colorado, US)
Fort Gordon (Georgia, US)
Guam (Pacific Ocean, US)
Kunia (Hawaii, US)
Leitrim (south of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)
Lackland Air Force Base, Medina Annex (San Antonio, Texas, US)
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1492/1494 - DIVIDING THE WORLD : THE TREATY OF TORDESILLAS BETWEEN SPAIN & PORTUGAL

2010-06-07T20:00:00.000+02:00

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The discovery of the New World to the west had been a bitter disappointment. Although riches of various kinds were found, the new land did not have the valued spices of the Orient. The search for a sea route to the East led to what is called the Age of Discovery, a time wherein the greatest sea adventures and explorations in history were undertaken. Europeans were eager to try new and faster routes to the spice markets of the Indies. Spices were highly valued because they made the otherwise bland and spoiled food taste better. Spices such as pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, or cloves were like treasures to Europeans. All these products were produced in India, Ceylon, and the Moluccas (known as the Spice Islands).

Because the spice trade could make them wealthy, explorers were motivated to find a faster and cheaper sea route. The European routes were blocked by powerful rivals such as the Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa and later the Turkish merchants of Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). Their ships had control of the eastern Mediterranean where trade with the Arabs abounded. After Vasco da Gama's famous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese had to battle Muslim forces and rival traders to gain a piece of the spice trade. The rulers of Portugal and Spain sought different routes to the Indies. While the Portuguese concentrated their efforts to the south and east, the Spanish sought alternative routes to the west.

On June 7, [1494], the Spanish and the Portuguese signed a treaty to divide the world in two. The dividing line ran through the Atlantic with Spain gaining lands to the west including all the Americas. Brazil was granted to Portugal. The eastern half including Africa and India was given to Portugal. Without accurate measurements of longitude, the question of where the line should be drawn in Asia persisted.

King Manuel I of Portugal sent many fleets to Brazil. One of the officers among the fleets sent out in 1501 was an Italian named Amerigo Vespucci. He was among the first explorers to report that South America was a continent, not an island. An excellent mapmaker, Vespucci sold copies of maps of coastal South America to a German cartographer. When the maps were reproduced, Vespucci was given credit with his name written on the land portion of the map. Misunderstanding the meaning, many thought the land was named "America."
Courtesy - www.mariner.org

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DIVIDING THE WORLD : THE TREATY OF TORDESILLAS

Spain and Portugal led the ocean-going European explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries. Portuguese ships travelled to the southern Atlantic and the African coast while Columbus headed west in Spanish ships in 1492 to find a path to the trade centres of Asia.

The Spanish and Portuguese looked to the Pope, head of the Roman Catholic Church, to legitimate their claims as they expanded their reach. In 1481, a Papal Bull, a special charter, granted the Canary Islands to the Castilians of Spain and rights to Africa for the Portuguese.

When it was revealed that lands lay across the Atlantic (Europeans would soon realize these were the expansive continents of North and South America), disputes arose as to who had rights to these territories. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 split the “New World” between Spain and Portugal. Although very little of the new lands had been seen, lines were slashed across the globe, giving most of North and South America to Spain and the easternmost area of what is now Brazil to Portugal.

The Treaty was sanctioned by a Papal decree, but future bulls moved this meridian back and forth, giving Spain control in Asia and allowing Portuguese expansion in Brazil. The French and the British were restricted from those areas under Papal authority, but they soon disregarded the bulls. Those nations not under the Treaty launched the search for a Northwest Passage, or engaged in piracy, conflict, and trade monopolies in other areas.

The impact of the Treaty of Tordesillas on the Pacific Northwest came centuries later. The Spanish had settlements in Mexico and California, but had not expanded north into the colder regions of the northern Pacific. By the 18th century, the Portuguese were no longer leaders in exploration, but the Russians, British, and French were sending expeditions that threatened what the Spanish still believed to be their rightful territory, granted by the Pope. Spain finally sent vessels to the Pacific Northwest, to areas they had all but ignored for more than 275 years.

Read more on www.beyondthemap.ca

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ARCHEOLOGY - ANCIENT MOSAIC REVEALS ARTISAN'S FOOTPRINTS

2009-10-22T20:00:00.001+02:00

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Foot and sandal prints said to be 1,700 years old have emerged from one of Israel's largest and finest mosaics.

The markings reveal how ancient artisans could have crafted the mosaic during the Roman period.

Spreading over 180 square meters (215 square yards), the mosaic -- apparently the floor of a lavish Roman villa -- was uncovered 13 years ago at Lod, south of Tel Aviv, only three feet under an asphalt road not far from Ben-Gurion Airport.

After a brief display for a single weekend, attracting thousands of visitors, the mosaic was covered until funds could be found to preserve it.

A recent influx of donations has allowed archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority to revisit the colorful scenes of birds, fish, exotic animals and merchant vessels.

Made of millions of small stones, the mosaic is being disassembled in order to transport it to restoration labs.

"Beneath a piece on which vine leaves are depicted, we discovered that the mosaic's builders incised lines that indicate where the tesserae (mosaic tiles) should be set," said Jacques Neguer, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority conservation department. "Afterwards, while cleaning the layer, we found the imprints of feet and sandals."
The petrified sandal prints that accompany the mosaic ranged in size, suggesting that children might have been at the site.
According to Neguer, the concentration of foot and sandal prints indicate that builders packed the mortar in place with their feet.
"The footprints are scientific material to be studied by anthropologists and archaeologists, but for conservators, they are a symbol of continuity," Neguer told Discovery News. "Some 1,700 years ago, the mosaic-makers walked on the same bedding mortar we are working on today."

Read more on dsc.discovery.com

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TED : IDEAS WORTH SPREADING - HENRY MARKRAM (BRAIN & SUPERCOMPUTER)

2009-10-20T20:00:00.000+02:00

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Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved -- soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they're made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain's 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.
About Henry Markram
Henry Markram is director of Blue Brain, a supercomputing project that can model components of the mammalian brain to precise cellular detail -- and simulate their activity in 3D. Soon he'll… Full bio and more links

Talks Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer

Courtesy www.ted.com
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1519/1522 - FERDINAND MAGELLAN AND THE FIRST CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE GLOBE

2009-09-06T08:00:00.005+02:00

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Fernão de Magalhães, was a Portuguese maritime explorer who, while in the service of the Spanish Crown, tried to find a westward route to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. He thereby became the first person to lead an expedition across the Pacific Ocean. This was also the first successful attempt to circumnavigate the Earth in history. Although he did not complete the entire voyage (he was killed during the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines), Magellan had earlier traveled eastward to the Spice Islands, so he became one of the first individuals to cross all of the meridians of the Globe.

Magellan was the first European to enter the Pacific from the eponymous Strait of Magellan, which he discovered. He was also the first European to reach the archipelago of what is now known as the Philippines, which was unknown to the western world before his landing. Arab traders had established commerce within the archipelago centuries earlier.

Courtesy - en.wikipedia.org

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FERDINAND MAGELLAN AND THE FIRST CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE GLOBE

Of the 237 men who set out on five ships to circumnavigate the earth in 1519, only 18 completed the circumnavigation of the globe and managed to return to Spain in 1522. They were led by the Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano, who took over command of the expedition after Magellan's death. Seventeen other men arrived later in Spain, twelve men captured by the Portuguese in Cape Verde some weeks earlier, and between 1525 and 1527 five survivors of the Trinidad.

Origins and first voyage

Magellan, because of his family's heritage, became a page to Queen Leonor at the royal court after the death of his parents during his tenth year. Very little is known about Magellan's background. He was the son of Rui de Magalhães (son of Pedro Afonso de Magalhães and wife Quinta de Sousa) and wife Alda de Mesquita, and brother of Duarte de Sousa, Diogo de Sousa and Isabel de Magalhães, but exactly how he is connected to the respective families it is unknown. He was married to Beatriz Barbosa and had two children: Rodrigo de Magalhães and Carlos de Magalhães, both of whom died at a young age.

Magellan made his first known expedition at sea at the age of 25 in 1505, when he was sent to India to install Francisco de Almeida as the Portuguese viceroy. The voyage gave Magellan his first experience of battle when a local king, who had paid tribute to Vasco da Gama three years earlier, refused to pay tribute to Almeida, which resulted in the Battle of Diu in 1509. After taking leave without permission, Magellan fell out of favour with Almeida and was also accused of trading illegally with the Moors. Several of the accusations were subsequently proved and there were no further offers of employment after May 15, 1514. Later on in 1515, Magellan had an employment offer as a crew member on a Portuguese ship, but rejected this offer.

Circumnavigation and return

The casualties suffered in the Philippines left the expedition with too few men to sail all three of the remaining ships. Consequently, on May 2, they abandoned Concepción and burned the ship. The fleet, reduced to Trinidad and Victoria, fled westward to Palawan. They left that island on June 21, and were guided to Brunei, Borneo by Moro pilots who could navigate the shallow seas. They anchored off the Brunei breakwater for 35 days, where Pigafetta, an Italian from Vicenza, recorded the splendour of Rajah Siripada's court (gold, two pearls the size of hens' eggs, etc.).

In addition, Brunei boasted tame elephants and armament of 62 cannons, more than 5 times the armament of Magellan's ships, and Brunei disdained cloves, which were to prove more valuable than gold, upon the return to Spain. Pigafetta mentions some of the technology of the court, such as porcelain and eyeglasses (both of which were not available or only just becoming available in Europe).

After reaching the Maluku Islands (the Spice Islands) on November 6, 115 crew were left. They managed to trade with the Sultan of Tidore, a rival of the Sultan of Ternate, who was the ally of the Portuguese.

The two remaining ships, laden with valuable spices, attempted to return to Spain by sailing westwards. However, as they left the Spice Islands, the Trinidad began to take on water. The crew tried to discover and repair the leak, but failed. They concluded that Trinidad would need to spend considerable time being overhauled, but the small Victoria was not large enough to accommodate all the surviving crew. As a result, Victoria with some of the crew sailed west for Spain. Several weeks later, Trinidad departed and attempted to return to Spain via the Pacific route. This attempt failed. Trinidad was captured by the Portuguese, and was eventually wrecked in a storm while at anchor under Portuguese control.

One of Magellan's ships circumnavigated the globe, finishing 16 months after the explorer's death.

Victoria set sail via the Indian Ocean route home on December 21, commanded by Juan Sebastián Elcano. By May 6, the Victoria rounded the Cape of Good Hope, with only rice for rations. Twenty crewmen died of starvation before Elcano put into Cape Verde, a Portuguese holding, where he abandoned 13 more crew on July 9 in fear of losing his cargo of 26 tons of spices (cloves and cinnamon).

On September 6, 1522, Elcano and the remaining crew of Magellan's voyage arrived in Spain aboard the last ship in the fleet, Victoria, almost exactly three years after they departed. Magellan had not intended to circumnavigate the world, only to find a secure way through which the Spanish ships could navigate to the Spice Islands; it was Elcano who, after Magellan's death, decided to push westward, thereby completing the first voyage around the entire Earth.

Maximilianus Transylvanus interviewed the surviving members of the expedition when they presented themselves to the Spanish court at Valladolid in the autumn of 1522, and wrote the first account of the voyage, which was published in 1523. The account written by Pigafetta did not appear until 1525, and was not wholly published until 1800. This was the Italian transcription by Carlo Amoretti of what we now call the Ambrosiana codex. The expedition eked out a small profit, but the crew was not paid full wages.

Four crewmen of the original 55 on Trinidad finally returned to Spain in 1525; 51 of them had died in war or from disease. In total, approximately 232 Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, English and German sailors died on the expedition around the world with Magellan.

Read more on en.wikipedia.org

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DEMOGRAPHICS & DOGON PEOPLE FROM REPUBLIC OF MALI

2009-07-07T20:00:00.042+02:00

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Republic of Mali is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with a population of 14.5 million. Its capital is Bamako. Mali consists of eight regions and its borders on the north reach deep into the middle of the Sahara, while the country's southern region, where the majority of inhabitants live, features the Niger and Sénégal rivers. The country's economic structure centers around agriculture and fishing. Some of Mali's natural resources include gold, uranium, and salt.

Present-day Mali was once part of three West African empires that controlled trans-Saharan trade: the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire (from which Mali is named), and the Songhai Empire. In the late 19th century, during the Scramble for Africa, France seized control of Mali making it a part of French Sudan. French Sudan (then known as the Sudanese Republic) gained independence in 1959 with Senegal, as the Mali Federation.

A year later, following Senegal's withdrawal from the federation, the Sudanese Republic declared itself the independent Republic of Mali. After a long period of one-party rule, a 1991 coup led to the writing of a new constitution and the establishment of Mali as a democratic, multi-party state. About half the population live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day.

Courtesy - en.wikipedia.org

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DEMOGRAPHICS OF MALI

In July 2009, Mali's population was an estimated 14.5 million. The population is predominantly rural (68% in 2002), and 5–10% of Malians are nomadic. More than 90% of the population lives in the southern part of the country, especially in Bamako, which has over 1 million residents.

In 2007, about 48% of Malians were less than fifteen years old, 49% were 15–64 years old, and 3% were 65 and older. The median age was 15.9 years. The birth rate in 2007 was 49.6 births per 1,000, and the total fertility rate was 7.4 children per woman. The death rate in 2007 was 16.5 deaths per 1,000. Life expectancy at birth was 49.5 years total (47.6 for males and 51.5 for females). Mali has one of the world's highest rates of infant mortality, with 106 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2007.

Mali’s population encompasses a number of sub-Saharan ethnic groups, most of which have historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious commonalities. The Bambara (Bambara: Bamanankaw) are by far the largest single ethnic group, making up 36.5% of the population. Collectively, the Bambara, Soninké, Khassonké, and Malinké, all part of the broader Mandé group, constitute 50% of Mali's population.

Other significant groups are the Fula (French: Peul; Fula: Fulɓe) (17%), Voltaic (12%), Songhai (6%), and Tuareg and Moor (10%). Mali historically has enjoyed reasonably good inter-ethnic relations; however, some hereditary servitude relationships exist, as do ethnic tensions between the Songhai and the Tuareg. Over the past 40 years, persistent drought has forced many Tuareg to give up their nomadic way of life.

Mali’s official language is French, but numerous (40 or more) African languages also are widely used by the various ethnic groups. About 80% of Mali’s population can communicate in Bambara, which is the country’s principal lingua franca and marketplace language.

DOGON PEOPLE

The Dogon are an ethnic group living in the central plateau region of Mali, south of the Niger bend near the city of Bandiagara in the Mopti region. The population numbers between 400,000 and 800,000 The Dogon are best known for their mythology, their mask dances, wooden sculpture and their architecture. The past century has seen significant changes in the social organization, material culture and beliefs of the Dogon, partly because Dogon country is one of Mali's major tourist attractions.

Geography and history

The principal Dogon area is bisected by the Bandiagara Escarpment, a sandstone cliff of up to 500m (1,640 ft) high, stretching about 150 km (almost 100 miles). To the southeast of the cliff, the sandy Séno-Gondo Plains are found, and northwest of the cliff are the Bandiagara Highlands.

Historically, Dogon villages were established in the Bandiagara area in consequence of the Dogon people's collective refusal to convert to Islam a thousand years ago. Dogon insecurity in the face of these historical pressures caused them to locate their villages in defensible positions along the walls of the escarpment. The other factor influencing their choice of settlement location is water. The Niger River is nearby and in the sandstone rock, a rivulet runs at the foot of the cliff at the lowest point of the area during the wet season.

Among the Dogon several oral traditions have been recorded as to their origin. One relates to their coming from Mande, located to the southwest of the Bandiagara escarpment near Bamako. According to this oral tradition, the first Dogon settlement was established in the extreme southwest of the escarpment at Kani-Na. Over time the Dogon moved north along the escarpment, arriving in the Sanga region in the 15th century.

Other oral histories place the origin of the Dogon to the west beyond the river Niger, or tell of the Dogon coming from the east. It is likely that the Dogon of today combine several groups of diverse origin who migrated to escape Islamization.

Islamic law classified them and many other ethnicities of the region, (Mossi, Gurma, Bobo, Busa and the Yoruba) as being within the dar al-harb and consequently fair game for slave raids organized by merchants, though it is often difficult to distinguish between pre-Muslim practices and later Islamic practice as the growth of cities increased the demand for slaves across the region of West Africa. The historical pattern has included murder of indigenous males by Islamic jihadists and enslavement of women and children.

Read more on en.wikipedia.org

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SPACE SHUTTLE CARRIED BY BOEING 747 - ORBITER 102 AT KENNEDY SPACE CENTER

2009-03-24T20:00:00.002+01:00

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The Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) are two extensively modified Boeing 747 airliners that NASA uses to transport Space Shuttle orbiters. One is a 747-100 model, while the other is a short range 747-100SR.

The SCAs are used to ferry space shuttles from landing sites back to the launch complex at the Kennedy Space Center, or more specifically, the NASA Shuttle Landing Facility, and to and from other locations too distant for the orbiters to be delivered by ground transport. The orbiters are placed on top of the SCAs by Mate-Demate Devices, large gantry-like structures which hoist the orbiters off the ground for post-flight servicing, and then mate them with the SCAs for ferry flights.

In early test flights, the shuttle was released from SCA during flight, and the shuttle glided to a landing under its own control.

Courtesy - en.wikipedia.org
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First Space Shuttle test flight 30 years ago was an American Engineering Triumph

NASA and its industry team celebrated the 25th anniversary of the most challenging test flight in its history. This occasion marks the first development flight of the Space Shuttle on April 12, 1981, a spacecraft that broke from using capsule based designs to the world's first reusable winged spacecraft, and the first spacecraft in history that could carry large satellites to and from orbit.

The Space Shuttle launches like a rocket, maneuvers in Earth orbit like a spacecraft and lands like a glider. Today, the Space Shuttle with its huge 60 by 15 foot payload bay is essential to completing assembly of the International Space Station, and may even service the Hubble Space Telescope one last time before it is retired in 2010.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin calls the Space Shuttle "the most amazing machine humans have ever built, and it has been the recipient of the most brilliant engineering that America can provide."

Rockwell International received the prime contract to develop the fleet of orbiters. Rocketdyne, then a part of Rockwell, received the task of developing the three main engines -- the first reusable liquid fueled rocket engines. In December 1996, Boeing purchased the aerospace and defense units of Rockwell International. Martin Marretta, now Lockheed Martin, built the External Tank, which carried the fuel for the three main shuttle engines. Morton Thiokol, now part of Alliant Techsystems, built the two strap-on solid rocket boosters which produced more than six million pounds of thrust. McDonnell Douglas provided the Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) pods on Columbia.

March 24, 1979 -- Orbiter 102 - Arrival at KSC

The first orbiter built was Enterprise, and although it was never designed to fly into space, it was crucial to the Space Shuttle program. Enterprise, carried aloft on top of a modified Boeing 747, was used in a series of approach and landing tests in 1977. Those early tests proved the orbiter could fly in the atmosphere and land like a glider.

Rockwell was awarded the contract on July 26, 1972 to design and build Columbia, which was rolled out of Air Force Plant 42 at the Palmdale, Calif., assembly facility on March 8, 1979. On Dec. 29, 1980, Columbia, the first of the five operational orbiters, was rolled out to the launch pad for the first time at Kennedy Space Center.

Rockwell built the aft fuselage and crew module at its facility in Downey, Calif. Most of the design work for the orbiter was also done at Downey. "We had a gradual buildup of the workforce. When NASA released the contract for the shuttle, we had to get the facilities ready, and then the people, and before manufacturing even set foot on the floor, we had to get the design out," said Dan Brown, Rockwell's vice president of production operations for the Space Shuttle who was responsible for Downey and Palmdale manufacturing. The manufacturing workforce numbered almost 2,500 employees.

"The design took about 18 months and we subcontracted a lot of the work to outside major vendors," said Brown. Grumman built the wings in New York, General Dynamics built the mid fuselage in San Diego, and Fairchild in New York built the tail. Once the design was finalized, Rockwell took about three years to assemble the orbiter. Once assembly was complete, Rockwell did an integrated checkout before the orbiter was flown on a Boeing 747 to Kennedy Space Center.

Read more on www.boeing.com

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DONALD FAGEN (IGY) - SUN EARTH DAY 2009

2009-03-18T20:00:00.001+01:00

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IGY is featured in a song of the same name, titled in full as "I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year)", on Donald Fagen's 1982 album, The Nightfly. The song also contains a reference to Spandex, which is an anachronism, since the fiber was first invented in 1959.

Today this message is about the International Geophysical & Heliophysical Year which have ended in December 31, 2008 and of course to celebrate the Sun Earth day 2009.

Sun-Earth Day

is a celebration established in 2000 by NASA and ESA. The purpose of the holiday is to popularize the knowledge about the Sun, and the way it influences life on the Earth. It is celebrated mostly in the USA on 18 March. In 2008, however, it took place on 20 March.

Text : John Gregorio

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The International Geophysical Year or IGY

was an international scientific effort that lasted from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958.

The IGY encompassed eleven Earth sciences: aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, gravity, ionospheric physics, longitude and latitude determinations (precision mapping), meteorology, oceanography, seismology and solar activity.

Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union launched artificial satellites for this event; the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1 of October 1957 was the first successful artificial satellite. Other significant achievements of the IGY included the discovery of the Van Allen Belts and the discovery of mid-ocean submarine ridges, an important confirmation of plate tectonics.

Following a suggestion by NAS member Lloyd Berkner, the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) in 1952 proposed a comprehensive series of global geophysical activities to span the period July 1957-December 1958. The International Geophysical Year (IGY), as it was called, was timed to coincide with the high point of the eleven-year cycle of sunspot activity.

In March of 1953, the NAS appointed a US National Committee to oversee US participation in the IGY. The US program included investigations of aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, glaciology, gravity, the ionosphere, determinations of longitude and latitude, meteorology, oceanography, seismology, solar activity, and the upper atmosphere. In connection with upper atmosphere research, the US undertook to develop an orbiting satellite program. It was from the IGY rocket and satellite research that the US developed its space program -- with the advice of the NAS Space Science Board.

The International Geophysical Year collection contains correspondence, reports, meeting minutes, photographs, and other records documenting the programs and activities of the US National Committee for the IGY. The collection covers the years 1953-1962 and spans approximately 152 linear feet. The historical records of the IGY can be found in the Archives of the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council; e-mail archives@nas.edu for further information.
Read more on www.history.nasa.gov

Objectives of IHY
The IHY has three primary objectives:
Advancing our Understanding of the Heliophysical Processes that Govern the Sun, Earth and Heliosphere
Continuing the tradition of international research and advancing the legacy on the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year
Demonstrating the Beauty, Relevance and Significance of Space and Earth Science to the World

The International Heliophysical Year or IHY

is a UN-sponsored but scientifically driven international program of scientific collaboration to understand external drivers of planetary environments and universal processes in solar-terrestrial-planetary-heliospheric physics. The IHY will focus on advancements in all aspects of the heliosphere and its interaction with the interstellar medium. This effort will culminate in the "International Heliophysical Year" (IHY) in 2007-2008.

The term "Heliophysical" was coined to refer specifically to this activity of studying the interconnectedness of the entire solar-heliospheric-planetary system. It is a broadening of the concept "geophysical," extending the connections from the Earth to the Sun & interplanetary space. On the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year, the 2007 IHY activities will build on the success of IGY 1957 by continuing its legacy of system-sides studies of the extended heliophysical domain.

The IHY 2007 has been planned to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957-1958, one of the most successful international science programs of all time. The IGY was a broad-based and all-encompassing effort to push the frontiers of geophysics and resulted in tremendous progress in space physics, Sun-Earth connections, planetary science and the heliosphere in general. The tradition of international science years began almost 125 years ago with the first International Polar Year and international scientific studies of global processes at the North Pole in 1882-1883. The IHY has received substantial support from the United Nations, and various space agencies around the world.

Read more on en.wikipedia.org

ATLAS ROCKET LAUNCHER PROGRAM - MILITARY SATELLITE COMMUNICATION (1958/2008)

2008-08-28T20:00:00.024+02:00

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The SM-65 Atlas was a U.S. missile designed by the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division and built by the Convair Division of General Dynamics. It was the first American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of boosting a nuclear warhead to any target on Earth.

After its military use ended in 1965, the Atlas became the foundation for a family of successful space launch vehicles now built by United Launch Alliance. The Atlas rocket family is today used as a launch platform for commercial and military satellites, and other space vehicles.

The first Atlas to be flown was the Atlas A in 1957–1958. It was a test model designed to verify the structure and propulsion system, and had no sustainer engine or separable stages. This was followed by the Atlas B and C in 1958–1959.

The B had a full three engines and staging capability, as well as a true guidance system. An Atlas B was used to orbit the SCORE satellite in December 1958, which was the Atlas' first space launch. The C was a slightly more developed model. Finally, the Atlas D, the first operational model and the basis for all Atlas space launchers, debuted in 1959. The final variants of the Atlas ICBM were the E and F, introduced in 1960–1961.

Looking Back on 50 Years of Spaceflight

IMAGES: 20 Great Rocket Launches

All About Satellite

Atlas Rocket Team Ready for Satellite Launch

The Atlas rocket program looks to return to its successful ways, launching a powerful U.S. military communications satellite with a tried-and-true engine valve instead of a newer design blamed for creating serious problems during the last ascent four months ago.

Atlas enjoyed a spotless 14-year consecutive success record covering 80 flights, but that score card was hit with a major blemish when a leaky fuel valve caused an Atlas 5 rocket to fall short of its intended altitude.

A pair of classified U.S. national security spacecraft deployed from the rocket's Centaur upper stage into a lower-than-planned orbit that day. Government officials said afterward, in essence, that the launch wasn't perfect but it wasn't a complete failure either.

Throughout the summer, sky-watching hobbyists who routinely track all sorts of satellites reported the secret duo from the botched launch were gradually boosting themselves higher and higher. Ted Molczan, a respected satellite observer, says the craft have made up about half the distance toward the expected launch altitude so far.

Source : Justin Ray - October 9, 2007

Courtesy - www.space.com

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A History of U.S. Military Satellite Communication Systems

One day, the Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote, "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." But how are U.S. soldiers, operating covertly in unfamiliar and hostile territory, to know where their allies are, where their enemies are, and what each is doing? How are they to receive commands and report status? The answer is satellite communications.

Satellite communication has been a vital part of the United States military throughout the space age, beginning in 1946, when the Army achieved radar contact with the moon. In 1954, the Navy began communications experiments using the moon as a reflector, and by 1959, it had established an operational communication link between Hawaii and Washington, D.C.

As the U.S. space program grew in the 1960s, the Department of Defense (DOD) began developing satellite communication systems that would address the special requirements of military operations. In addition to protection against jamming, these needs included the flexibility to rapidly extend service to new regions of the globe and to reallocate system capacity as needed.

The goal of these systems has been to provide communications between, and to supply information to, military units in situations where terrestrial means of communication are impossible, unreliable, or unavailable. This goal was partly realized with the earliest DOD communication satellites, and as satellite and communications technology has improved, the goal has been realized to a much greater extent.

Early DOD satellite communication experiments led to initial operational systems, which evolved to a complete military satellite communications (milsatcom) architecture encompassing DOD's unique requirements. Within this milsatcom architecture, different systems were developed for three broad populations of users: wideband, tactical, and protected. Each is characterized by its own satellite designs, Earth terminals, and applications.

The Aerospace Corporation has been a key player throughout this history. From the early days of the space age, the company has taken a significant role in the development and deployment of military communication satellites. Aerospace participates in all planning efforts for these satellite systems, including studies of requirements, surveys of current and projected technologies, and analyses of multiple alternatives to satisfy requirements (see Milsatcom Timeline).

Aerospace assists DOD in the definition of technical requirements for satellite systems. As satellite hardware is designed, built, and tested, Aerospace reviews the designs, analyses, and test plans; observes testing; and studies test results. It also assists with launch preparations and support of on-orbit operations.

The First Satellite Communication Programs

The first U.S. military communication satellites were of an experimental nature and used low-altitude orbits. They were developed to provide basic experience with satellites and to explore what satellite communications could do. Later systems would see actual military field use.

SCORE : The first artificial communication satellite, Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment), was launched in 1958, primarily to show that an Atlas missile could be put into orbit. The secondary objective was to demonstrate a communications repeater built into the missile. A repeater receives a signal, amplifies it, and then retransmits it.

The Army Signal Research and Development Laboratory created the repeater by modifying commercial equipment. Two redundant sets of equipment were mounted in the nose of the SCORE missile. Four antennas were mounted flush with the missile surface, two for transmission and two for reception.

SCORE's other equipment included two tape recorders, each with a four-minute capacity. Any of four ground stations in the southern United States could command the satellite into playback mode to transmit the stored message or into record mode to receive and store a new message. One was a Christmas message from President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Source : Donald H. Martin

Read more on www.aero.org

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INTERSTELLAR SPACE TRAVEL FASTER THAN LIGHT TROUGH THE MILKY WAY

2008-08-08T20:00:00.071+02:00

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FTL (faster than light) space travel is possible on BBC News James Wilkinson report, September 1995, on wormholes and warp engines.

Between 1924 and 1927, the physicists Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Dirac had all but written the last pages of the modern theory of atomic structure based on quantum mechanics. The Bohr-Sommerfield 'planetary' atom though conceptually simple was, nevertheless, invalid so that there was no longer a basis for thinking that electrons were miniature planets by this time. Yet SF based on this curious principle of 'worlds within worlds' persisted even as late as 1949 in Stan Raycraft's Pillars of Delight and in He Who Shrank.

With the establishment of the principles of quantum mechanics there came a minor resurgence of interest in the tantalizing properties of the atomic world. In James Blish's story Nor Iron Bars (1956).

By some unknown, accidental means, the 'Haertel Overdrive' endowed the ship 'Flyway II' with negative mass. The ship was promptly ejected from normal space and took up residence within an atom.

Presumably, this was the only place in the universe where negative mass could exist. In many ways this idea resembles the old Aristotlean notion that matter has an innate sense of its proper place in the universe, and like a stone falling to the ground, will seek out its natural resting-place. The ship could not logically exist in our universe, so it found a place where it could.

The captain also sets foot on the surface of an electron described as "... a swirling, opalescent substance...covered with fine detail and rills rather like mercury...Its boundary trailing off into space indistinctly [since] the electron never knows exactly where it is..." The electron was clearly assumed to have a finite size, though in deference to quantum mechanics, there was a haziness about its boundary.

Who Invented Faster than Light Travel ? by Sten Odenwald - Copyright 1995

Courtesy - www.astronomycafe.net

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Interstellar space travel

is manned or unmanned travel between stars. The concept of interstellar travel in starships is a staple of science fiction. The concept of interstellar travel proves especially difficult, greater than that of interplanetary travel. Intergalactic travel, or travel between different galaxies, is even more difficult.

Many scientific papers have been published about related concepts. Given sufficient travel time and engineering work, both unmanned and generational interstellar travel seem possible, though both present considerable technological and economic challenges unlikely to be met in the near future, particularly for manned probes. NASA, ESA and other space agencies have been engaging in research into these topics for several years, and have accumulated a number of theoretical approaches.

Faster-than-light travel: Warped spacetime, Wormholes

Scientists and authors have postulated a number of ways by which it might be possible to surpass the speed of light. Even the most serious-minded of these are speculative.

According to Einstein's equation of General Relativity, spacetime is curved:

General relativity may permit the travel of an object faster than light in curved spacetime. One could imagine exploiting the curvature to take a "shortcut" from one point to another. This is one form of the Warp Drive concept.

In physics, the Alcubierre drive is based on an argument that the curvature could take the form of a wave in which a spaceship might be carried in a "bubble". Space would be collapsing at one end of the bubble and expanding at the other end. The motion of the wave would carry a spaceship from one space point to another in less time than light would take through unwarped space. Nevertheless, the spaceship would not be moving faster than light within the bubble. This concept would require the spaceship to incorporate a region of exotic matter, or "negative mass".

Wormholes are conjectural distortions in space-time that theorists postulate could connect two arbitrary points in the universe, across an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. It is not known whether wormholes are possible in practice. Although there are solutions to the Einstein equation of general relativity which allow for wormholes, all of the currently known solutions involve some assumption, for example the existence of negative mass, which may be unphysical. However, Cramer et al. argue that such wormholes might have been created in the early universe, stabilized by cosmic string. The general theory of wormholes is discussed by Visser in the book Lorentzian Wormholes.

NASA research

The NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program (terminated in FY 2003 after 6-year, $1.2 million study, as "No breakthroughs appear imminent.") identified some breakthroughs which are needed for interstellar travel to be possible.

Geoffrey A. Landis of NASA's Glenn Research Center states that a laser-powered interstellar sail ship could possibly be launched within 50 years, using new methods of space travel. "I think that ultimately we're going to do it, it's just a question of when and who," Landis said in an interview. Rockets are too slow to send humans on interstellar missions. Instead, he envisions interstellar craft with extensive sails, propelled by laser light to about one-tenth the speed of light. It would take such a ship about 43 years to reach Alpha Centauri, if it passed through the system. Slowing down to stop at Alpha Centauri could increase the trip to 100 years.

Read more on http://Interstellar_travel

Artist's depiction of a hypothetical Wormhole Induction Propelled Spacecraft, based loosely on the 1994 "warp drive" paper of Miguel Alcubierre. Credit: NASA CD-98-76634 by Les Bossinas.

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ULYSSES - END OF NASA / ESA MISSION AFTER 17 YEARS IN SOLAR SYSTEM

2008-07-01T20:00:00.004+02:00

Hi Passengers!

Ulysses, the mission to study the Sun's poles and the influence of our star on surrounding space is coming to an end. After more than 17 years in space - almost four times its expected lifetime - the mission is finally succumbing to its harsh environment and is likely to finish sometime in the next month or two.

Ulysses is a joint mission between ESA and NASA. It was launched in 1990 from a space shuttle and was the first mission to study the environment of space above and below the poles of the Sun. The reams of data Ulysses has returned have forever changed the way scientists view the Sun and its effect on the space surrounding it.

Ulysses is in a six-year orbit around the Sun. Its long path through space carries it out to Jupiter’s orbit and back again. The further it ventures from the Sun, the colder the spacecraft becomes. If it drops to 2ºC, the spacecraft's hydrazine fuel will freeze.

This has not been a problem in the past because Ulysses carries heaters to maintain a workable on-board temperature. The spacecraft is powered by the decay of a radioactive isotope and over the 17-plus years, the power it has been supplying has been steadily dropping. Now, the spacecraft no longer has enough power to run all of its communications, heating and scientific equipment simultaneously.

"We expect certain parts of the spacecraft to reach 2ºC pretty soon," says Richard Marsden, ESA’s Ulysses Project Scientist and Mission Manager. This will block the fuel pipes, making the spacecraft impossible to manoeuvre.

In an attempt to solve this problem, the ESA-NASA project team approved a plan to temporarily shut off the main spacecraft transmitter. This would release 60 watts of power that could be channelled to the science instruments and the heater. When data was to be transmitted back to Earth, the team planned to turn the transmitter back on. Unfortunately, during the first test of this method in January, the power supply to the radio transmitter failed to turn back on.

"The decision to switch the transmitter off was not taken lightly. It was the only way to continue the science mission," says Marsden, who is a 30-year veteran of the project, having worked on it for 12 years before the spacecraft was launched.

After many attempts, the Ulysses project team now consider it highly unlikely that the X-band transmitter will be recovered. They believe the fault can be traced to the power supply, meaning that the extra energy they hoped to gain cannot be routed to the heater and science instruments after all.

So, the spacecraft has lost its ability to send large quantities of scientific data back to Earth and is facing the gradual freezing of its fuel lines. This spells the end of this highly successful mission. "Ulysses is a terrific old workhorse. It has produced great science and lasted much longer than we ever thought it would," says Marsden. "This was going to happen in the next year or two, it has just taken place a little sooner than we hoped."

The team plan to continue operating the spacecraft in its reduced capacity for as long as they can over the next few weeks. "We will squeeze the very last drops of science out of it," says Marsden.

Courtesy - ulysses-ops.jpl.esa.int

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Ulysses Communication Anomaly
Early on 15 January, at the start of a routine test in preparation for the next phase of the Ulysses mission, communication with the spacecraft via the onboard X-band transmitter was lost. As a result, the Spacecraft Operations Team declared a Spacecraft Emergency in order to obtain additional ground station coverage from NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN).

The team was then able to send the commands needed to switch to the S-band transmitter, and establish stable communications, albeit at a low bit rate. Subsequently, the bit rate was increased to 1024 bps using a 70m DSN station and the data recorded onboard the spacecraft during the anomaly could be played back.

Since the spacecraft is in a very stable configuration and there are no power or thermal concerns, the Ulysses Project ended the Spacecraft Emergency status late on 16 January and Ulysses is now in "Safing Mode". Analysis of the problem with the X-band transmitter is on-going.
Scientific Goals

Ulysses Mission during the period 1995 to 2004
During solar maximum, the conditions encountered by Ulysses were expected to be dramatically different, especially in the polar regions, from those during the "Solar Minimum Mission". This was indeed the case. The polar cap magnetic fields were in the process of vanishing and then reversing polarity. The Heliospheric Current Sheet (HCS), which had a low inclination at solar minimum, was highly inclined.

This complex and dynamic field topology had important consequences for the solar wind, solar energetic particles and cosmic rays. Some of the basic questions to be answered in this phase of the mission included:

Where do the heliospheric magnetic fields and solar wind originate?

Are the large-scale properties of the solar wind, particularly the speed and density, still correlated with distance to the current sheet?

What will be the magnetic topology of CMEs encountered at high latitude?

The solar wind, being closely coupled to coronal magnetic fields, is also expected to undergo drastic changes. CMEs are expected to dominate corotating structure even at high latitudes. Will the flow from the polar caps be correspondingly irregular?

Will shocks be present?

Will high speed streams still originate from coronal holes?
Galactic cosmic rays will be strongly modulated. How will their properties (e.g. intensity) differ from the poles to the equator?

Will it be possible to determine the relative importance of drifts and merged interaction regions in the modulation process?

What role does the HCS (or sheets) play?

Can the anomalous cosmic ray component penetrate into the polar regions?

At lower energies, the properties of solar energetic particles will probably be very different. The increased solar activity will ensure a large number of flares, including some that are very intense. Will particles accelerated in flares or CME shocks be detected at high latitudes?

Will evidence for local acceleration at transient shocks be found in the polar regions?

The above list of questions is clearly not exhaustive. Answers to many of them were obtained, at least partially. And, as might be expected, new puzzles were found. Nevertheless, the Ulysses "Solar Maximum Mission" constituted an effectively new mission with unique scientific goals that could not be addressed by any other project.

Furthermore, the possibility of continuous measurements of all the key properties of the solar wind and other heliospheric phenomena over an extended period using the same set of instruments is an added bonus of considerable value. The current phase of the mission, leading to a second "encounter" with Jupiter in February, 2004, has its own unique aspects, related in particular to the reversed polarity of the global heliospheric magnetic field.
Read more on ulysses-ops.jpl.esa.int

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- 6000 BC - THE CIVILIZATION OF SUMER

2008-02-13T20:00:00.001+01:00

Hi Passengers !

They are the architects of greatness. Their vision lies within their souls. They never see the mirages of Fact, but peer beyond the veils and mists of doubt and pierce the walls of unborn Time. Makers of empire, they have fought for bigger things than crowns and higher
seats than thrones.

They are the Argonauts, the seekers of the priceless fleece--The Truth. Through all the ages they have heard the voice of destiny call to them from the unknown vasts.

Their brains have wrought all human miracles. In lace of stone their spires stab the Old World's skies and with their golden crosses kiss the sun.

They are the chosen few…the blazers of the way, who never wear a doubt's bandage on their eyes…who starve and chill and hurt, but hold to courage and to hope, because they know that there is always proof of truth for them who try--that only cowardice and lack of faith can keep the seeker from his chosen goal, but if his heart be strong and if he dream enough and dream it hard enough, he can attain, no matter
where men failed before.

Walls crumble and the empires fall. The tidal wave sweeps from the sea and tears a fortress from its rocks. The rotting nations drop off Time's bough, and only things the dreamers make live on.

They are the Eternal Conquerors their vassals are the years.
Courtesy - www.strayreality.com
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THE CIVILIZATION OF SUMER

Sumer was a civilization and a historical region located in southern Iraq (Mesopotamia), known as the Cradle of civilization. It lasted from the first settlement of Eridu in the Ubaid period (late 6th millennium BC) through the Uruk period (4th millennium BC) and the Dynastic periods (3rd millennium BC) until the rise of Babylon in the early 2nd millennium BC. The term "Sumerian" applies to all speakers of the Sumerian language.

Although other cities pre-date Sumer (Jericho, Çatalhöyük and others, either for seasonal protection, or as year-round trading posts) the cities of Sumer were the first to practice intensive, year-round agriculture (from ca. 5300 BC). The surplus of storable food created by this economy allowed the population to settle in one place instead of migrating after crops and grazing land. It also allowed for a much greater population density, and in turn required an extensive labor force and division of labor. This organization led to the necessity of record keeping and the development of writing (ca. 3500 BC).

Origin of name

The term "Sumerian" is the common name given to the ancient inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia by their successors, the Semitic Akkadians. The Sumerians called themselves sag-giga, literally meaning "the black-headed people". The Akkadian word Shumer may represent this name in dialect, but it is unknown why the Akkadians called the southern land Shumeru. Biblical Shinar, Egyptian Sngr and Hittite Šanhar(a) could be western variants of Šumer. According to Babylonian historian Berossus, the Sumerians were "black-faced foreigners". Sumer also built ziggurats, temples used for worshiping kings.

Population

The Sumerians were a non-Semitic people and were at one time believed to have been invaders, as a number of linguists believed they could detect a substrate language beneath Sumerian. However, the archaeological record shows clear uninterrupted cultural continuity from the time of the Early Ubaid period (5300 – 4700 BC C-14) settlements in southern Mesopotamia. The Sumerian people who settled here farmed the lands in this region that were made fertile by silt deposited by the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.

Despite the lack of corroborating written records, it is generally agreed that Sumerian speakers were farmers who moved down from the north, after perfecting irrigation agriculture there. The Ubaid pottery of southern Mesopotamia has been connected via Choga Mami Transitional ware to the pottery of the Samarra period culture (c. 5700 – 4900 BC C-14) in the north, who were the first to practice a primitive form of irrigation agriculture along the middle Tigris River and its tributaries.

The connection is most clearly seen at Tell Awayli (Oueilli, Oueili) near Larsa, excavated by the French in the 1980s, where 8 levels yielded pre-Ubaid pottery resembling Samarran ware. Farming peoples spread down into southern Mesopotamia because they had developed a temple-centered social organization for mobilizing labor and technology for water control, enabling them to survive and prosper in a difficult environment.

Alternatively, the Sumerians may have been an indigenous culture of hunter-fishers who lived in the reedy marshlands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, as the Marsh Arabs do today. This culture contributed to a cultural fusion with northern agriculturists, creating Sumerian language and civilisation.

Language and writing

The most important archaeological discoveries in Sumer are a large number of tablets written in Sumerian. Sumerian pre-cuneiform script has been discovered on tablets dating to around 3500 BC.

The Sumerian language is generally regarded as a language isolate in linguistics because it belongs to no known language family; Akkadian belongs to the Afro-Asiatic languages. There have been many failed attempts to connect Sumerian to other language groups. It is an agglutinative language; in other words, morphemes ("units of meaning") are added together to create words, unlike analytic languages where morphemes are purely added together to create sentences.

Sumerians invented picture-hieroglyphs that developed into later cuneiform, and their language vies with Ancient Egyptian for credit as the oldest known written human language. An extremely large body of hundreds of thousands of texts in the Sumerian language has survived, the great majority of these on clay tablets. Known Sumerian texts include personal and business letters and transactions, receipts, lexical lists, laws, hymns and prayers, magical incantations, and scientific texts including mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.

Monumental inscriptions and texts on different objects like statues or bricks are also very common. Many texts survive in multiple copies because they were repeatedly transcribed by scribes-in-training. Sumerian continued to be the language of religion and law in Mesopotamia long after Semitic speakers had become the ruling race.

Understanding Sumerian texts today can be problematic even for experts. Most difficult are the earliest texts, which in many cases don't give the full grammatical structure of the language.

Read more on en.wikipedia.org

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CARL SAGAN (1934 / 1996) - TRIBUTE IN 45 IMAGES

2007-12-20T20:00:00.001+01:00

Hi Passengers !

Carl Edward Sagan, Ph.D. was an American astronomer, astrochemist, author, and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

He is world-famous for writing popular science books and for co-writing and presenting the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which has been seen by more than 600 million people in over 60 countries, making it the most widely watched PBS program in history.

A book to accompany the program was also published. He also wrote the novel Contact, the basis for the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film of the same name starring Jodie Foster. During his lifetime, Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books. In his works, he frequently advocated skeptical inquiry, secular humanism, and the scientific method.

Courtesy - www.carlsagan.com

Discover now some information about Carl Sagan with the following numeric report made by Universum Observatorium on WEB 2.0 - Carpe diem passengers - GEO 66

The Carl Sagan Portal
Carl Sagan at the Internet Movie Database
Can We Know the Universe? – 1979 essay by Carl Sagan, taken from his book Broca's Brain
Talk of the Nation – Ira Flatow interviews Sagan on his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (May 3, 1996)
Skeptical Inquirer: Carl Sagan's Life & Legacy (Jan./Feb. 2007)
We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot – A short film narrated by Carl Sagan (40 min extended version)
Carl Sagan Charlie Rose interviews
Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization
Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Science, presented by the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences (AAS/DPS)
Cosmos Magazine, an Australian popular science magazine inspired by Carl Sagan and launched in June 2005
Works by or about Carl Sagan in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Carl Sagan at Find A Grave

CARL SAGAN (9 November 1934 / 20 December 1996)

Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Russian Jewish family. His father, Sam Sagan, was a Russian immigrant garment worker; his mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, "the mother she never knew", in Sagan's words. Sagan graduated from Rahway High School in Rahway, New Jersey in 1951.

He attended the University of Chicago, where he participated in the Ryerson Astronomical Society, received an A.B. with general and special honors (1954), an S.B. (1955) and an S.M. (1956) in physics, before earning a Ph.D. degree (1960) in astronomy and astrophysics.

Upon graduation, he had a thoroughly proper yet engaging and light-hearted graduation party, with numerous family members and close friends. "It was a true delight," he said at the time. During his time as an undergraduate, Sagan spent some time working in the laboratory of the geneticist H. J. Muller. From 1960 to 1962 he was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1962 to 1968, he worked at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sagan lectured and did research annually at Harvard University until 1968, when he moved to Cornell University in New York State. He became a full Professor at Cornell in 1971, and he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies there. From 1972 to 1981, Sagan was the Associate Director of the Center for Radio Physics and Space Research at Cornell.

Sagan was a scientist connected with the American space program since its inception. From the 1950s onward, he worked as an adviser to NASA. One of his many duties during his tenure at the space agency included briefing the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon. Sagan contributed to many of the robotic spacecraft missions that explored the solar system during his lifetime, arranging experiments on many of the expeditions.

He conceived the idea of adding an unalterable and universal message on spacecraft destined to leave the solar system that could be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find it. Sagan assembled the first physical message that was sent into space: a gold-anodized plaque, attached to the space probe Pioneer 10, launched in 1972. Pioneer 11, also carrying another copy of the plaque, was launched the following year.

He continued to refine his designs throughout his lifetime; the most elaborate message he helped to develop and assemble was the Voyager Golden Record that was sent out with the Voyager space probes in 1977. Sagan often challenged the decisions to fund the Space Shuttle and Space Station at the expense of other robotic missions.

At Cornell University, Sagan taught a course on critical thinking until his death in 1996 from a rare bone marrow disease. The course had only a limited number of seats. Although hundreds of students applied each year, only about 20 were chosen to attend each semester. The course was discontinued immediately after Sagan's death, but it was resumed by Dr. Yervant Terzian in 2000.
Personal life and beliefs
In 1966, Sagan was asked to contribute an interview about the possibility of extraterrestrials to a proposed introduction to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sagan allegedly responded by saying that he wanted editorial control and a percentage of the film's box office receipts. These terms were rejected.

Sagan wrote frequently about religion and the relationship between religion and science, expressing his skepticism about the conventional conceptualization of God as a sapient being. Sagan once stated, for instance, that "The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous.

But if by 'God' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying ... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity." Sagan is also widely regarded as a freethinker or skeptic; one of his most famous quotations, in Cosmos, was, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." (This was actually based on a nearly identical earlier quote by fellow CSICOP founder Marcello Truzzi, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.") The quote is also known, under different wording, as the principle of Laplace—attributed to Pierre-Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), a French mathematician and astronomer: "The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness."

Sagan was, however, not an atheist, expressing that, "An atheist has to know a lot more than I know." In reply to a direct question in 1996 about his religious beliefs, "Sagan gave a direct answer: 'I'm agnostic.'"

Sagan married three times: to biologist Lynn Margulis, mother of Dorion Sagan and Jeremy Sagan, in 1957; to artist Linda Salzman, mother of Nick Sagan, in 1968; and to author Ann Druyan, mother of Alexandra Rachel (Sasha) and Samuel Democritus (Sam), in 1981. His marriage to Druyan continued until his death in 1996.

Isaac Asimov described Sagan as one of only two people he ever met who were smarter than Asimov himself. The other was the computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky.

Sagan was a user of marijuana. Under the pseudonym "Mr. X", he wrote an essay concerning cannabis smoking in the 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered, written by Sagan's close friend Lester Grinspoon. In his essay, Sagan wrote how marijuana use had helped to inspire some of his works and enhance sensual and intellectual experiences. After Sagan's death, Grinspoon disclosed this to Sagan's biographer, Keay Davidson. The publishing of this biography, Carl Sagan: A Life, in 1999, brought much media attention to the issue of the use and legalization of marijuana.

Sagan warned against human beings' tendency for anthropocentrism, and was the faculty adviser for the Cornell Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In the COSMOS chapter "Blues For a Red Planet" Sagan states, "If there is life on Mars, then I believe we should do nothing to disturb that life. Mars, then, belongs to the Martians, even if they are microbes."

Death

After a long and difficult fight with myelodysplasia, which included three bone marrow transplants, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62 at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, on December 20, 1996. He was buried at Lakeview Cemetery in Ithaca, New York.

Read more on en.wikipedia.org

Stone dedicated to Carl Sagan in the Celebrity Path of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

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DEMOGRAPHICS & GYPSY PEOPLE FROM ROMANIA

2007-07-07T20:00:00.060+02:00

Hi Passengers !

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea. Romania shares a border with Hungary and Serbia to the west, Ukraine and Moldova to the northeast and east, and Bulgaria to the south.

At 238,391 square kilometers (92,043 sq mi), Romania is the ninth largest country of the European Union by area, and has the seventh largest population of the European Union with 21.5 million people. Its capital and largest city is Bucharest, the sixth largest city in the EU with about two million people.

The Kingdom of Romania emerged when the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were united under Prince Alexander John Cuza in 1859. Independence from the Ottoman Empire was declared on May 9, 1877, and was internationally recognized the following year. At the end of World War I, Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia united with the Kingdom of Romania. Greater Romania emerged into an era of progression and prosperity that would continue until World War II. By the end of the War, many north-eastern areas of Romania's territories were occupied by the Soviet Union, and Romania forcibly became a socialist republic and a member of the Warsaw Pact.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the 1989 Revolution, Romania began to transition towards democracy and a capitalist market economy. After a decade of post-revolution economic problems, extensive reforms fostered economic recovery and the country joined the European Union on 1 January 2007. Romania is now an upper middle-income country with high human development and relatively high standards of living.

Romania joined NATO on 29 March 2004, and is also a member of the Latin Union, of the Francophonie, of the OSCE and of the United Nations, as well as an associate member of the CPLP. Today, Romania is a unitary semi-presidential republic, in which the executive branch consists of the President and the Government.

Courtesy - en.wikipedia.org

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DEMOGRAPHICS OF ROMANIA

In 2002, Romania had a population of 21,698,181. Like other countries in the region, its population is expected to gradually decline in the coming years as a result of sub-replacement fertility rates. Romanians make up 89.5% of the population. The largest ethnic minorities are the Hungarians, who make up 6.6% of the population and Gypsies, who make up 2.46% of the population.

Hungarians constitute a majority in the counties of Harghita and Covasna. Ukrainians, Germans, Lipovans, Turks, Tatars, Serbs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Greeks, Russians, Jews, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Armenians, as well as other ethnic groups, account for the remaining 1.4% of the population.

In 1930, there were 745,421 Germans in Romania, but only about 60,000 remain today. In 1924, there were 796,056 Jews in the Kingdom of Romania. The number of Romanians and individuals with ancestors born in Romania living abroad is estimated at around 12 million.

The fertility rate is decreasing, with 1.4 births per woman. The birth rate (10.61‰, 2008) is slightly lower than mortality rate (11.84‰, 2008), so that natural increase is negative (-0.125%), resulting in a shrinking and aging population.

GYPSY PEOPLE (ROMANI)

The Romani (also Romany, Romanies, Romanis, Roma or Roms; exonym: Gypsy; Romani: Romane or Rromane, depending on the dialect) are an ethnic group living mostly in Europe, who trace their origins to the Indian Subcontinent.

The Romani are widely dispersed, with their largest concentrated populations in Europe, especially the Roma of Central and Eastern Europe and Anatolia, followed by the Iberian Kale in Southwestern Europe and Southern France. Deported to Brazil by Portugal during the colonial era and via more recent migrations, some people have gone to the Americas and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the world.

The Romani language is divided into several dialects, which add up to an estimated number of speakers larger than two million. The total number of Romani people is at least twice as large (several times as large according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of the language current in their country of residence, or of mixed languages combining the two.

Gypsy

The English term Gypsy (or Gipsy) originates from the Greek word for "Egyptian", in the belief that the Romanies, or some other Gypsy groups (such as the Balkan Egyptians), originated in Egypt, and in one narrative were exiled as punishment for allegedly harbouring the infant Jesus. This exonym is sometimes written with capital letter, to show that it designates an ethnic group. The term 'gypsy' appears when international research programmes, documents and policies on the community are referred to. However, as a term 'gypsy' is considered derogatory by many members of the Roma community because of negative and stereotypical associations with the term.

As described in Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the medieval French referred to the Romanies as egyptiens. The term has come to bear pejorative connotations. The word Gypsy in English has become so pervasive that many Romani organizations use it in their own organizational names.

In North America, the word gypsy is commonly used as a reference to lifestyle or fashion, and not to the Romani ethnicity. The Spanish term gitano and the French term gitan may have the same origin as a reference to Egypt.

Read more on en.wikipedia.org

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FIRST IMAGES OF AN ELECTRON

2007-05-30T20:00:00.004+02:00

Hi Passengers !

Using pulses of high-intensity sound, two Brown University physicists have succeeded in making a movie showing the motion of a single electron.

Humphrey Maris, a physics professor at Brown University, and Wei Guo, a Brown doctoral student, were able to film the electron as it moved through a container of superfluid helium.

Home Movies of Atomic Size

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University]

www.brown.edu

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Researchers Catch Motion of a Single Electron on Video

To observe the motion of an electron – an elementary particle with a mass that is one billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a gram – has been considered to be impossible. So when two Brown University physicists showed movies of electrons moving through liquid helium at the 2006 International Symposium on Quantum Fluids and Solids in Kyoto, they raised some eyebrows.

The images, which were published online on May 31, 2007, in the Journal of Low Temperature Physics, show scattered points of light moving down the screen – some in straight lines, some following a snakelike path. The Matrix it’s not. Still, the fact that they can be seen at all is astounding. “We were astonished when we first saw an electron moving across the screen,” said Humphrey Maris, a professor of physics at Brown University. “Once we had the idea, setting it up was surprisingly easy.”

Maris and Wei Guo, a doctoral student, took advantage of the bubbles that form around electrons in supercold liquid helium. Using sound waves to expand the bubbles and a coordinated strobe light to illuminate them, Guo was able to catch their movements on a home video camera.

A free electron repels the atoms that surround it, creating a small space, or bubble, around itself. In conventional liquids, the bubble shrinks to nothing because the surface tension of the liquid works against the repulsive force. Superfluid helium has very little surface tension, so the bubble can become much larger. The two opposing forces balance when the diameter of the bubble is about 40 angstroms – still far to tiny to see.

The researchers used a planar transducer – basically, a loudspeaker that produces flat, not focused, sound waves – to pummel the whole volume of liquid helium with sound. As each wave overtook an electron bubble, it alternately increased and decreased the surrounding pressure. Under negative pressure, the bubbles expanded to about eight microns, the size of a small speck of dust, then shrank again as the next wave of high pressure washed over them. A strobe light, synchronized to the sound pulse, illuminated the bubbles without overheating the chamber.

Running a camcorder in “super night mode,” Guo and Maris were able to record the approximately 2,000 photons they estimate were scattered by the expanded bubbles, producing a series of electron-bubble images on each frame of videotape.

“The results are very original and really spectacular,” said Sébastien Balibar, research director for physics at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, “imaging single vortices of atomic size with a sound wave is an astonishing achievement.”

To be sure they were seeing electron bubbles and not just trapped dust, the researchers gradually increased the power to the transducer. They detected no points of light at low power and then a rapid increase in the appearance of bubbles at a particular voltage, just as their calculations predicted. Dust particles would exhibit no such threshold.

The researchers had planned to introduce streams of electrons into the chamber from a radioactive source, but found that even without a source, a number of electrons could be seen moving through the chamber. Most traveled in a fairly straight line leading away from the transducer, which produces a flow of heat down through the liquid.

A few of the electrons, however, followed a distinctly different snakelike path. Maris and Guo hypothesize that those electrons are following the lines of superfluid vortices – a phenomenon akin to a tornado in which the liquid spins at high velocity around a line. “The vortex is like a piece of string running through the liquid,” said Maris. “The electron bubble is attracted to the core of the vortex and gets attached to it. It’s as though it’s sliding down this rope that winds through the fluid.” By following the path that the electron takes as it slides along the vortex, the researchers were able to observe vortex lines for the first time. “People never thought it would be possible to visualize the vortex lines,” said Guo, “but then, almost by accident, we saw them.”

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Captured on a home video camera, some electrons follow a straight path through superfluid helium (far left). Those entrained in a superfluid vortex follow a snakelike path.

Picture courtesy - Humphrey Maris and Wei Guo