Category: Space
Whether you believe in UFO’s or not is a moot point. Personally, I have my own opinions on that matter. The one thing both I and those UFO watchers share is the certainty of life out in space. Mathematically, when you realise how many galaxies there are, how infinite the universe is yet conversely small, for what is size but a man made creation, then the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life becomes abundantly clear. We are not alone.
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The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold-anodized aluminium plaques which were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 is intercepted by extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.
The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts were the first human-built objects to achieve escape velocity from the Solar System. The plaques were attached to the spacecraft’s antenna support struts in a position that would shield them from erosion by stellar dust.
The Voyager Golden Record, a much more complex and detailed message using (then) state-of-the-art media, was attached to the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977.
The original idea, that the Pioneer spacecraft should carry a message from mankind, was first mentioned by Eric Burgess when he visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, during the Mariner 9 mission. He approached Carl Sagan, who had lectured about communication with extraterrestrial intelligences at a conference in Crimea.
Sagan was enthusiastic about the idea of sending a message with the Pioneer spacecraft. NASA agreed to the plan and gave him three weeks to prepare a message. Together with Frank Drake he designed the plaque, and the artwork was prepared by Sagan’s then-wife Linda Salzman Sagan.
Both plaques were manufactured at Precision Engravers, San Carlos, California.
The first plaque was launched with Pioneer 10 on March 2, 1972, and the second followed with Pioneer 11 on April 5, 1973.
According to astronomer Frank Drake, there were many negative reactions to the plaque because the human beings were displayed naked. (read more)
The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred on Tuesday, January 28, 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members. The spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of central Florida, United States, at 11:38 a.m. EST (16:38 UTC).
Disintegration of the entire vehicle began after an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff. The O-ring failure caused a breach in the SRB joint it sealed, allowing pressurized hot gas from within the solid rocket motor to reach the outside and impinge upon the adjacent SRB attachment hardware and external fuel tank. This led to the separation of the right-hand SRB’s aft attachment and the structural failure of the external tank. Aerodynamic forces promptly broke up the orbiter.
The crew compartment and many other vehicle fragments were eventually recovered from the ocean floor after a lengthy search and recovery operation. Although the exact timing of the death of the crew is unknown, several crew members are known to have survived the initial breakup of the spacecraft. However, the shuttle had no escape system and the astronauts did not survive the impact of the crew compartment with the ocean surface.
The disaster resulted in a 32-month hiatus in the shuttle program and the formation of the Rogers Commission, a special commission appointed by United States President Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident. The Rogers Commission found that NASA’s organizational culture and decision-making processes had been a key contributing factor to the accident. NASA managers had known that contractor Morton Thiokol’s design of the SRBs contained a potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings since 1977, but they failed to address it properly. They also disregarded warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching posed by the low temperatures of that morning and had failed to adequately report these technical concerns to their superiors. The Rogers Commission offered NASA nine recommendations that were to be implemented before shuttle flights resumed. (read more)
- Labels: astronauts, death, disaster, Space
by Peter Lindbergh 1990
- Labels: above top secret, aliens, art, photography, Space, truth, universe
The Moon is certainly the most puzzling object in our corner of the universe. The many visits made by mankind to the Moon during the 20th Century did little to answer any of the pivotal questions regarding its origin or importance. Our closest neighbor in space is probably more of an enigma now than it has ever been. In Who Built the Moon (Watkins 2005), authors Christopher Knight and Alan Butler have opened a discussion for new questions regarding the existence of the Moon.
Although it is extremely large relative to the Earth, the Moon is very light in mass, in fact only 1/81st part the mass of the Earth, despite being just under 1/3rd the size. This is all the more perplexing now that it is known for certain that the Moon is made from exactly the same sort of rock as the Earth â though with very few of the heavy metals that give our world is mass.
The same observable facts about the Moon that made it so attractive and mysterious to our ancient ancestors still display themselves on a regular basis. The most significant of these is the Moon’s ability to exactly cover the face of the Sun at the time of total eclipse. This is possible because the Moon is ‘exactly’ 1/400th part of the size of the Sun and also that its orbit takes it to a position 1/400th of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. In so large a universe as ours outrageous coincidences are certain to happen but this is far from being the end of the story. Such are the orbital characteristics of the Moon that its movements in the sky, when seen from Earth, exactly mirror those of the Sun. As an example, when the Sun sets north of west at midsummer, the full Moon sets south of west at the same time. Although not immediately obvious, this phenomenon might be even more remarkable than the possibility of total eclipse.
The size of a planetary body such as the Moon has little or nothing to do with its orbital characteristics, which are specifically tied to its speed. Yet time and again Knight and Butler came across number parallels that simply defy logic. For example the Earth is 3.66 times larger than the Moon and takes 366 days to go around the Sun. Another peculiarity emerged when it was realized that the Moon, which orbits the Earth in 27.322 days, takes a very neat 10,000 days to complete 366 orbits.
“We discovered so many peculiar mathematical relationships that we were astounded, but we eventually pared them down to a few very specific facts,” said Knight. “It amounts to this: The Earth is 109.3 times smaller than the Sun and the Moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun. This inevitably means that the Moon must be 3.66 times smaller than the Earth. Add to this the fact that the Moon orbits at a distance exactly 1/400th that between the Earth and the Sun and what you are left with is so unlikely that it cannot be accounted for by simple chance.” (read more)
- Labels: above top secret, aliens, disclosure, earth, moon, Space
