An artist's impression of X-20 Dyna-Soar being launched on top of Titan booster, an American USAF project based on work of German physicists Walter Dornberger, Wernher von Braun and Eugen Saenger. Allegedly operated only from 1957 to 1963, but is that where the American military's secret space program began, continuing to this day?
Paul D. McKeever, in August 1984 at age 18, was accepted into U. S. Army Reserves at Ft. Leonard Wood, Company D44, Missouri.
Ten years after the Sandia hills event, Paul McKeever at age 18 enlisted in the U. S. Army Reserves in August 1984. He is pictured here on far left. Paul was sent for basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri where he trained with Company Delta 44 (Battalion 4, Brigade 4).
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
October 31, 2007 Fort Branch, Indiana - Today I received the following email from amateur astronomer Charlie Kiesel who lives in Fort Branch, Indiana. He has sent the images of Comet Holmes seeming to erupt in two of 28 images Charlie photographed on Sunday night, October 28, 2007, at 9:59:38 PM CDT and 10:06:51 PM CDT. Charlie has sent the "erupting" images to Spaceweather.com and other NASA comet websites for comment. He told me, "Comet Holmes flared up from a magnitude 17 to magnitude 2 in just 24 hours from October 24 to 25, 2007."
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
“As longtime Arctic residents, they told me they had never seen
open water so early before - which was late May 2007.”
- Scott Lamoureux, Ph.D., Queen's University
Red circle marks Melville Island between Alaska and Greenland near the Arctic Circle, the site of ice melt studies between 2002 and 2005 by Queen's University geography team.August 2007, Arctic Ocean, open water and ice seen from an icebreaker research vessel. Image by Andy Armstrong, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
October 5 , 2007 Kingston, Ontario , Canada - The United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has had to revise upward its estimates of possible temperature increases over this century. Now, the numbers say that in another 90 years, Earth could be as much as 11 degrees F. warmer than it was at the beginning of the 21st Century. Compare 11 degrees F. to only a 1 degree F. increase in the entire 20th century!
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
“I’ve never seen this bimodal germination bimodal before. This is totally anomalous. ...These two entirely different populations of growth rates in these East Field seed samples indicates that there were two entirely different types of energy that hit the field at pretty much the same time.”
October 4, 2007 Grass Lake, Michigan - The most extraordinary crop formation of 2007 was discovered on Saturday, July 7th, around 3:20 AM in the East Field of Wiltshire, England, by three people on a night watch. One was researcher and photographer, Winston Keech, who had video cameras aimed at the East Field, capable of night vision and infrared. The other two eyewitnesses were Gary King and his friend, Paula Presdee-Jones, from Cardiff, Wales. Back in July, I interviewed Gary King about the fact that at approximately 3:08 AM, all three saw a great flash of bright light over the East Field. One of Winston Keech’s infra red cameras also captured the flash before the ran camera out of videotape. See 071907 Earthfiles.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
Red circle and arrow identify meteorite impact crater site in Carancas, Peru, south of Yunguyo at the southern end of Lake Titicaca. Map created by Jose Machare, Ingemmet.Red circle and arrow identify meteorite impact crater site in Carancas, Peru, south of Yunguyo at the southern end of Lake Titicaca. Map created by Jose Machare, Ingemmet.Meteorite crater filled with ground water after 11:34 AM impact on September 15, 2007, in Carancas, Peru, south of Lake Titicaca near Bolivian border. Hole diameter measured between 7.4 to 7.8 meters (26 feet). Ring boundary of ejecta around hole measured between 13.3 to 13.8 meters in diameter. Crater depth to groundwater estimated about 2 meters.
September 26, 2007 Lima, Peru - It was 11:45 AM on Saturday, September 15, 2007, when alpaca farmer, Justina Limache, heard a “thunderous roar from the sky.” Scared, she grabbed her 8-year-old granddaughter and ran into her house. For the next few minutes, Justina heard rocks raining down on the roof so loudly that she worried her house would collapse. What 74-year-old Justina Limache did not know was that a meteorite had fallen near her Carancas, Peru, home 62 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Puno and not far from Lake Titicaca. Carancas is a farm community of about 2,000 people who raise cows, alpacas, llamas and other animals on the high Andean plateau near the Bolivian border.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
“In principle, you could use this repelling Casimir force to levitate heavier objects, but not with current technology. With current technology, one could only conceive of levitating very light objects.”
- Thomas Philbin, Ph.D., Theoretical Physicist
August 10, 2007 Fife, Scotland - Theoretical physicists work in their mind and on paper with math and formulas trying to understand the laws of the universe. Some of the greatest of those minds have been Max Planck and Albert Einstein. More than a hundred years ago in 1900, Planck was struggling to understand radiation from black bodies. Actual experiments forced him to suppose that the electromagnetic energy of the light at a given frequency could only take discrete values: it is "quantized." Planck found that if he chose the spacing between the allowed energies correctly, his equations agreed with the experiments. This spacing is determined by a number, now called Planck's constant. For that theoretical physics work - now regarded as the birth of quantum physics - Max Planck received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. For that theoretical physics work – now regarded as the birth of quantum physics - Max Planck received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
A scorching-hot gas planet beyond our solar system is steaming up with water vapor, according to new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and European Space Agency.
Planet HD 189733b is a gas giant 63 light-years away, in the constellation Vulpecula, discovered in 2005 orbiting its parent star. Graphic illustration courtesy European Space Agency (ESA).
July 12, 2007 Paris, France, and Pasadena, California - Scientists report the first conclusive discovery of the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet beyond our Solar System. The discovery was made by analyzing the transit of the gas giant HD 189733b across its star, in the Infrared. The findings appear in the July 12, 2007, issue of the scientific journal Nature. The original paper, titled ‘Water vapour in the atmosphere of a transiting extrasolar planet’, is by G.Tinetti, A.Vidal-Madjar, M-C. Liang, J-P. Beaulieu, Y. L. Yung, S. Carey, R. Barber, J. Tennyson, I. Ribas, N. Allard, G. Ballester, D.K. Sing, F. Selsis.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
Mysterious moving light changes position from one Saturn ring band on far left in image W00016503 to a further ring band in far right image W00016506, on July 23, 2006. Is it a "sundog" where sunlight reflects off icy, dusty rings? All Cassini-Huygens spacecraft images courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Update - Email from an employee at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, on June 23, 2007:
"I enjoy visiting your Earthfiles website for news on topics one normally doesn't hear much about, and your reports to Coast to Coast which I listen to when I stay up late working on art projects or photographs. I like that you're keeping on top of the disappearing bees situation.
About your recent Earthfiles report, What Is the Moving Light in Saturn's Rings? A Sundog? The bright spots in the four images are not a sundog. It's called the 'opposition effect' and is seen in the rings whenever Cassini is looking in the exact same direction as the sunlight. It's due to sunlight illuminating everything face-on (what astronomers call 'zero phase angle') and therefore, no shadows exist.
I work at the Space Science Institute, doing most of the image processing for the Cassini cameras in one of the groups."
[ Editor's Note: Space Science Institute: "The opposition effect exists because of two contributing factors. One is due to the fact that the shadows of ring particles directly opposite the Sun from Cassini–the region of opposition–fall completely behind the particles as seen from the spacecraft. These shadows are thus not visible to the spacecraft: all ring particle surfaces visible to Cassini are in sunlight and therefore bright. Away from the region of opposition, the ring particle shadows become more visible to Cassini and the scene become less bright. The surge in brightness falls off in a circular fringe around that point.
"Another contributing factor to the opposition surge is an optical phenomenon called “coherent backscatter.” Here, the electromagnetic signal from the rays of scattered sunlight, making their way back to the spacecraft, is enhanced near the region of opposition because, instead of canceling, the electric and magnetic fields comprising the scattered radiation fluctuate in unison.
The July 23, 2006, images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 262,000 kilometers (163,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale in the radial, or outward from Saturn, direction is 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel." ]
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
