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>and allowing our country to be flooded with 15 million illegals immigrants, from places unknown
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Oct 5, 2023
Ring of Fire over Monument Valley
Tracking along a narrow path, the shadow of a new moon will race across North, Central, and South America, on October 14. When viewed from the shadow path the apparent size of the lunar disk will not quite completely cover the Sun though. Instead, the moon in silhouette will appear during the minutes of totality surrounded by a fiery ring, an annular solar eclipse more dramatically known as a ring of fire eclipse. This striking time lapse sequence from May of 2012 illustrates the stages of a ring of fire eclipse. From before eclipse start until sunset, they are seen over the iconic buttes of planet Earth's Monument Valley. Remarkably, the October 14 ring of fire eclipse will also be visible over Monument Valley, beginning after sunrise in the eastern sky.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
SpaceX's Elon Musk to give big Starship update today
Oct 5, 2023
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk will give an update about the company's Starship vehicle today (Oct. 5), and you can watch it live.
Musk will speak for about an hour at the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) today, beginning at 9:45 a.m. EDT (1345 GMT). You can watch his lecture, titled "Creating a More Exciting Future," live here at Space.com, courtesy of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), the space advocacy body that organizes the IAC every year.
"As the most powerful launch system ever developed, SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle is a fully and rapidly reusable transportation system designed to carry satellites, payloads, crew and cargo to a variety of orbits and Earth, lunar or Martian landing sites," the IAF wrote in a description of the event, which will be moderated by Clay Mowry, the organization's president.
"SpaceX's Chief Engineer Elon Musk will provide an update on the design and development of Starship as SpaceX strives to fundamentally change the future of space transportation and help make life multiplanetary," the organization added.
The Starship deep-space transportation system consists of two elements — a huge first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper stage known as Starship.
Both of these components are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, the key breakthrough that Musk believes will make Mars settlement and other extraordinary exploration feats economically feasible.
A fully stacked Starship has one liftoff under its belt to date. On April 20, the vehicle launched on a test flight from SpaceX's South Texas facility that aimed to send the upper stage partway around Earth. (Splashdown was targeted for the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.)
However, Starship suffered a number of problems shortly after liftoff, including the failure of its two stages to separate, and the vehicle was intentionally destroyed high above the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX is currently gearing up to launch a second test flight, though the company is still waiting on a launch license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
Musk has made something of a habit of giving Starship updates at the IAC. He also did so at the 2016 meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the 2017 gathering in Adelaide, Australia. This year, the IAC is convening in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
https://www.space.com/spacex-elon-musk-starship-update-iac-webcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg3Z0wj9xDI
'Ring of fire' eclipse Oct. 14 will be practice run for total solar eclipse next year
Oct 5, 2023
Scientists in the United States are excited to use the October "ring of fire" eclipse as valuable practice for a total eclipse in the Americas next year.
North America will experience an annular "ring of fire" solar eclipse on Oct. 14 that crosses eight U.S. states in between Oregon and Texas. We have full details about how to watch in-person and online here, including selecting the right equipment to observe the sun safely.
An annular eclipse occurs when the moon is further away from Earth, causing it to be slightly smaller than the sun in the sky. The smaller moon is unable to block the entire disk of the sun, creating a "ring of fire" for a few minutes when the moon passes in front of the sun.
NSF plans annular eclipse outreach events in both the Albuquerque, New Mexico and Boulder, Colorado areas, including partnerships with NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the University of Colorado's Fiske Planetarium, Albuquerque's International Balloon Fiesta and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science that will bring in thousands of members of the public.
Science will be front and center as well, with the research team using the annular eclipse to get ready for totality. For example, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope at the National Solar Observatory in Maui, Hawaii will be entering its operational phase just in time for both eclipses, according to Carrie Black, a program officer at NSF's astronautical science division that oversees Inouye's operations.
Inouye, the world's largest solar telescope, will not be in the eclipse path during either October 2023's or April 2024's events. But Inouye will provide a high-resolution "unobstructed view of the sun while the eclipse is happening," Black said. Inouye's results can then be compared with other telescopes to get a fuller picture of solar activity and its effects on Earth, particularly with the sun at a height of solar activity.
"It's like a microscope," Black said of the powerful Inouye, "essentially to zoom in and look at features we wouldn't be able to see otherwise without this type of high resolution — and then connecting it to other (telescope) observations."
Scientists generally, said NSF's Lisa Winter, will be able to view a very active corona — or upper atmosphere of the sun — during the precious minutes that the sun is nearly completely blocked by the moon. The sun is nearing its maximum of solar activity in its 11-year-cycle, unlike the last U.S. total solar eclipse of 2017, meaning that "the corona will be very active this time around," said Winter, who is NSF's program director for solar-terrestrial research.
Solar activity has an immense impact on the ionosphere, which is a layer of Earth's atmosphere that interacts with electromagnetic radiation from above and below its extent. These interactions affect the propagation of radio signals.
With the sun mostly blacked out temporarily by the eclipse, NSF will be carefully watching what happens "when you suddenly turn off that X-ray and the ultraviolet" rays from the sun that usually filter into the ionosphere and affect its extent, said Mangala Sharma, the foundation's program director for space weather (the ionosphere actually expands and contracts depending on how much energy it is absorbing from the sun)
The ham radio community will also help with ionospheric studies during the eclipse, using their GPS receivers to help professional scientists track changes in that layer of the Earth's atmosphere. "That's going to be useful in moving the science forward, and also getting the excitement of the eclipse out into the public," Sharma said.
Additionally, scientists will be watching local weather to see how it is affected by the lack of solar radiation. "The moon's shadow traverses across the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, so things change pretty fast (and) very quickly throughout the eclipse region," Sharma said.
In April next year, scientists will chase the total eclipse in NSF/National Center for Atmospheric Research Gulfstream-V aircraft to study the elusive "low corona," referring to the parts of the upper atmosphere of the sun that are not observable from space.
Black called the experience of seeing this low corona "magical" – so much so that scientists "spend their whole careers traveling around the world to try to find these total solar eclipses, so that you can see this (low) region that we're particularly interested in."
Once this eclipse campaign is over, NSF says no other total solar eclipse will be visible in the United States until 2044 — that's 20 years after April's event.
https://www.space.com/ring-of-fire-eclipse-practice-run-scientists
More than 170,000 UFO sightings reported since 1974, nonprofit says
Wed, October 4th 2023, 3:17 PM PDT
More and more people are apparently reporting UFO sightings across the globe.
That's according to the National UFO Reporting Center, which is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1974 by UFO investigator Robert J. Gribble.
A list on the nonprofit's website includes reported sightings dating as far back as 1946.
Throughout its history, the Center has processed over 170,000 reports, and has distributed its information to thousands of individuals," the website notes.
The list notes more than 1,900 people in Maryland alone have reported seeing something in the sky during the last two decades, with at least 100 people in the state coming forward recently. They described the UFOs as a variety of shapes, sizes and colors.
Some of the reports included images of the objects.
"It's heartening to me that so many people are coming forward now. We are getting significantly more reports than just six months or a year ago," Peter Davenport who directs the National UFO Reporting Center told WJZ.
"I don't know what the future has in store for us, but I am encouraged that more people are coming forward and the government recognizes the UFO phenomenon that's something worthy of their attention," he also said.
The media outlet noted that a majority of the sightings happened along the East and West Coasts in the United States, as well as the Middle East and the South China Sea.
One of the latest reports apparently occurred in Gambrills, Maryland on September 4.
We saw a bright white and blue light with very long bright tail and no noise," one person wrote. "Thought it was a firework at first but then realized it was too high and didn't hear it go off."
Another took place in Pasadena, Maryland on August 16. The person reported seeing the object fly over a home not once, but twice.
"I could not make out what was on top but there was 4 spinning disks underneath and each disk was a different color," according to the post. "I was outside with my dog and (heard) a loud noise in the sky. When I looked up I saw 4 large disk(s) spinning … As it was getting farther away we saw that things were shooting out of it. It looked like stars with blinking lights on each one. Then there was a big flash of light and that 4 disc thing was gone but all the blinking things that looked like stars were left behind. Then the whole sky filled with these blinking things . They were in groups of 3 in a boomerang formation. I counted over 13 sets of 3. I went in the house because my children were scared. After I calmed them down and went back outside all the blinking things were gone."
Those are just a few examples. More can be found here: https://nuforc.org/ndx/?id=post
https://ktvl.com/news/nation-world/more-than-170000-ufo-sightings-reported-since-1974-nonprofit-says-congress-nasa-investigate-ufos-reporting-center-says-unidentifiable-flying-objects-extraterrestrial-beings-aliens-life-forms-unidentified-aerial-anomalous-phenomena
China to double size of space station, touts alternative to NASA-led International Space Station
05 Oct 2023 02:30PM
China plans to expand its space station to six modules from three in coming years, offering astronauts from other nations an alternative platform for near-earth missions as the NASA-led International Space Station (ISS) nears the end of its lifespan.
The operational lifetime of the Chinese space station will be more than 15 years, the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), a unit of China's main space contractor, said at the 74th International Astronautical Congress in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Wednesday (Oct 4).
That would be more than the 10 years previously announced.
China's self-built space station, also known as Tiangong, or Celestial Palace in Chinese, has been fully operational since late 2022, hosting a maximum of three astronauts at an orbital altitude of up to 450km.
At 180 metric tonnes after its expansion to six modules, Tiangong is still just 40 per cent of the mass of the ISS, which can hold a crew of seven astronauts. But the ISS, in orbit for more than two decades, is expected to be decommissioned after 2030, about the same time China has said it expects to become "a major space power".
Chinese state media said last year as Tiangong became fully operational that China would be no "slouch" as the ISS headed toward retirement, adding that "several countries" had asked to send their astronauts to the Chinese station.
But in a blow to China's aspirations for space diplomacy, the European Space Agency (ESA) said this year it did not have the budgetary or "political" green light to participate in Tiangong, shelving a years-long plan for a visit by European astronauts.
"Giving up cooperation with China in the manned space domain is clearly short-sighted, which reveals that the US-led camp confrontation has led to a new space race," the Global Times, a nationalist Chinese tabloid, wrote at the time.
Tiangong has become an emblem of China's growing clout and confidence in its space endeavours, and a challenger to the United States in the domain after being isolated from the ISS. It is banned by US law from any collaboration, direct or indirect, with NASA.
Russia, a participant in the ISS, has similar space diplomacy plans, suggesting that Moscow's partners in the BRICS group - Brazil, India, China and South Africa - could construct a module for its space station.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said last year it was planning to build a space station comprising six modules that could accommodate up to four cosmonauts.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/china-expand-tiangong-space-station-space-power-nasa-iss-3823041