TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Dec 12, 2023
Aurora and Milky Way over Norway
What are these two giant arches across the sky? Perhaps the more familiar one, on the left, is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. This grand disk of stars and nebulas here appears to encircle much of the southern sky. Visible below the stellar arch is the rusty-orange planet Mars and the extended Andromeda galaxy. But this night had more! For a few minutes during this cold arctic night, a second giant arch appeared encircling part of the northern sky: an aurora. Auroras are much closer than stars as they are composed of glowing air high in Earth's atmosphere. Visible outside the green auroral arch is the group of stars popularly known as the Big Dipper. The featured digital composite of 20 images was captured in mid-November 2022 over the Lofoten Islands in Norway.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
NASA Sensor Produces First Global Maps of Surface Minerals in Arid Regions
DEC 11, 2023
NASA’s EMIT mission has created the first comprehensive maps of the world’s mineral dust-source regions, providing precise locations of 10 key minerals based on how they reflect and absorb light. When winds loft these substances into the air, they either cool or warm the atmosphere and Earth’s surface, depending on their composition. Understanding their abundance around the globe will help researchers predict future climate impacts.
Launched to the International Space Station in 2022, EMIT – short for Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation – is an imaging spectrometer developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The mission fills a crucial need among climate scientists for more detailed information on surface mineral composition.
Surveying Earth’s surface from about 250 miles (410 kilometers) above, EMIT scans broad areas that would be impossible for a geologist on the ground or instruments carried by aircraft to survey, yet it does this while achieving effectively the same level of detail.
To date, the mission has captured more than 55,000 “scenes” – 50-by-50-mile (80-by-80-kilometer) images of the surface – in its study area, which includes arid regions within a 6,900-mile-wide (11,000-kilometer-wide) belt around Earth’s mid-section. Taken together, the scenes comprise billions of measurements – more than enough to create detailed maps of surface composition.
The mission has also demonstrated a range of additional capabilities in its 17 months in orbit, including detecting plumes of methane and carbon dioxide being emitted by landfills, oil facilities, and other infrastructure.
“Wherever we need chemistry to understand something on the surface, we can do that with imaging spectroscopy,” said Roger Clark, an EMIT science team member and senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. “Now, with EMIT, we’re going to see the big picture, and that’s certainly going to open some eyes.”
Dust and Climate
Scientists have long known that airborne mineral dust affects the climate. They know that darker, iron oxide-rich substances absorb the Sun’s energy and warm the surrounding air, while non-iron-based, brighter substances reflect light and heat, cooling the air. Whether those effects have a net warming or cooling impact, however, has remained uncertain.
Researchers have an idea of how dust travels through the atmosphere, but the missing piece has been the composition – the color, essentially – of the surface in the places dust typically originates, which until now was derived from fewer than 5,000 sample sites around the world. Based on billions of samples, EMIT’s maps offer much more detail.
“We’ll take the new maps and put them into our climate models,” said Natalie Mahowald, EMIT’s deputy principal investigator and an Earth system scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “And from that, we’ll know what fraction of aerosols are absorbing heat versus reflecting to a much greater extent than we have known in the past.”
Dust and Ecosystems
Beyond harnessing EMIT’s mineral data to improve Earth climate modeling, scientists can use the information to study dust’s impact on the ecosystems where it lands. There’s strong evidence that particles settling in the ocean can spur phytoplankton blooms, which can have implications for aquatic ecosystems and the planet’s carbon cycle. Scientists also have shown that dust originating in the Andes of South America, as well as in parts of northern and sub-Saharan Africa, provides nutrients for rainforest growth in the Amazon basin.
EMIT data can enable researchers to pinpoint the sources of mineral dust and get a more detailed look at its composition, helping estimate the travel of key elements such as phosphorus, calcium, and potassium, which are thought to factor into this long-distance fertilization.
“EMIT could help us to build more intricate and finely resolved dust-transport models to track the movement of those nutrients across long distances,” said Eric Slessarev, a soil researcher at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “That will help us to better understand the chemistry of soils in places very far from the dust-generating regions.”
A New Generation of Science
Aside from tracking 10 key minerals that are part of its primary mission, EMIT data is being used to identify a range of other minerals, types of vegetation, snow and ice, and even human-produced substances at or near Earth’s surface. And with vastly more measurements at their disposal, researchers will be able to find statistical relationships between surface characteristics and other features of interest.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/emit/nasa-sensor-produces-first-global-maps-of-surface-minerals-in-arid-regions/
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EXCLUSIVE Secrets of Area 51: Metallic egg-shaped UFO the size of an SUV was kept at the highly-classified Air Force base in the 1980s, whistleblower claims
UPDATED: 14:50 EST, 11 December 2023
An egg-shaped metallic UFO was kept at Area 51 in the 1980s, a whistleblower claims in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com.
Engineers at the Nevada airbase claimed the CIA found the strange craft in the desert and brought it to them for investigation – but later shipped it to another base after they were unable to get inside the object.
Eric Taber has been a defense aerospace contractor for 13 years and has held a security clearance to work on military aircraft.
In an interview with DailyMail.com, he revealed the story his late great uncle Sam Urquhart, an Area 51 contractor, told him about a UFO at the mysterious desert base.
Taber testified in May to the Pentagon's UFO investigation unit, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), who are collecting accounts of alleged government possession of non-human craft.
The claim – though an unverified story from a now-deceased witness – is part of a long history of rumors about potential extraterrestrial craft or futuristic spaceships stored at the Nevada desert airbase near Groom Lake, north of Las Vegas.
The news comes after whistleblowers told Congress the government has a secret program to capture crashed or landed 'non-human' vehicles and has for decades been attempting to glean technological insights from these alleged out-of-this-world objects.
The claims have prompted lawmakers to draft legislation to disclose any such programs, currently working its way through Congress.
Taber spoke to DailyMail.com only about his great uncle's story, declining to comment on any of his own work as a defense contractor.
He said he struck up a friendship with his grandmother's brother after moving to the West Coast from Mississippi in 2012.
The younger engineer said he repeatedly quizzed Urquhart on the truth about rumors of aliens at Area 51, and was always brushed off. But one day Urquhart relented.
'My great uncle served in the Air Force for 28 years, E8 rank [equivalent to a First Sergeant],' Taber told DailyMail.com. 'He told me he worked at Area 51 from 1997 until 2014.'
Urquhart began his job at Area 51 working for defense contractor EG&G, which later partnered with Raytheon to become JT3 LLC and subsequently JT4 LLC.
'He was head of security for his engineering group, and a data configuration specialist. His group did radar cross-section testing.
'I kept asking him about UFOs. He said 'I know nothing'. Then one day we were on his back porch and he said 'Ok, I'll tell you about one craft that I knew of.'
'He said, 'When I first got there in 1997, I had a personal conversation with a senior EG&G engineer whose group was tasked with trying to reverse-engineer an object that was brought there by some CIA people in the 1980s.'
'It was supposedly just found in a remote desert location fully intact.
'The senior EG&G engineer described to my great uncle that it was egg-shaped, about the size of an SUV, smooth and seamless, metallic-looking, silverish gray in color, with no control surfaces, no flaps, no inlet, and no exhaust, and no writing or symbols on the outside.
'These are the best and brightest engineers you can think of. They tried to no avail to figure out what the power source was, how to activate it, and how it works. They tried to induce electricity to it.
'X-rays couldn't penetrate it; it showed up on X-ray as a solid object. They tried to open it and penetrate its hull; they couldn't.
'They said that they were able to take some very small samples of the material. And I'm not an expert in chemistry, but I guess from the isotope ratio or the mixture of elements, they concluded it was not made on Earth.'
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Taber said Urquhart told him eventually the craft was shipped to another base, possibly White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and that was the last the engineers heard about it.
But Urquhart had one more shocking twist in his story.
'My great uncle would collect radar data, and bring it into secure vaults to catalog and store it,' Taber said. 'He was in one of these secure data vault storage rooms in the main control building, nicknamed the Taj Mahal, when on the wall he saw an up-close crystal-clear color photograph of the exact same object that the senior engineer had discussed.'
Taber shared pictures with DailyMail.com that Urquhart showed him, including a group photo with his Area 51 engineer colleagues in a break trailer at the base, and an insignia patch designed for their radar analysis group.
But the alleged smoking gun photo of the egg-shaped craft never left the Area 51 vault.
'Sam said the American people would probably never get to see it,' Taber told DailyMail.com.
Taber admitted he sold his great uncle's patch for $600 on eBay in March when he was strapped for cash – a move he now regrets.
Urquhart, a 28-year Air Force veteran who served in the Vietnam and Gulf wars, died in August last year aged 75.
His story has now been documented by the Pentagon's UFO investigation office AARO, after Taber was interviewed by staff in May.
A memo of his account, along with other reports and witness statements, is due to be compiled and sent to Congress next year.
Taber said the AARO staffers were 'professional' and 'non-threatening', adding: 'I was surprised at how interested they were.'
Taber said he decided to come forward to push for limited disclosure of what he believes is the truth about non-human craft in the government's possession.
'I did this interview in a way that I feel doesn't disclose technical information our adversaries could exploit,' he said.
'Despite what people may think, secrets can be kept. If you're getting paid well, if you have a security clearance, if you've signed a nondisclosure agreement, you're going to be happy, and you're going to work hard, and you're going to keep your mouth shut.
Wilson has vociferously denied ever meeting Davis, telling journalist Ross Coulthart that he was in an isolated camp in Maine during October 2002, and had only been to Las Vegas once: a deployment to Nellis Air Force base in 1979 or 1980.
The notes were entered into the congressional record by Wisconsin congressman Mike Gallagher at the historic UFO hearing last year.
Notorious former Area 51 worker Bob Lazar has claimed since his first interview in 1989 that he worked on an alien flying saucer reverse engineering program at Groom Lake – though many elements of his story have now been debunked.
Taber said his great uncle told him he knew Lazar worked at the base, but that much of his story was fabricated.
'He was only there for a few months,' Taber said. 'He states there was a site called S-4 at the base of the Papoose Mountains with nine hangar sections built into the side of the mountain housing nine flying saucers. My great uncle said it's bogus. The only thing Papoose had was some radio tower equipment. That was his take on it.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12838131/Secrets-Area-51-Metallic-egg-shaped-UFO-1980s-whistleblower-claims.html
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SecAF redesignates Space Operations Command West as US Space Forces – Space
Dec. 12, 2023
Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall has redesignated Space Operations Command West as U.S. Space Forces – Space, a U.S. Space Force Component Field Command directly subordinate to the Chief of Space Operations for execution of the Secretary of the Air Force’s responsibilities under Title 10, U.S. Code for Service-specific administration and support functions on Dec. 6.
U.S. Space Command Commander, Army Gen. James H. Dickinson has designated the U.S. Space Forces – Space Commander Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Schiess, to dually serve as the Combined Joint Force Space Component Commander, granting Schiess authority over all space forces presented by the services to the combatant command.
The activation of Space Forces – Space ensures space forces are most efficiently presented to U.S. Space Command to best meet challenges presented by the dynamic national security environment and the return to great power competition.
Previously, Space Operations Command was assigned to U.S. Space Command as the Space Force service component. The service component responsibilities have been removed from Space Operations Command and realigned under U.S. Space Forces – Space. This realignment streamlines the mission of the service component.
Joint responsibilities within U.S. Space Command previously held by the commanders of Combined Task Force Space Operations, Combined Force Space Component Command and Joint Task Force-Space Defense will be transitioned to Schiess in his role as Combined Joint Force Space Component Commander.
Space Forces – Space was activated on Dec. 6, following U.S. Senate confirmation of Schiess’ promotion to lieutenant general. An activation ceremony is scheduled to take place in January.
https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3614445/secaf-redesignates-space-operations-command-west-as-us-space-forces-space/