Oh to have NASA's Imagination..now there's Moths in space.

It would seem that the people in charge on naming things at NASA need a slap or something to wake them from fantasy land. During the week we have already had the release of an image that appears to show a woman or mermaid sitting on a rock on Mars. At least that photo which I believe is probably a fake looks like something. I feel that NASA is playing games. Apparently the Image above looks like a Moth I'm surprised they didn't go all the way and call it MOTHMAN.

"These near-infrared images, taken with the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, show the wing- shaped dust disk surrounding the young, nearby star HD 61005. Astronomers have dubbed the star system."

"The Moth" because the dust disk resembles the wings of the flying insect.
The Moth's wingspan extends about 22 billion miles from the star. The black disk in the center of the images represents the coronagraphic hole in the NICMOS camera that blocks most of the starlight so that astronomers can see details in the surrounding dust disk."

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/01/image/a/

Link to Ben Fairhalls for image of woman/mermaid

http://conspiracy-research.blogspot.com/2008/01/life-on-mars.html

Asteroid is right on Time @3.33am

NEWS RELEASE: 2008-012 Jan. 24, 2008

Asteroid to Make Rare Close Flyby of Earth January 29

Scientists are monitoring the orbit of asteroid 2007 TU24. The asteroid, believed to be between 150 meters (500 feet) and 610 meters (2,000 feet) in size, is expected to fly past Earth on Jan. 29, with its closest distance being about 537,500 kilometers (334,000 miles) at 12:33 a.m. Pacific time (3:33 a.m.
Eastern time). It should be observable that night by amateur astronomers with modest-sized telescopes.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 was discovered by the NASA-sponsored Catalina Sky Survey on Oct. 11, 2007.
Scientists at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have determined that there is no possibility of an impact with Earth in the foreseeable future.

"This will be the closest approach by a known asteroid of this size or larger until 2027," said Don Yeomans, manager of the Near Earth Object Program Office at JPL. "As its closest approach is about one-and-a-half times the distance of Earth to the moon, there is no reason for concern. On the contrary, Mother Nature is providing us an excellent opportunity to perform scientific observations."

Asteroid 2007 TU24 will reach an approximate apparent magnitude 10.3 on Jan. 29-30 before quickly becoming fainter as it moves farther from Earth. On that night, the asteroid will be observable in dark and clear skies through amateur telescopes with apertures of at least 7.6 centimeters (3 inches). An object with a magnitude of 10.3 is about 50 times fainter than an object just visible to the naked eye in a clear, dark sky.

NASA detects and tracks asteroids and comets passing close to Earth. The Near Earth Object Observation Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," discovers, characterizes and computes trajectories for these objects to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.
For more information, visit http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

National Aeronautics tSunami Administration

Direct Quotation below..Why are NASA so interested in Tsunamis...

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 818-354-5011 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/

Alan Buis 818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov

NEWS RELEASE: 2008-007 Jan. 17, 2008

NASA Tsunami Research Makes Waves in Science Community

PASADENA, Calif. – A wave of new NASA research on tsunamis has yielded an innovative method to improve existing tsunami warning systems, and a potentially groundbreaking new theory on the source of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

In one study, published last fall in Geophysical Research Letters, researcher Y. Tony Song of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., demonstrated that real-time data from NASA's network of global positioning system (GPS) stations can detect ground motions preceding tsunamis and reliably estimate a tsunami's destructive potential within minutes, well before it reaches coastal areas. The method could lead to development of more reliable global tsunami warning systems, saving lives and reducing false alarms.

Conventional tsunami warning systems rely on estimates of an earthquake's magnitude to determine whether a large tsunami will be generated. Earthquake magnitude is not always a reliable indicator of tsunami potential, however. The 2004 Indian Ocean quake generated a huge tsunami, while the 2005 Nias (Indonesia) quake did not, even though both had almost the same magnitude from initial estimates. Between 2005 and 2007, five false tsunami alarms were issued worldwide. Such alarms have negative societal and economic effects.

Song's method estimates the energy an undersea earthquake transfers to the ocean to generate a tsunami by using data from coastal GPS stations near the epicenter. With these data, ocean floor displacements caused by the earthquake can be inferred. Tsunamis typically originate at undersea
boundaries of tectonic plates near the edges of continents.

"Tsunamis can travel as fast as jet planes, so rapid assessment following quakes is vital to mitigate their hazard," said Ichiro Fukumori, a JPL oceanographer not involved in the study.
"Song and his colleagues have demonstrated that GPS technology can help improve both the speed and accuracy of such analyses."

Song's method works as follows: an earthquake's epicenter is located using seismometer data.
GPS displacement data from stations near the epicenter are then gathered to derive seafloor motions. Based upon these data, local topography data and new theoretical developments, a new "tsunami scale" measurement from one to 10 is generated, much like the Richter Scale used for earthquakes. Song proposes using the scale to make a distinction between earthquakes capable of generating destructive tsunamis from those unlikely to do so.

To demonstrate his methodology on real earthquake-tsunamis, Song examined three historical tsunamis with well-documented ground motion measurements and tsunami observations: Alaska in 1964; the Indian Ocean in 2004; and Nias Island, Indonesia in 2005. His method successfully replicated all three. The data compared favorably with conventional seismic solutions that usually take hours or days to calculate.

Song said many coastal GPS stations are already in operation, measuring ground motions near earthquake faults in real time once every few seconds. "A coastal GPS network established and combined with the existing International GPS Service global sites could provide a more reliable global tsunami warning system than those available today," he said.

NASA Update: Sun: Ulysses Pole Flyby

Ulysses Spacecraft Flies Over Sun's North Pole

The Ulysses spacecraft today is making a rare flyby of the sun's north pole. Unlike any other spacecraft, Ulysses is able to sample winds at the sun's poles, which are difficult to study from Earth.
Ulysses has flown over the sun's poles three times before, in 1994-95, 2000-01 and 2007. Last week, solar physicists announced the first indications of a new solar cycle. Visiting the pole at this time may lead to new insights about solar activity.

"This is a wonderful opportunity to examine the sun's north pole within a transition of cycles,"
said Arik Posner, Ulysses program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We've never done this before."

Many researchers believe the sun's poles are central to the 11-year ebb and flow of solar activity. When sunspots break up, their decaying magnetic fields are carried poleward by vast currents of plasma. This makes the poles a sort of graveyard for sunspots. Old magnetic fields sink beneath the polar surface 200,000 kilometers deep (about 124,000 miles), all the way down to the sun's inner magnetic dynamo, which generates the solar magnetic field. There, dynamo action amplifies the fields for use in future solar cycles.

"Just as Earth's poles are crucial to studies of terrestrial climate change, the sun's poles may be crucial to studies of the solar cycle," said Ed Smith, Ulysses project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Each previous flyby revealed something interesting and mysterious. One puzzle has been the temperature of the sun's poles. In the previous solar cycle, the magnetic north pole was about 80,000 degrees Fahrenheit (more than 44,000 degrees Celsius), or 8 percent cooler than the south. The current flyby may help solve this puzzle because it comes less than a year after a similar south pole flyby in Feb. 2007. Mission scientists will be able to compare temperature measurements, north versus south, with hardly any gap between them.

Ulysses also discovered the sun's high-speed polar wind. At the sun's poles, the magnetic field opens up and allows solar atmosphere to stream out at a million miles per hour. By flying around the sun, covering all latitudes in a way that no other spacecraft can, Ulysses has been able to monitor this polar wind throughout the solar cycle and has found that it is acting a bit odd.

"Twelve years ago, just before the previous 'sea change' between solar cycles, the polar wind spilled down almost all the way to the sun's equator. But this time it is not. The polar wind is bottled up, confined to latitudes above 45 degrees, " said Posner.

http://ulysses.jpl.nasa.gov%20./

NASA sees Horned Devils in the Dust of TERRA CHIMERA.

I will leave it up to you as always to decide what NASA means by this press release but I would suggest to you dear reader that it is not as innocent as it would at first seem. The suggestion from me is that this is yet another hint at who and what created the human species at least in the all seeing eye of the occultists. We seem to have the notion of a chimera species being created on Terra or maybe in TERROR by a horned beast.

From wiki: Chimera...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)

"In zoology, a chimera is an animal that has two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated in different zygotes; if the different cells emerged from the same zygote, it is called a mosaicism.
Chimeras are formed from four parent cells (two fertilized eggs or early embryos fuse together) or from three parent cells (a fertilized egg is fused with an unfertilized egg or a fertilized egg is fused with an extra sperm). Each population of cells keeps its own character and the resulting animal is a mixture of mis-matched parts. An analogy is two jigsaw puzzles cut using an identical cutter, but with different pictures. A single puzzle can be made out of the mis-matched parts, but the completed puzzle will show parts of both pictures.
This condition is either inherited, or it is acquired through the infusion of allogeneic hematopoietic cells during transplantation or transfusion. In fraternal twins, chimerism occurs by means of blood-vessel anastomoses. The likelihood of a child being a chimera is increased if the child is created via in vitro fertilization. Chimeras can often breed, but the fertility and type of offspring depends on which cell line gave rise to the ovaries or testes."

"This image shows a set of dark sand dunes within the northern part of an unnamed crater in the Terra Cimmeria region.The dunes have a distinctive shape, with two horns on one end and a rounded edge on the other. The side of the dunes with the horns has a steeper slope and the rounded side a more shallow slope. These types of dunes are called “barchans” and, by analogy with similar dunes on Earth, form in areas with limited sand supply."

"The horns of the barchans point in the downwind direction, thereby indicating that the predominant surface winds in this region blew from the east (right side of image). Further evidence of this wind regime is apparent when one zooms into the image. “Wind tails” are visible on the western (left) side of many rocks (many of these rocks may be ejecta from the degraded crater in the northern part of the image). Wind tails are formed by the accumulation of dust and sand in the lee of rocks, which act as wind shadows. Very small light ripples at a scale of a few meters (yards) are also apparent."


"The dark, sinuous forms in the image are tracks left by dust devils, which lift bright dust off the surface, revealing the darker surface. Where dust devils cross the dunes, the fine texture on the dunes is undisturbed, indicating that the particles making up the dunes are coarse and fairly immobile."



http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_006248_1235 for the entire article.

NASA about FACE on Global Warming!

News Release: 2007-131 Nov. 13, 2007

NASA Sees Arctic Ocean Circulation Do an About-Face

PASADENA, Calif. – A team of NASA and university scientists has detected an ongoing reversal in Arctic Ocean circulation triggered by atmospheric circulation changes that vary on decade-long time scales. The results suggest not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming.

The team, led by James Morison of the University of Washington's Polar Science Center Applied Physics Laboratory, Seattle, used data from an Earth-observing satellite and from deep-sea pressure gauges to monitor Arctic Ocean circulation from 2002 to 2006. They measured changes in the weight of columns of Arctic Ocean water, from the surface to the ocean bottom. That weight is influenced by factors such as the height of the ocean's surface, and its salinity. A saltier ocean is heavier and circulates differently than one with less salt.

The very precise deep-sea gauges were developed with help from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the satellite is NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace). The team of scientists found a 10-millibar decrease in water pressure at the bottom of the ocean at the North Pole between 2002 and 2006, equal to removing the weight of 10 centimeters (four inches) of water from the ocean. The distribution and size of the decrease suggest that Arctic Ocean circulation changed from the counterclockwise pattern it exhibited in the 1990s to the clockwise pattern that was dominant prior to 1990.

Reporting in Geophysical Research Letters, the authors attribute the reversal to a weakened Arctic Oscillation, a major atmospheric circulation pattern in the northern hemisphere. The weakening reduced the salinity of the upper ocean near the North Pole, decreasing its weight and changing its circulation.

"Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming," said Morison.

"While some 1990s climate trends, such as declines in Arctic sea ice extent, have continued, these results suggest at least for the 'wet' part of the Arctic -- the Arctic Ocean -- circulation reverted to conditions like those prevalent before the 1990s," he added.

The Arctic Oscillation was fairly stable until about 1970, but then varied on more or less decadal time scales, with signs of an underlying upward trend, until the late 1990s, when it again stabilized. During its strong counterclockwise phase in the 1990s, the Arctic environment changed markedly, with the upper Arctic Ocean undergoing major changes that persisted into this century. Many scientists viewed the changes as evidence of an ongoing climate shift, raising concerns about the effects of global warming on the Arctic.

Morison said data gathered by Grace and the bottom pressure gauges since publication of the paper earlier this year highlight how short-lived the ocean circulation changes can be. The newer data indicate the bottom pressure has increased back toward its 2002 level. "The winter of 2006-2007 was another high Arctic Oscillation year and summer sea ice extent reached a new minimum," he said. "It is too early to say, but it looks as though the Arctic Ocean is ready to start swinging back to the counterclockwise circulation pattern of the 1990s again."

Morison cautioned that while the recent decadal-scale changes in the circulation of the Arctic Ocean may not appear to be directly tied to global warming, most climate models predict the Arctic Oscillation will become even more strongly counterclockwise in the future. "The events of the 1990s may well be a preview of how the Arctic will respond over longer periods of time in a warming world," he said.

Grace monitors tiny month-to-month changes in Earth's gravity field caused primarily by the movement of water in Earth's land, ocean, ice and atmosphere reservoirs. As such it can infer changes in the weight of columns of ocean water. In contrast, the pressure gauges installed on the sea floor in 2005-2006 directly measured water pressure at the bottom of the ocean. Gauge data were remotely recovered during the first year of the study.

"The close agreement between the North Pole pressure gauges and Grace data demonstrates Grace's potential for tracking world ocean circulation," said study co-author John Wahr of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"Satellite altimeters, such as NASA's Jason, are ideal for studying ocean circulation but can't be used at Earth's poles due to ice cover," said study co-author Ron Kwok of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Our results show Grace can be a powerful tool for tracking changes in the distribution of mass in the Arctic Ocean, as well as its circulation."

Grace is a partnership between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The University of Texas Center for Space Research, Austin, has overall mission responsibility.
JPL developed the twin satellites. DLR provided the launch, and GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Germany, operates Grace. For more on Grace: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/ .

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Other media contacts for this study include: Peter West, National Science Foundation, Arlington, Va., 703-292-7761, pwest@nsf.gov ; and Jim Scott, University of Colorado, 303- 492-3114, Jim.Scott@colorado.edu .

Nasa Update

IT Came From Vesta
October 29, 2007


Their infiltration began – like so many other infiltrations – with a tell-tale contrail of smoke and flame creating a supersonic slash across the afternoon sky. But this time they would not go unnoticed.
This time, two Australian station workers, just going about their job, opening a gate to a boundary fence, witnessed their arrival. The eyewitnesses later said they observed a "fireball with sparks coming off," streaking from the south to the north, make its descent into a hummock of spinifex grass. It would be another 10 years before they told their story. A decade before the world realized -- the Eucrites had arrived.

"Most people do not realize there are eucrites all are over the planet," said Dr.
Christopher Russell of UCLA. "How they get here is something of a mystery but we believe they came from Vesta."

For those of you who are not geophysicists with four decades of service to the cause, Vesta is the brightest asteroid in the night's sky and the only one visible from Earth to the naked eye. The planetoid was discovered in 1807 by Heinrich Olbers and named after the ancient Roman goddess of the hearth – Vesta. But perhaps most important to this tale is the fact that the 330-mile-wide space rock has a 285-mile-wide gouge out of its south pole.

"We believe it was caused by a collision of protoplanetary bodies that caused a release of energy far beyond that of any atomic weapon known to man," said Russell.

It was this clash of celestial titans that gouged out an eight-mile-deep hole in the asteroid.
On that fateful day, eons ago, one percent of Vesta's volume was believed to be blasted into the cold blackness of interplanetary space -- over one-half million cubic miles of its insides -- and outsides. It was on Vesta's outsides that the eucrites made their home.

But as awesome in scope as that deep space blast was, it cannot solely explain the appearance of eucrites on Earth. After all, the orbit of Vesta is more than twice as far from the sun as Earth's. The other major factor in the equation belongs to the planetary body named after the Roman ruler of all the gods – Jupiter.

"There is a gap in the asteroid belt where objects floating around inside it are greatly affected by Jupiter's gravity," said Russell. "Over the centuries, this gravitational tugging can modify these objects' trajectories about the sun. They could end up on a longer, narrower orbit, and some of those could cross Earth's path."

So just what are these eucrites? Simply put, they are survivors. They survived a stupendous deep space explosion. Then, they survived a multi-billion-mile journey across the solar system, and they survived a 3,200-degree-Fahrenheit plunge through Earth's atmosphere.

"Meteorites are hardy objects indeed," said Russell. "Eucrites are a specific type of meteorite that the science community is confident came from Vesta's surface. We believe that when Vesta was forming, there was molten rock that flowed onto its surface that cooled rapidly. That rapid cooling created small crystals."

It was the unique composition of the eucrites that allows scientists like Russell to trace the meteorites back to their parent body, asteroid Vesta. The meteorites' chemical identity points to Vesta because they have the same unique spectral signature. Isotopes, oxygen atoms with varying numbers of neutrons, in eucrites are unlike the isotopes found for all other rocks of Earth, Moon and most other meteorites. But when astronomers turn their spectrometers on Vesta, the signatures are the same.

"That is why we are quite confident to say eucrites came from Vesta," said Russell.
"Simply put, we cannot find another place in the solar system they could be from. I believe when you discover a eucrite meteorite, you can say with confidence -- "It Came From Vesta."


One final thing. There is a mission that will tell us more, so much more, about eucrites and the last unexplored region of our solar system. NASA's Dawn spacecraft is a deep space probe that will journey into the heart of the asteroid belt on an eight-year odyssey to asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Dawn is on an exploration that may help unravel these mysteries and perhaps provide some of the missing pieces into who we are in the universe.

End

Media contact: DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Link to an article and video of veste:

http://www.solarviews.com/cap/ast/vvesta1.htm

Ulysses To Catch a Comet by the Tail (Nasa Update)

Ulysses Catches Record for Catching Comets by Their Tails

When it was launched 17 years ago, scientists and mission engineers for the Ulysses project knew they should expect, well, the unexpected. After all, the joint NASA/European Space Agency- managed spacecraft was going where no spacecraft had gone before – above and below the sun's poles. But the surprises the team expected were wholly in the area of solar research – which would make sense, as the primary mission of the Ulysses spacecraft is to characterize the sun and its influence on the space environment. That was before the spacecraft met up with some of the solar system's most mysterious and beautiful deep-space nomads.

"Ulysses has flown through and acquired data from the tails of comets on three separate occasions," said Edward J. Smith of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Smith serves as the U.S. project scientist for the Ulysses mission. "No other spacecraft in history has done that."

Ulysses' first cometary tail encounter occurred in 1996. Back then, comet Hyakutake was dazzling scientists and the public alike with its noteworthy appearances in the nighttime spring sky. On May 1, 1996, while Ulysses was cruising through space studying the solar wind, its data suddenly went wild for a few hours.

"As we were not looking for comets, we did not realize the significance of the data right away," said Smith. "The solar wind seemed to almost disappear and was replaced by gases not normally found in solar wind, and the magnetic field in the solar wind was distorted."

At the time of the unexpected encounter, Ulysses was hundreds of millions of miles from comet
Hyakutake and far beyond the visible tail. As their analysis began ruling out other possibilities, the science team came to a startling conclusion – Hyakutake's tail extended more than 480 million kilometers (300 million miles, or three times the distance from Earth to the sun), making it the longest comet tail ever recorded.

The once-in-a-lifetime chance encounter with a comet tail happened again in 2004 when Ulysses flew through the ion tailings of comet McNaught-Hartley. Unlike Hyakutake, comet McNaught-Hartley seemed to be at the wrong location for Ulysses to intercept its tail. By chance, an eruption of particles from the surface of the sun, called a coronal mass ejection, carried cometary material to Ulysses. Such a collision has recently been observed for the first time by NASA’s Stereo spacecraft
(http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/encke.html).

A movie
(http://www.nasa.gov/mpg/191284main_encke_scienceatnasa.mpg) shows the disruption and reformation of periodic comet Encke’s tail.

Ulysses racked up its third, and perhaps most scientifically revealing, comet tail encounter this past February when it again flew through the ion tailings of a comet named McNaught (a different comet than the one encountered in 2004, but discovered by and named after the same astronomer). The nucleus of this comet McNaught was some 257 million kilometers (160 million miles) from the spacecraft during encounter. Ulysses’ solar wind ion composition spectrometer instrument, developed by University of Michigan heliophysicist George Gloeckler, found that even at such a great distance, the tail had filled the solar outflow with unusual gases and molecules. In response, the solar wind that usually measures about 700 kilometers per second (435 miles per second) at that distance from the sun, was less than 400 kilometers per second (249 miles per second) inside the comet’s tail, as measured by one of Ulysses’ instruments called "Solar Wind Observations Over the Poles of the Sun."

The interaction between comets' tails and the solar wind has been studied for decades. A comet's ion tail always points away from the sun, whether the body is traveling toward or away from the sun along the comet's elliptical orbit. It was this finding that eventually led in 1958 to the discovery of solar wind. The magnetism and velocity of the solar wind are so strong, the effect pushes the comet's tail forward. A paper on Ulysses' latest crossing of a comet tail was published in the Oct. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal.

"I recall saying a few years back that the odds that Ulysses' flight path would intersect that of a comet tail were probably less likely than finding a needle in a haystack," said Smith. “Now that we have encountered three, I cannot help wondering when nature will have another one in store for us.”

Smith is part of an international science team that has been working Ulysses data since its 1990
launch from the payload bay of Space Shuttle Discovery. Ulysses scans the sun’s magnetic field,
solar plasmas, solar radio noise, energetic particles, galactic cosmic rays and cosmic dust between the poles and the equator – imparting a more complete perspective of the sun's atmosphere. Understanding Earth's nearest star and its processes is of paramount importance, as the space weather created by the sun has a huge effect on the third rock from it and its inhabitants. The sun's gaseous outer atmosphere can create huge space storms. This violent space weather, in turn, can affect Earth's electrical grid, cell phone communications, satellite functioning, and the operation of astronauts in orbit.

"Such unique science is a tribute to the durability of the mission and the intellectual curiosity of our science team," said Ed Massey of JPL, who serves as Ulysses' NASA project manager.

The Ulysses spacecraft was built by Dornier Systems of Germany for the European Space Agency. NASA provided the launch via space shuttle and the upper stage boosters. The U.S. Department of Energy supplied a generator that powers the spacecraft; science instruments were provided by both U.S. and European investigators. The spacecraft is operated from JPL by a joint team from the European Space Agency and NASA.