Posted on 10/19/2004 11:13:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Given the reality of the dark spots, which soon became known as "atmospheric holes" because of their appearance in the images, there is only one explanation which has endured over all these years to present. That is, the holes are due to the shadowing of the atmospheric light by an object above the atmosphere. This object simply cannot be a stony or iron meteor because the holes are very large, tens of miles in diameter. A rock of this size would provide a disastrous impact on the Earth's surface. As it turns out, water vapor is very good at absorbing the atmospheric light and thus appearing as a atmospheric hole in the images taken by the spacecraft camera. The only other step in the interpretation is to note that a cloud of water vapor will have only a brief existence in interplanetary space so that it must be delivered to Earth as a small comet filled with water snow which is disrupted and expands as it impacts into our atmosphere.
(Excerpt) Read more at smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu ...
FGS
George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent
In re to Louis Frank's mini-comets being the source of earth's oceans, there is a severe constraint on the rate thereof : the moon gets about 5% of all meteoric mass entering the system(95% falls to the earth). If the incoming comet-water mass-rate was LARGE we would have a SECOND SUN in our sky as the water-rich cloud around the moon would be bright-white(high albedo)and thus extremely reflective, instead of its present asphalt-black. So, you either have "smart" comets that only target the earth...or we forget Frank's theory as wishful thinking in pondering the NOISE in the satellite's cameras..
Naw, not wishful thinking, or noise. The Moon doesn't retain water, due to mass, density, and lack of atmosphere, while the Earth does.
Wrong! If you have mini-comets impacting the lunar surface at its terminal velocity, low as that may be, you would still see the H2O (volatiles) in the samples brought back by the apollo astronauts. Reference the Lunar Source Book, a compendium of known lunar facts, published after 1973 when the apollo program was terminated. There is no, repeat NO, evidence for "wet" impacts in lunar surface rocks; as Louis Frank's mini-comet theory predicts. Again, you are faced with a dilemma : 5% of all meteorite mass that comes into the earth-moon system impacts the MOON, that's a known factoid. Over past eons a continual spray of mini-comets would then show up in lunar surface rocks...it doesn't, the moon is as dry as a bone. Ignoring inconvenient facts is not how one does science. Or as Sherlock Holmes would say : the dog that didn't bark in the night(no lunar water traces)is telling us something(besides Frank's theory being wishful thinking)...are you listening?
Thanks for that rambling email with no paragraph breaks you sent on Monday. Is that how *you* do science?
An Argument for the Cometary Origin of the Biosphere
American Scientist ^ | September-October 2001 | Armand H. Delsemme
Posted on 09/06/2004 8:16:38 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1208497/posts
Why Study Comets?
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/media/f_whycomets.html
"Comets are the remainders of material formed in the coldest part of our solar system. Impacts from comets played a major role in the evolution of the Earth, primarily during its early history billions of years ago. Some believe that they brought water and a variety of organic molecules to Earth."
updated URL, full text:
http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php?p=109189#post109189
http://www.bautforum.com/showpost.php?s=83eca795ebba56491b80ecbf6db604d7&p=109252&postcount=3
09-July-2003, 12:17 AM
The Bad Astronomer
Administrator
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: CA, USA
Posts: 4,250
My Bitesize essays about Frank were written early on, when I first heard of his claims. I should really re-write them, or append them: Louis Frank is as wrong as wrong can be. I have seen his claims, read papers, and years ago decided his claims are utterly incorrect. I found several articles on the web; here is one about seeing them from the ground (search on "frank"), and here is another.
The bottom line is that we should see them, lots of them, all the time. We can't. So, unless they are magic (like Nancy Lieder's Planet X), they don't exist.
__________________
Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
see also:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/badminicomet.html
http://www.badastronomy.com/bitesize/minicomet.html
Anyway, thanks for an interesting update.
FGS
It took the better part of twenty years after Frank and his then-student ruled out pixel dropouts to convince the numbnuts who rejected it in a knee-jerk manner. :') My guess is, the Defense Dep't had already figured this out before Frank saw the data (that the dark spots were natural objects) and wanted some kind of confirming study, rather than just ignoring the "dropouts", as a matter of national security.
Icy Comets Once Carried Water to Earth...Scientists long ago concluded that comets are frozen, dusty remnants from the formation of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
February 3, 2006 9:00AM
Sci-Tech Today
Some have theorized that comets smashing into the early Earth delivered primitive organic compounds and water that helped give rise to life.
Jessica Sunshine, lead author of the Science article, said that understanding comets' composition can illuminate the role they played as "a possible source that delivered water to Earth."
"Add the large organic component in comets and you have two of the key ingredients for life," she said.
NASA Sees Comets Entering AtmosphereSupporting evidence comes from Robert Conway, a plantary physicist at the Naval Research laboratory, who announced on August 11, 1997, that his ultraviolet telescope on the Discovery Space Shuttle had detected unexpectedly high levels of hydroxyl in the upper atmosphere. Hydroxyl comes from water vapor, possibly delivered by the newly discovered snowballs. To everyone's surprise, the objects seem to break up so much higher than they would if the atmosphere were the disrupting force. Frank proposes that Earth's magnetic field is the cause...
by Brig Klyce
Cosmic Ancestry
Did comets water Earth?Frank reports that he obtained pictures of nine small comets among 1,500 images made between October 1998 and May 1999 using the Iowa Robotic Observatory (IRO) located near Sonoita, Ariz. In addition, he says that the possibility of the images being due to "noise," or electronic interference, on the telescope's video screens was eliminated by operating the telescope in such a manner as to ensure that real objects were recorded in the images. This operation of the telescope utilized two simple exposure modes for the acquisition of the images. One scheme used the telescope's shutter to provide two trails of the same small comet in a single image, and the second scheme used the same shutter to yield three trails in an image.
University of Iowa news release
March 5, 2001
"In the two-trail mode for the telescope's camera, no events were seen with three trails, and for the three-trail mode, no events were seen with two trails," he says. "This simple shutter operation for the telescope's camera provides full assurance that real extraterrestrial objects are being detected."
Did Comets Flood Earth's Oceans?The Ptolemy experiment on Rosetta may just find out... It is a miniature laboratory designed to analyse the precise types of atoms that make up familiar molecules like water. Atoms can come in slightly different types, known as isotopes. Each isotope behaves almost identically in a chemical sense but has a slightly different weight because of extra neutrons in its nucleii... By analysing with Ptolemy the mix of isotopes found in Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, he hopes to say whether comet water is similar to that found in Earth's oceans. Recent results from the ground-based observation of another comet, called LINEAR, suggested that they probably are the same... However, if the comets are not responsible for Earth's oceans, then planetary scientists and geophysicists will have to look elsewhere... If comets did not supply Earth's oceans then it implies something amazing about the comets themselves. If Ptolemy finds that they are made of extremely different isotopes, it means that they may not have formed in our Solar System at all.
European Space Agency
June 18, 2004
Professor Sir Fred Hoyle [obituary]
Source: Daily Telegraph (UK)
Published: 08/22/2001
Posted on 08/21/2001 18:35:13 PDT by dighton
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b830c515b83.htm
What a crock, if space is really so full of small comets why don't we see them hit the moon?
Good argument for returning to the Moon.
Comment on the paper 'On the influx of small comets into the earth's upper atmosphere'Abstract: The possibility that comets containing up to 100 tons of ice encounter the earth's atmosphere at a rate of one every 20 min is discussed. Cometary 'hail storms' were proposed to explain observed regular transient decreases in the atmospheric UV dayglow intensity. The decreases take the form of dark 'holes' up to 50 km across. The probability that clouds of objects assumed to be as dark as the nucleus of Comet Halley between the earth and moon would be detectable by ground-based electrooptical deep space telescopes is considered. Conflicting projections of the number of objects which would be detected per hour are examined. High correlations are noted between cometary passages (Comets Encke, Tuttle, Tempel) and intervals of meteor showers (Taurids, Leonids, Geminis, etc.). The holes, however, are not correlated or coincident with the showers. It is suggested that dedicated searches for the unclassified dark objects be carried out in November, when cometary fluxes are high.
Steven Soter
Geophysical Research Letters
vol. 14, Feb. 1987, p. 162, 163;
Reply, p. 164-167.
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