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The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
Welcome to yet another GGG ping.
additional Louis A. Frank links:
http://www-pi.physics.uiowa.edu/~frank/
http://www-pi.physics.uiowa.edu/~frank/LAF_publications.html
http://www.physics.uiowa.edu/faculty/LFrank.html
The Original DiscoverySigwarth and I analyzed over 10,000 images and learned a good deal about the black spots in the process. Our interpretation of the events continued to involve meteor impacts into Earth's upper atmosphere.By counting the spots in our images we were able to estimate the rate at which these objects appeared. This was the simplest measurement to do. We saw ten holes per minute on the daylight side of Earth. So we doubled that figure to obtain the rate of these objects over the entire face of Earth. There had to be about twenty such objects entering the atmosphere every minute. That was an alarming number of objects.
by Louis A. Frank
with Patrick Huyghe
Out ThereI spent more than a year answering the objections of critics. But I didn't convince them. It was 10,000 to 1 -- actually 2, myself and John Sigwarth, whose task as my graduate student assistant had been to help me resolve this black-spot mystery. "We have taken a representative poll of current opinion in this field," an editor at Nature wrote in rejecting a small-comet paper we submitted to them in 1988, "and the verdict goes against you." It was my first encounter with taking polls as a way of doing science.
by Louis A. Frank
and Patrick Huyghe
Now, a decade later, many of those who had "voted" against us are changing their minds. In May at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, we presented images acquired by our ultraviolet camera aboard NASA's Polar spacecraft, a satellite sent up to study the Sun's effects on the Earth's environment. This camera, too, had picked up the black spots in the Earth's sunlit atmosphere. And this time there was no doubt; these black spots or atmospheric holes, as we called them, occurred in clusters of pixels or picture elements, not single pixels as in the Dynamics Explorer images. The phenomenon could not be due to instrumental artifacts. We could also see these black spots expanding and moving as they entered Earth's atmosphere. And the filters on our visible-light camera confirmed that these objects consisted of water -- enough water to produce clouds of water vapor 50 miles across, high in the atmosphere.
The new evidence stunned many of our former critics into admitting that we had been right. The University of Michigan's Thomas Donahue, one of the world's leading experts in atmospheric science, said so, as did Robert Meier, a space physicist from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. "I guess I'll just have to swallow crow," wrote one detractor. These former critics now agree that these objects are indeed water-bearing, but they don't want to call them small comets because they don't have the dust that the large, well-known comets do. That's okay. Call them "cometesimals" if you want -- that's the term Donahue prefers -- but the fact remains: They carry lots of water just like the large comets, and they are millions of times smaller than Hale-Bopp and Halley.
At first glance, this apparent resolution to the small-comet affair would seem worthy of applause -- the scientific process of debate, peer review and criticism would appear to have functioned admirably. But the gap between appearance and reality is a large one. After I presented my findings on the small comets in 1986, the scientific community did its best to extinguish my career. In the past decade, I have been unable to get any other projects off the ground. Before the small-comet findings became public, my success in this regard was envious; I was able to get instruments on board several major spacecraft -- Polar, Galileo and Geotail. But after my small-comet announcement, I got nothing. I had my ongoing projects, such as the one on Polar that eventually produced the confirmatory data. But the new projects I proposed went nowhere -- even those that had nothing to do with small comets.
I read it fairly quickly, and didn't see addressed the
issue of orbital hazard.
Have they computed the risk level to orbiting craft?
If significant, could we have expected losses by now?
Have there been any that could be attributed to these
micro comets?
George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent
Is this activity specific to Earth's orbit?
Is orbital distance then a pre-requisite to habitibility?
Is this happening on Mars? Venus?
Do we see any evidence pro or con for the other planets?
Has anyone reviewed say, Cassini film/photo footage for evidence of such cometary activity?
Would there be similar photographic evidence to help confirm the theory?
It raises a hell of a lot more questions than it answers, IMHO...
Donald Simanek's Page: Cutting Edge ScienceSnowball Comets. In 1986 physicist Louis Frank of the University of Iowa stirred controversy with evidence that the earth gets significant water from impact of icy comets vaporizing in our atmosphere. Now new and more direct evidence.
by Donald Simanek
Sandia scientist, colleague suggestSandia physicist Mark Boslough and Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Tex., have published a study that provides a less provocative -- but still scientifically interesting -- explanation for the so-called atmospheric holes. They may be plumes, not holes, and meteoroids may be the source. Their computational simulations, which make use of Sandia's shock physics code CTH and Boslough's earlier work with Sandia colleague Dave Crawford in successfully predicting the visible plumes from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's impact into Jupiter in 1994, suggest that the entry of ordinary meteoroids can form dark spots very similar to those reportedly observed by the satellite instruments... [T]hey believe that atomic oxygen, which is the source of the dayglow, is momentarily displaced by the passage of meteoroids. Normal air from lower altitudes contains oxygen in its molecular form and is black in the wavelength that the satellite sees. They propose that when a stony object as small as 50 centimeters across collides with the atmosphere and plunges into the lower layers, it ejects a very thin plume of this "black" air to as high as 1,000 kilometers. It is these dark plumes, they suggest, that are being detected by the satellites. Their work is preliminary and they acknowledge that the hypothesis doesn't account for the observed high rate of dark hole formation. But they say if they can show their idea is correct for large meteoroids, they will look into the possibility that small ones have a similar effect.
meteor plumes causing
transient dark spots in upper atmosphere
Sandia National Laboratories
February 10, 1998
George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent
another GGG topic (from the Catastrophism subsection):
When the Days Were Shorter
Alaska Science Forum (Article #742) ^ | November 11, 1985 | Larry Gedney
Posted on 10/04/2004 10:31:59 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1234919/posts
A tiny bump to one of those older style URL topics:
Catastrophic event preceded Dark Ages - scientist
Miscellaneous News Keywords: SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGINATION
Source: Reuters
Posted on 09/08/2000 10:06:44 PDT by VadeRetro
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39b91ca42b27.htm
Justa posted this link:
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a39b91ca42b27.htm#100
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."
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
