Posted on 06/14/2009 2:45:28 AM PDT by JoeProBono
For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth's atmosphere — but no longer. A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned.
The satellites' main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists. The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Goodness gracious!
I know if I had fireballs I’d mostly keep them covered up.
Here’s an interesting quote from the article on what is routinely hitting our earth, and has been hitting our earth, all along for years on end...
Most “shooting stars” are caused by natural space debris no larger than peas.
But routinely, rocks as big as basketballs and even small cars crash into the atmosphere.
And then, here was an article on an asteroid that hit the earth last year..., which I bet a lot of people didn’t know about. I had not heard that an asteroid hit the earth last year... :-) But, that is, yet again, another event that happens with great regularity, I’m sure...
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The asteroid was detected by the automated Catalina Sky Survey telescope at Mount Lemmon , Ariz., on Oct. 6, 2008. Just 19 hours after it was spotted, it collided with Earth’s atmosphere and exploded 23 miles (37 kilometers) above the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan.
Because it exploded so high over Earth’s surface, no chunks of it were expected to have made it to the ground. Witnesses in Sudan described seeing a fireball, which ended abruptly.
But Peter Jenniskens, a meteor astronomer with the SETI Institute’s Carl Sagan Center, thought it would be possible to find some fragments of the bolide. Along with Muawia Shaddad of the University of Khartoum and students and staff, Jenniskens followed the asteroid’s approach trajectory and found 47 meteorites strewn across an 18-mile (29-km) stretch of the Nubian Desert.
“This was an extraordinary opportunity, for the first time, to bring into the lab actual pieces of an asteroid we had seen in space,” Jenniskens said.
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quoted from http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090325-asteroid-meteorites.html
“Did somebody mention spaceballs?”
What are the implications, reasons, motivations, etc?
Why the change?
>>>Why the change?
Possibly the sensors were picking up the ionization re-entry trail of unannounced orbiter spaceflights flown by the military or related agencies (such as NRO).
And why the military?
I think Tintin and Snowy got to the bottom of this mystery.
ahhhhhh . . . true.
What about . . . also . . . too much info about even “natural” meteor events they wanted us ignorant of for whatever reason?
See above.
There are a great many unexplained atmospheric events that are poorly understood.
One of which is the effect of upward streaming lightening from the tops of high clouds.
Also, the phenomena of Ball Lightening has been interpreted as UFO sightings.
Incidentally, Nicola Tesla created a great many electrical plasma discharge effects, one of which was ‘Ball Lightening’
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