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Deep Impact - First Impressions - Electric Universe Theorists response
Thunderbolts Picture of the Day ^ | 47/5/2005

Posted on 07/06/2005 2:32:43 AM PDT by Swordmaker

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Jul 05, 2005
Deep Impact?First Impressions

The Deep Impact was an amazing show, and there will be much more information to come.

In advance of the event we set forth our expectations as explicitly as possible. Therefore, we urge readers of this page to refer to our previous Picture of the Day.

We also eagerly await the first pictures of the impact site, which have not been seen due to a huge surprise: The energy of the "impact" was much greater than NASA scientists had expected and -- as predicted by Wallace Thornhill -- was strongly reminiscent of the early Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact events at Jupiter. Indeed, the luminous glow that persisted occluded the impact site to a degree that shocked observers and will make it difficult to determine the size of the resulting crater through the glare. Of course, a prime aim of the experiment was to observe the crater before the spacecraft had moved out of the required position. So here we see another example of the potential cost of asking the wrong questions.

We had said that the flare or explosion would be more energetic than expected, due to the contribution of electrical energy from the charged comet. NASA scientists were astonished and expressed their amazement on camera and in no uncertain terms: The blast was "considerably more energetic than I expected." "The big question is how did we make such a big splash." "I'm at a loss to explain it."

The reaction was universal. From Softpedia News: "The impact was bigger than everybody would have expected."

After the event, the Thunderbolts crew was scurrying to find reliable data on the timing of the flare, to see if it actually began microseconds before the impact. Thornhill had predicted an advance flash following the intensity curve of lightning. Whether the cameras will answer the latter question is uncertain, but it appears that a flare did indeed precede the main flash. Pete Schultz of Brown University, suggested that the first flare "indicates a layered structure for the comet. "My guess is there was soft layering on top, [the impactor] went down, and finally got in contact with ices."

Obligatory guesses of this sort can only add to the exasperation of the electrical theorists. The comet was approaching the impactor at 23,000 miles per hour. A soft surface layer, which various guesses have put at perhaps ten feet or so, would have no measurable effect on the timing of an impact flare, and it would not separate a flare into two phases as appears to have occurred.

It will be useful for independent researchers to contrast the NASA animation of the expected event with the actual event. You will observe in the animation a dark cloud of shrapnel emanating upward from a crater formed by the impact. The shrapnel is illuminated by the Sun.

In the real event series of images we see an exceedingly bright flare-up (left image above) with bright rays. The formation of evenly spaced bright discharge rays or filaments is characteristic of a "plasma gun" type discharge as seen on Jupiter's moon, Io. But more intriguing are the rays above the presumed main crater, which seem to emanate from a separate bright center. It indicates the sudden, simultaneous flare-up of another jet. Such an electrical effect was predicted in our previous TPOD.

We noted in our prior piece that standard comet theory had fragmented into competing "explanations" of things that are virtually impossible to reconcile with the original idea of the "dirty snowball". When astronomers observed comets exploding or disintegrating millions of miles from the Sun (as in the demise of comet Linear), they began to grasp for extraordinary ways to rescue comet science from the apparent contradictions. It was inconceivable that warming from the Sun could cause a chunk of sublimating ice miles wide to explode. So we saw resorts to "fluff-ball" comets, or "sponges", or loose aggregation of lesser ice cubes or cometesimals. But with a single impact, these "back-up" models also crashed and burned. They were no longer tenable, stated the NASA scientists.

It is now our job, and the job of other critics, to remind NASA officials that there was a reason for the ad hoc proposals after the explosive demise of Linear and other comets. For a year or two these proposals verged on a majority opinion due to the extremity of the contradictions. Now, the extreme "models" are gone, but the facts that provoked them remain and must not be ignored.

How many NASA scientists predicted the surface features with the clarity of the prediction we registered in our July 4 submission? On seeing the remarkable, sharply sculpted features, NASA officials used much the same language we've used in describing electrical discharge sculpting of cometary and other surface -- extensive craters, flat-floored valleys, mesas, ridges.


-- Larger picture of the imminent impact site --

As usual, the investigators do not know whether to call the craters impact sites or vents. They will toggle between the two as convenient. But it should not take "rocket scientists" to see that sublimating dirty snowballs don't look like the surface of Tempel 1. The best analogy is a surface sculpted by electrical discharge machining (EDM).

It looks as if the pictures will speak more emphatically than anything we could say here. The picture above right appears to show, with surprising resolution, the predicted plasma discharge tufts which we have already identified on Jupiter's moon Io and on the surface of Mars (the towering "dust devils" of Mars). For the electrical theorists, this picture is worth more than an encyclopedia of archaic comet facts.

We will be following with great interest the published spectra, light and X-ray curves and spectroscopic analysis of the ejecta from the impact. No one knows yet whether NASA will find the subsurface water that is required for the dirty snowball theory. Of course water in the coma is expected in the electric model due to negative oxygen from the nucleus exchanging charge with positive ions from the Sun. Most electrical theorists doubt the existence of extensive subsurface water. The bone-dry surface of Borrelly was a pretty good clue as to what may be most likely.

And there remains for the standard model the mystery as to how dust explodes episodically from the nucleus -- a mystery the specialists concede remains to be solved.

The "instantaneous" brightening of the coma, larger than the Earth, is also an essential subject for us. Could distribution through the kinetics of explosion account for this? Then the coma continued to brighten to eleven times its prior brightness. These findings also echo the surprises from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's encounter with Jupiter. We live in an electrified solar system.

EXECUTIVE EDITORS:
David Talbott, Wallace Thornhill

MANAGING EDITOR:
Amy Acheson

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:
Mel Acheson, Michael Armstrong, Dwardu Cardona, Ev Cochrane,
Walter Radtke, C.J. Ransom, Don Scott, Rens van der Sluijs,
Ian Tresman

WEBMASTER:
Michael Armstrong

Copyright 2005: thunderbolts.info



TOPICS: Extended News; News/Current Events; Technical
KEYWORDS: catastrophism; comet; cometology; comets; cosmology; deepimpact; electricuniverse; nasa

1 posted on 07/06/2005 2:32:44 AM PDT by Swordmaker
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To: Swordmaker

Say what?


2 posted on 07/06/2005 2:54:52 AM PDT by Neanderthal
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To: Swordmaker; Neanderthal
They seem to be saying that the comet has a huge electircal potential difference from the impactor, sufficient to produce energy comparable to that of the kinetic energy of the impact.

3 posted on 07/06/2005 3:54:32 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters but PR.)
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To: Swordmaker

I don't suppose the remaining 7 kilos of thruster fuel had anything to do with a larger than expected result?

We'll see.


4 posted on 07/06/2005 4:05:20 AM PDT by tet68 ( " We would not die in that man's company, that fears his fellowship to die with us...." Henry V.)
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To: Swordmaker

"It is possible that this new era also means a partial return to more understandable physics. For the nonspecialists, four-dimensional relativity theory and the indeterminism of atom structure have always been mystic and difficult to understand. I believe that it is easier to explain the 33 instabilities in plasma physics or the resonance structure of the solar system. The increased emphasis on the new fields means a certain demystification of physics. In the spiral or trochoidal motion which science makes during the centuries, its guiding center has returned to these regions from where it started.

It was the wonders of the night sky, observed by Indians, Sumerians, or Egyptians, that started science several thousand years ago. It was the question why the wanderers - the planets - moved as they did that triggered off the scientific avalanche several hundred years ago. The same objects are now again in the center of science - only the questions we ask are different. We now ask how to go there, and we also ask how these bodies once were formed.

And if the night sky on which we observe them is at a high latitude, outside this lecture hall - perhaps over a small island in the archipelago of Stockholm - we may also see in the sky an aurora, which is a cosmic plasma, reminding us of the time when our world was born out of plasma. Because in the beginning was the plasma."

H. Alfvõp Science 4 June 1971. From a lecture he delivered in Stockholm, Sweden, on 11 Dec 1970 when he received the Nobel Prize in Physics.


5 posted on 07/06/2005 5:39:22 AM PDT by Fred Nerks (Understand Islam. Understand Evil. Read THE LIFE OF MUHAMMAD link My Page.)
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To: Swordmaker
Marvin is PISSED!
6 posted on 07/06/2005 6:20:30 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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To: Swordmaker

Heeeey, thanks!


7 posted on 07/06/2005 8:47:15 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (last updated by FR profile on Tuesday, May 10, 2005.)
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To: tet68
the remaining 7 kilos of thruster fuel

No, a drop in the bucket. Kinetic energy is capable of not only vaporizing both the spacecraft and some of the body of the comet, but of ionizing a portion of the resulting gas. The initial flash was due to the ionization effect. Totally expected. The linear features of the dust/gas plume are an effect of near zero gravity, also totally expected.

8 posted on 07/06/2005 10:07:15 AM PDT by RightWhale (withdraw from the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty)
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The Big Splash The Big Splash:
A Scientific Discovery That Revolutionizes the Way We View the Origin of Life,
the Water We Drink, the Death of the Dinosaurs, the Creation of the Oceans,
the Nature of the Cosmos, and the Very Future of the Earth Itself

by Louis A. Frank
with Patrick Huyghe

Sigwarth 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.


9 posted on 09/06/2005 11:15:51 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Down with Dhimmicrats! I last updated by FR profile on Sunday, August 14, 2005.)
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Deep Impact space collision reveals comets to be fluffy balls of powder
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Wednesday September 7, 2005
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1564135,00.html


10 posted on 09/06/2005 11:16:23 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Down with Dhimmicrats! I last updated by FR profile on Sunday, August 14, 2005.)
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Catastrophism

11 posted on 05/09/2006 9:15:07 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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