Free Republic

Over the next several weeks, our planet will have a close encounter with the Taurid meteor swarm. It will be the closest that we have been to the center of the meteor swarm since 1975, and we won’t have an encounter this close again until 2032. So for astronomers, this is a really big deal. And hopefully there will be no danger to Earth during this pass, but some scientists are absolutely convinced that the Tunguska explosion of 1908 which flattened 80 million trees in Russia was caused by an object from the Taurid meteor swarm. As you will see...

Oh, they’re out there all right. Raj and I saw one with our own eyes at dusk one summer day over 40 years ago. And no, there were no chemicals involved. “Our sovereignty is being violated by vehicles of unknown origin.” – Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations The U.S. military has seen them.    The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast....

When I was on vacation to the Meteor Crater in Arizona, I open carried into the museum and display area, and on the tour.  The guard/ticket seller at the front entrance never blinked.  I listened to the tour guide tell us of some of the history, and I asked a question or two.  I must have caught the attention of a presumably Navajo grandmother with her family.  She might have been my age, give or take a few years. She asked me if I believed what the tour guide had told us.  I said that I believed most of...

One of the reasons why humans are handicapped in our understanding of reality is because of our reliance on the “scientific method”. It is a system based on observation. The problem with this method is that our understanding of reality is corrupted by the limits imposed by observation. Indeed, as well well know, it is the perception of the observer that changes our reality. This is a well understood rule. If you the reader, don’t “get it”, then you need to study quantum mechanics 101. For in the last two decades the entire foundation of our understanding of reality has...

Updates on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, diamonds inside a planet, the Environmental Defense Fund is up to no good (again), and cleaning up Caves...

Time travel -- it is of course a subject central to science fiction. Most of us probably believe it might one day become possible. It does not seem to be that close to becoming a reality. There are, apparently, laboratory experiments with mysterious sub-atomic particles that demonstrate the existence of time travel on a limited basis. But as to human beings getting into a time machine and ending up in their future or past, we don't have anything like that available. But we do already know some things about time travel, from what we can observe around us. (1) If...

Why do people say that they are as "happy as a clam"? Clams don't look all that happy to me.

I’m at Vandenberg Air Force Base. My wife and I came to see the launch of Icesat2, a satellite intended to measure the thickness of the polar ice caps. Our son Tony designed the laser altimeters on Icesat, which measure the height above the geoid of the ice, of forests, and other objects. The launch vehicle was a Delta rocket. The Delta was derived from the Air Force’s old Thor missile. This was the last launch of a Delta. It’s now obsolete and being retired. For me, it closed out some personal history. Back in the late ‘fifties, I was...

It’s August, and that means we will have  ☆*¨`*☆StArrY, StArrY NiGhƮs☆*¨`*☆So grab your dog and your camera…and head out to capture some magnificent images under the night sky. The Perseids Meteor shower is at its peak tonight.Photo by Andrew RhodesEnjoy it while you can.Posted from: MOTUS A.D.

Beto O’Rourke is running to replace Ted Cruz. Literally. Sweat pours off his lean, 6’ 4”-frame as the El Paso Democrat jogs along the southern bank of the Trinity River surrounded by 300-odd supporters and curious voters jogging along with him. Incredibly, they have shown up at 8 a.m. on a Sunday to join him for a double shot of politics and cardio. In between panting breaths, O’Rourke explains to me the origins of this novel campaign event, which has him running several miles under the Texas sun, stopping in the middle to take questions and lingering at the end...

The next time asteroids menace the earth, we'll be ready. Because NASA has created a plan. But before you get too excited, unfortunately, NASA's just-released plan does not include a Bruce Willis-led crew of roughnecks landing on an asteroid and blowing it to smithereens with a nuke. Which begs the question, if that's not part of the plan, what's a potential "Space Force" actually for? Yesterday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a report titled, the "National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan." Okay, see, this is the problem with government bloat. That title is...

The solar system just got a bit stranger. As astronomers continue their ongoing quest to find the elusive Planet Nine, a team found a space rock that lends credence to the idea that a huge super-Earth planet really exists in the outer reaches of our solar system. The newfound asteroid, called 2015 BP519, adds to a growing body of evidence about little worlds in the solar system being perturbed by something big. Astronomers detailed its discovery and description in a new paper, adding that its bizarre angle of its orbit gives more weight to the idea that a big planet...

Blue Origin test flight, China's space-program, SLS, earth's magnetic field flipping?

If you simply flew up into space and sawed the moon in half with a giant hacksaw, most likely, nothing would happen. This is because gravitational force would hold the two halves together, sort of like a couple of magnets. But what if you were able to get a couple of giant crowbars and put a person on the other side and then count to 3 and totally separate the two halves of the moon? With enough strength applied, you could theoretically push the two halves far enough apart where the gravitational force no longer pulls them together and now...

"Meridani Planum is located on the equator due east of the giant canyons of Valles Marineris. It is a subsection region inside Arabia Terra, the largest of the transition zones between the lower elevation vast plains of the northern hemisphere and the higher elevation crater southern highlands."

Summary: Curiosity’s exploration of Vera Rubin Ridge is extended, while an attempt by Opportunity to climb back up Perseverance Valley to reach an interesting rock outcrop fails.

"SpaceX launched NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on Wednesday, April 18 from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The launch occurred at 6:51 p.m. EDT, or 22:51 UTC. TESS was deployed into a highly elliptical orbit approximately 49 minutes after launch. Following stage separation, SpaceX successfully landed Falcon 9’s first stage on the “Of Course I Still Love You” drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

In linking to my sunspot update this week, there has been a lot of speculation at the climate website WattsUpWithThat that the next solar cycle has begun...which suggested that this sunspot was the first such sunspot this cycle, was not quite accurate however. This sunspot with an opposite polarity, which decayed so quickly that it did not rate getting a sunspot number, was not the first... The grand minimum of the 1600s, dubbed the Maunder Minimum in honor of the scientist who first identified it, was a century where almost no sunspots were visible. There was no apparent solar cycle....

It surely looks like the solar minimum has arrived, and it has done so far earlier than expected! On Sunday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for March 2018...the least active month for sunspots since the middle of 2009, almost nine years ago. In fact, activity in the past few months has been so low it matches the low activity seen in late 2007 and early 2008, ten years ago when the last solar minimum began.

Let's see how long this thread lasts, the mods pull everything I post that offends or upset the delicate little flat earth and science hating snowflakes that have taken over FreeRepublic these days. Here's a simple method anyone can use to measure the altitude, size, and velocity of the International Space Station by capitalizing on a lunar transit (where ISS is silhouetted against the moon within a narrow corridor - you can find opportunities on transit-finder.com). Anyone can do this with a friend using a good high magnification camera like a P900 or other long focal length telephoto lens on...