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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ... and"The Lost Cities of Barsoom" .... by Richard C. Hoaglandupdated 4/7/06The Enterprise MissionAnother close-up from the same MRO mosaic (rotated 50 degrees, clockwise -- below) demonstrates that not all "quasi-circular features" on Mars are simple "impact craters." This remarkably preserved example exhibits organized, interior geometric detail characteristic of a massive, designed building ... surrounded by six, geometrically aligned, surviving elevated "walls" -- minus a possible roof! The massive former structure is attended by an array of additional, still partially-buried rectilinear features just outside. NOT A PING LIST, merely posted to:

Giant planets 'formed in hundreds of years' Giant planets like Jupiter were formed in just a few hundred years, not several million as was previously thought, according to scientists. The research completely contradicts the widely held assumption that it takes at least one million years for gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn to evolve. Two years of work by scientists using a greatly refined mathematical model produced results that they say explain just how quickly such planets form. Astrophysicist Thomas Quinn, from the University of Washington, said the disk of matter which spins round a young star begins to...

If your idea of fun is whirling around on a dizzying carnival ride, astronomers have found a stellar adventure that would stop you in your tracks. A sizzling-hot star is spinning around at near break-up velocity, according to a new study.

Jafar Arkani-Hamed of McGill University discovered that five impact basins--dubbed Argyre, Hellas, Isidis, Thaumasia and Utopia--form an arclike pattern on the Martian surface. Three of the basins are well-preserved and remain visible today. The locations of the other two, in contrast, were inferred from measurements of anomalies in the planet's gravitational field... a single source--most likely an asteroid that was initially circling the sun in the same plane as Mars--created all five craters. At one point the asteroid passed close to the Red Planet... and was broken apart by the force of the planet's gravity. The resulting five pieces subsequently...

Probe to 'look inside' asteroids By Paul Rincon BBC News Online science staff in Paris, France Studies of asteroids would aid Earth-protection strategies A new space mission concept unveiled at a Paris conference aims to look inside asteroids to reveal how they are made. Deep Interior would use radar to probe the origin and evolution of two near-Earth objects less than 1km across. The mission, which could launch some time later this decade, would also give clues to how the planets evolved. The perceived threat of asteroids colliding with our planet has renewed interest in space missions to understand these...

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have found evidence that dusty disks of planet-forming material tug on and slow down the young, whirling stars they surround. Young stars are full of energy, spinning around like tops in half a day or less. They would spin even faster, but something puts on the brakes. While scientists had theorized that planet-forming disks might be at least part of the answer, demonstrating this had been hard to do until now... Stars begin life as collapsing balls of gas that spin faster and faster as they shrink, like twirling ice skaters pulling in their...

Rather than look for the light reflected directly by these objects (as is customary astronomy practice), this project will search for those very rare moments when one of these objects passes between the telescopes and a nearby background star. This brief "eclipse" lasts less than a second, but will allow the scientists to study objects that are much too faint to be seen in reflected sunlight, even with the largest telescopes.

Asteroid Vesta: The 10th Planet? Discovery Brightens Odds of Finding Another Pluto Nemesis: The Million Dollar Question HOUSTON, TEXAS -- Our solar system may have had a fifth terrestrial planet, one that was swallowed up by the Sun. But before it was destroyed, the now missing-in-action world made a mess of things. Space scientists John Chambers and Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center hypothesize that along with Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars -- the terrestrial, rocky planets -- there was a fifth terrestrial world, likely just outside of Mars's orbit and before the inner asteroid belt. Moreover, Planet V...

New Theory: Catastrophe Created Mars' Moons By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 29 July 2003 PASADENA, California – The two moons of Mars – Phobos and Deimos – could be the byproducts of a breakup of a huge moon that once circled the red planet, according to a new theory. The capture of a large Martian satellite may have taken place during or shortly after the formation of the planet, with Phobos and Deimos now the surviving remnants. Origin of the two moons presents a longstanding puzzle to which one researcher proposed the new solution at...

Gravitational anomalies An invisible hand?An unexplained effect during solar eclipses casts doubt on General Relativity “ASSUME nothing” is a good motto in science. Even the humble pendulum may spring a surprise on you. In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe and record the movements of a pendulum over a period of 30 days. Coincidentally, one of his observations took place during a solar eclipse. When the moon passed in front of the sun, the pendulum unexpectedly started moving a bit faster than...

Mystery Object Encountered By Russian Phobos Spacecraft by Tom Van Flandern, Astronomer Meta Research Martian moon Phobos and "Phobos Mystery Object", photographed in 1989 by a Russian spacecraft not long before all contact was lost. March 15, 1992 was the cover date on the first issue of a new astronomy research publication, the Meta Research Bulletin (MRB). Its purpose was to draw attention to deserving astronomy findings and ideas ignored solely because they did not fit well into mainstream models of the field. Such mainstream models include the Big Bang, the primeval Destination: Space nebula, the Oort cloud, and the...

Deep Impact ... Deepening Contradictions Well, it's been over a full week now -- more than seven days -- since NASA's Deep Impact Spacecraft slammed into Comet Tempel 1-- And apparently kicked up a major firestorm ... on Earth. "Something's" definitely been happening, since the highly-publicized culmination of "Deep Impact" the other night, but NOT in public. Something that's potentially far more revealing than "just another successful NASA mission": A behind-the-scenes-eruption -- currently taking place in Washington and in Pasadena -- over precisely what Deep Impact actually ran into the other night .... How do we know that such "an...

RETHINKING RELATIVITY BY TOM BETHEL No one has paid attention yet, but a well-respected physics journal just published an article whose conclusion, if generally accepted, will undermine the foundations of modern physics -- Einstein's Theory of Relativity in particular. Published in Physics Letters A (December 21, 1998), the article claims that the speed with which the force of gravity propagates must be at least twenty billion times faster than the speed of light. This would contradict the Special Theory of Relativity of 1905, which asserts that nothing can go faster than light. This claim about the special status of the...

History: Fiction or Science? by Anatoly T. Fomenko

Neptune's largest moon, Triton, was originally a member of a duo orbiting the Sun but was kidnapped during a close encounter with Neptune, a new model suggests. Triton is unique among large moons in that it orbits Neptune in a direction opposite to the planet's rotation, which long ago led scientists to speculate that the moon originally orbited the Sun. But until now, no convincing theory for how Triton paired with Neptune existed. Gravity might have pulled Triton away from its companion to make it an orbiting satellite of Neptune, researchers report in a new study published in the May...