Philae Lander Early Science Results: Ice, Organic Molecules and Half a Foot of Dust

universetoday.com ^ | November 18, 2014 | Bob King

[BenLurkin]

With just 60 hours of battery power, the lander drilled, hammered and gathered science data on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko before going into hibernation.

Despite appearances, the comet’s hard as ice. The team responsible for the MUPUS (Multi-Purpose Sensors for Surface and Sub-Surface Science) instrument hammered a probe as hard as they could into 67P’s skin but only dug in a few millimeters:

“Although the power of the hammer was gradually increased, we were not able to go deep into the surface,” said Tilman Spohn ... “If we compare the data with laboratory measurements, we think that the probe encountered a hard surface with strength comparable to that of solid ice,” he added. This shouldn’t be surprising, since ice is the main constituent of comets, but much of 67P/C-G appears blanketed in dust, leading some to believe the surface was softer and fluffier than what Philae found.

This finding was confirmed by the SESAME experiment (Surface Electrical, Seismic and Acoustic Monitoring Experiment) where the strength of the dust-covered ice directly under the lander was “surprisingly high” according to Klaus Seidensticker from the DLR Institute. Two other SESAME instruments measured low vaporization activity and a great deal of water ice under the lander.

...

Stephan Ulamec, Philae Lander manager, is confident that we’ll resume contact with Philae next spring when the Sun’s angle in the comet’s sky will have shifted to better illuminate the lander’s solar panels. The team managed to rotate the lander during the night of November 14-15, so that the largest solar panel is now aligned towards the Sun. One advantage of the shady site is that Philae isn’t as likely to overheat as 67P approaches the Sun ... Still, temperatures on the surface have to warm up before the battery can be recharged...

[ForGod'sSake]

Try this on for size. The water is FORMED by the high-energy plasma-discharge interacting with the solar wind, which is made up of stripped protons.

Interestingly enough, that thought occurred to me but having ZERO background in science; in particular chemistry, I didn't even know where or how to begin a search to see if it was even possible. Gratifying to know that my thought processes still function properly -- more or less.

I did some scouting around to see what I could find out generally about Tempel1. Ran across several articles stating water ice or water ice patches were discovered on the comet. Conflicting and contradictory information is everywhere apparently. I discovered one article in my wandering in particular that gave me severe indigestion. If you have time, see what you can make of this item from HERE:

How hot is it on Tempel 1? Researchers made a temperature map of the sunlit side and found the hottest point nearly directly under the sun. It's 329 degrees Kelvin under the sun and 260 in the shade.

The coldest temperature is important because the temperature at which ices such as water, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide turn directly into gas is below 200 degrees Kelvin.

The problem I have is reconciling the fact that from this same article it states 72°F is roughly 295°K. Nowhere near hot enough to cook off anything. Confusing for the layman.

[Swordmaker]

The problem I have is reconciling the fact that from this same article it states 72°F is roughly 295°K. Nowhere near hot enough to cook off anything. Confusing for the layman.

Well, first of all the Kelvin scale would be not reported in degrees. Just Kelvin. The Kelvin scale starts at absolute zero, no molecular motion at all. You also have to consider the factor of pressure. For example, the boiling point of water drops as the pressure drops. At a certain pressure, the boiling point could certainly be 72º F or 295.372 K. That pressure point for water is approximately 1/10 of an atmosphere, or about 1.5 lbs per square inch of pressure. So the reported 329 K would be enough to do the job IF the supposed ice were on the surface.

However, every comet we've visited has never shown an iota of surface ice, and the ice does not "sublimate" off in gentle clouds as proposed but, rather, in highly energetic jets from distinct geyser like points, implying they come from extremely high pressure inside the comet. These not only come from these geyser like jets, they do it from the same locations on the comet for days without seeming to erode the "nozzles" of the jets. If they were constructed of ice, they'd quickly ablate and widen, losing the ability to spew far. . . but they don't.

For the pressure to be built up inside the comet, the solar heating must heat the entire mass of the area surrounding the mass of ice supplying pressure to the jets. . . All the while spinning under the sun, alternating cold and hot sides. Keep in mind also that comets frequently begin their show out beyond the orbit of Jupiter where the temperatures are far lower than the temperatures at which ice is at the triple point in a vacuum.

Triple Point of H₂O on Pressure and Temperature
Note the temperature scale at the bottom of this graph at 1 Pascal, which is as close as this graph
gets to a hard vacuum. The temperatures we are discussing out beyond Jupiter are approximately
-175 C (98 K) to -145º C (128 K) and are WAY below the point show here for ice to turn to vapor.

That vacuum pump we saw on the PBS special could pump the air out of their chamber down below maybe 1 kiloPascal . . . 10 millibars, Maybe she hit 100 Pascals, but I doubt it.

Then she did her magic trick with the infra-red heat lamp from less than a meter away. Think of how much heat she added to that petri dish of not-very-cold ice and dirt (say -5º to -10º C— she was compacting it with her hands, after all). Then look at the chart above. It is no wonder she got what any first semester physics student could get exploring the triple point could get. Gosh. I'm shocked. NOT! I did it in high school back in the mid sixties!

And, then we get back to the question of how does a infinitessimally small chunk of ice, rock, or rocky-road ice-cream with a gravity well of 1-3mm per second per second somehow have a granitic sway over a cloud of particles or whatever 15,000,000 kilometers in diameter (second only in size to the solar heliosphere itself!) and how did that cloud grow to that immense size in a few short months (merely by Boyle's law)? One coma and tail, Comet McNaught, in 2007 stretched an astonishing 1.5 AU, 222 million kilometers! And what causes the comae of comets to glow? The individual particles are not large enough to reflect enough sunlight to Earth. Next, why do comets emit X-ray radiation and radio waves, both of which are electro-magnetic phenomena and findings which repeatedly shock orthodox cosmologists greatly every time they find them at every comet we visit? One would think that after finding the same phenomena at one comet, and then at another, and another, they'd begin to get a clue that comets MIGHT be electrical phenomena.

[Cincinatus]

There is plenty of water ice in the comet nucleus. Look at the data presented here.

[ForGod'sSake]

Thanks for your efforts. The fog is beginning to lift a little.

Shifting gears slightly: I've read several comments that water in its various forms could not exist in deep space. This OLDER ARTICLE says yes, in frozen and vapor form. In its frozen form it has attached itself to dust particles which accounts for ~99% of the water. The remaining ~1% in vapor form. What if comets, because of the nature of their travels, gather up this dust/ice along the way? Maybe on each circuit even, renewing its supply???

[Swordmaker]

What if comets, because of the nature of their travels, gather up this dust/ice along the way? Maybe on each circuit even, renewing its supply???

How? Their gravity is miniscule. The only way that would work would be to again accept an electric nature with a charge that would attract the water.

[ForGod'sSake]

The only way that would work would be to again accept an electric nature with a charge that would attract the water.

To this layman that certainly seems possible. I don't know enough about the density of these dust/ice clouds to know if a charge could build up as a comet passes through them. Or if they would be opposite charges. It seems likely a comet would build up a charge as it moves through any medium. It also seems likely a greater and greater charge would develop as the medium becomes denser. Like when a comet approaches the sun. But that's just a back of the napkin guess, or WAG.

[Dagnabitt]

The builders say that the James Web Space Telescope will be 100x as powerful as Hubble. Game changer - if it gets to its parking spot in working order.

[Swordmaker]

To this layman that certainly seems possible. I don't know enough about the density of these dust/ice clouds to know if a charge could build up as a comet passes through them. Or if they would be opposite charges. It seems likely a comet would build up a charge as it moves through any medium. It also seems likely a greater and greater charge would develop as the medium becomes denser. Like when a comet approaches the sun. But that's just a back of the napkin guess, or WAG.

The comet is going to be so much more highly charged than anything they will encounter they won't pickup any charges. . . let me suggest you start visiting the pre-eminent site for all things on the Electric Universe, Thunderbolts.info, where you can start reading their "Picture of the Day" and the essays that go along with them. Some of them have been written by, or cite, Nobel Laureates. . . and other scientists who follow this.

You can also go to the YouTube channel The Thunderbolts Project and watch their specials and videos to be introduced to some of the lectures given by their people on the multi-disciplinary evidence that bolsters the theories. Some of the evidence includes data from such disparate fields as archaeology, paleontology, comparative mythology, Comparative Theology, Astronomy, Plasma physics, Classical Physics, Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Epistemology, Catastrophism, and a host of others. I highly recommend you start with the feature length documentaries:

Symbols of an Alien Sky (Full Documentary)

Symbols of an Alien Sky: The Lightning Scarred Planet Mars (Full Documentary) — 01:18:26

Symbols of an Alien Sky: The Electric Comet: (Full Documentary) — 01:29:02

Thunderbolts of the Gods | Official Movie — 1:03:52

It will blow your mind because the concepts are mind blowing. Be prepared to throw out many age old concepts and be willing to keep an open mind. This is truly a multi-disciplinary study that challenges the orthodox views of many sciences who have swept many problems in their scientific data under the rug because they chose to ignore the hard questions.

For example, one simple question is why did every ancient culture on Earth focus on SATURN as our luminary? And why did every depiction of it either present the luminary as a circle with another circle in it or as a circle with multiple spokes inside it going to a central axel?

Ancient images of Earth's Luminary

Yet today, if you were to ask any school child to draw the sun, they would invariably draw this image:

But that is NOT what our ancestors drew. . . not once. . . at least not our ancient ancestors more than 8,000 years ago. They drew complex images of circles with other circles inside or wheels with spokes, sometimes multiple spokes, and almost always at the top of a tower or or occasionally a spiral like structure, the Axis Mundi. And our later ancestors remembered that spoked wheel in later mythology in out later gods.

And why is this image, and variations of it, found carved in stone everywhere, on every continent except Antarctica, around the world?

SquatterMan

And why do all of those petroglyph images, carved by ancient peoples, bear remarkable similarities to these images of LABORATORY HIGH EMERGY PLASMA?

The laboratory verified configuration includes a
transparent “champagne glass” form above, a transparent
“hollow donut” (when seen edge-on), and the “squashed bell” form
below, all joined by an axial spine running down from the “head” of the figure.

Every one of the thousands of these stylized petroglyph figures can be duplicated in the plasma laboratory. . . and some of them, the ones that show multiple toroids, are so energetic in the x-ray spectrum that it is likely the artist who scratched the image in the rock did not live long after witnessing the object in his sky and replicating it on the rock. These things etched in the rocks all over the earth were actually seen in the sky's by our ancient ancestors.

The Origin of Petroglyphs—Recordings of a Catastrophic Aurora in Human Prehistory?

D.A. Scott1 and A. L. Peratt
Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545

USAPetroglyphs are images created on rock by means of carving or ‘pecking’ the outer surface to expose the surface underneath. They are found on all continents except Antarctica. The purpose of this paper is an attempt to explain how in man’s prehistory recordings of high-energy-density phenomena (some not experimentally recorded until the last few years) could have been carved on rock in an accurate, systematic, and apparently temporally accurate fashion. Based on the compilation and analysis of the order of 50,000 digitally recorded petroglyphs, we have identified several dozen general categories of instabilities whose morphology is that of a highly nonlinear pinched plasma column generally associated with multi-mega-ampere Z-pinch experiments. We shall present the direct comparison of the temporal evolution of experimental instabilities with petroglyphs, indicating that nearly all archaic carvings match the phenomena that might be produced in an intense and long-lasting aurora. One category is illustrated below

High Energy Plasma Instabilities (R) — Matching Petroglyphs (L)

This work was partially supported for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia. We are indebted to Prof. William S-Y. Wang for calling our attention to a connection between archaic petroglyphs and the Chinese Language.

D. A. Scott and A.L. Peratt, 'The origin of petroglyphs- Recordings of a catastrophic aurora in human prehistory, IEEE Int. Conf. Plasma Sci., Jeju, Korea,p.143, 2003.

1. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA USA

All of this, and a heck of a lot more point to answers that orthodox science ignores by sweeping things under the rug and looking the other way because they cannot explain the discrepancies so long as they ignore the effect of electricity in the Universe. Electricity has had a profound effect on mankind throughout history and pre-history and we will not understand until we embrace those facts.

As I said, be prepared for shocks. This WILL shake your world view.

[ForGod'sSake]

Thanks for the links. I'm already familiar with much of what the Thunderbolts people have done. I haven't seen the comet video so I'll take a look at that one tomorrow sometime.

A side note on the dust/ice business. It's fairly apparent there is at least SOME ice on the surface of SOME comets so I was offering up an uneducated explanation for how it got there. As highly charged as comets appear to be, they will inevitably gather opposite charged particles as they tour the cosmos, no? And if, as the article stated, there is in fact dust/ice present in space, this COULD account for it being present on comets?

Anyhow, it's late and this is truly interesting stuff but the comet video will have to wait til tomorrow.

[MaxMax]

Bump for later. Incredible.

[Swordmaker]

A side note on the dust/ice business. It's fairly apparent there is at least SOME ice on the surface of SOME comets so I was offering up an uneducated explanation for how it got there. As highly charged as comets appear to be, they will inevitably gather opposite charged particles as they tour the cosmos, no? And if, as the article stated, there is in fact dust/ice present in space, this COULD account for it being present on comets?

That could be the answer. . . if space were crowded with dust. It isn't. However, Sake. either answer has to recognize that massive charges in space are the cause of the dust on the surface, which has been predicted by the EU cosmologists because it is a logical result of electrical machining that is also observable in the laboratory.

This may seem like an illogical jump, but consider the ejecta rays from what is assumed to be meteor impact crater Tyco on the Moon:

Tycho Crater

Notice anything odd? Almost every one of the ejecta rays is not a radii from the center of the impact! It seems as if they took a sharp turn after being ejected from the impact before leaving the vicinity of the crater. Why? How? What force caused that?

In any case, in the EU view, that ejecta is dust and particles from a bolt of lightning escaping from what has been mischaracterized as a meteor crater but what is actually an Electron Peak, formed by the rush of electrons build-up, as are the rays themselves, flowing toward the point of potential before discharge, before the initial bolt leaves, and the crater is the return strike.

When the brilliant engineer, Ralph Juergens, considered the lunar craters Tycho and Aristarchus, he noted the distinct features of electrical discharge. He wrote in 1974, “…If Aristarchus and Tycho were produced by electric discharges, their clean floors would be just about what one would expect. The abilities of discharges to produce melting on cathode [negatively charged] surfaces and generally to ‘clean up’ those surfaces have been remarked upon since the earliest experiments with electric discharges”.

Juergens envisioned an interplanetary arc between the Moon and an approaching body (for his analysis, he summoned the planet Mars). While an instantaneous explosion does not have time to create a lava lake, an electric arc involving a long-distance flow of current between two approaching bodies, “would persist beyond the instant of any initial touchdown explosion”, leaving material melted in place.

Juergens saw Tycho as a “cathode crater”, and he drew special attention to Tycho’s “spectacular system of rays”. These, he suggested, are the very kind of streamers an electrical theorist would look for—a signature of the electron pathways that triggered the Tycho discharge.

Of course, the astronomers’ consensus today is that the streamers are the trails of material ejected from the crater into narrow paths over extraordinary distances. But the “rays”, Juergens noted, have no discernible depth, while material exploding from a Tycho-sized crater “would at least occasionally fall more heavily in one place than in another and build up substantial formations. But no one has ever been able to point out such a ray ‘deposit’”.

The presence of the narrow rays over such long distances, according to Juergens, is “all-but-impossible to reconcile with ejection origins. Enormous velocities of ejection must be postulated to explain the lengths of the rays, yet the energetic processes responsible for such velocities must be imagined to be focused very precisely to account for the ribbon-thin appearance of the rays”. In fact, this challenge has found no answer in more recent scientific exploration. No experimental explosion at any scale has ever produced anything comparable to the well-defined 1500-kilometer “rays” of Tycho. —Source

Then there is Crater Aristarchus, the second largest on the Moon, which is surrounded by a very strange ejecta field, that is anything but straight "spokes" radiating from a center crater.

Aristarchus Crater (circled)

Look at this larger, over-all photo of the moon showing both craters with their surrounding fields, and then compare that surrounding field to this photograph of the aftermath of a lightning strike at a golf course:

Lightning Strike showing Lichtenberg figures of Electron paths

Lichtenberg figures are the twisting, contorted fractal pathways that electrons carve all the way down to the molecular level on their way of least resistance to escape during a cathode blister lightning strike. Most people think that lightning come down from the clouds, but the main bolt goes UP from the ground.

Look again at the two craters on the moon and you will see the Lichtenberg figures under the rays. . . they are far more obvious at Aristarchus.

The point is that as the electrons flow outward, they carry other material with them. This material having a lot more mass than an electron does fall eventually back around the point of ejection.

[chimera]

That’s Copernicus crater you have circled.

[Swordmaker]

That’s Copernicus crater you have circled.

You are correct. What a boner. Aristarchus is northwest of there. . . I was using Duck Duck Go, and the image I chose originally was correct. . . and then I didn't check on posting. I just did it again and got a plain rock strewn field of nothing, no crater. Strange. The close-ups showed the correct crater with a second one nearby. This one should be correct. Sorry about that.

But the point remains the same. Here is the original photo of Aristarchus. Copernicus also shows the same Lichtenberg figures.

Crater Aristarchus

[Swordmaker]

That’s Copernicus crater you have circled.

i tracked down where Duck Duck Go found it. . .

Source

[Swordmaker]

Oh, thanks for catching that. I appreciate it.

[chimera]

Strange that they would have made such an error. One of the canceled Apollo missions (18) was targeted for Copernicus. We should have gone there and checked it out.

[Swordmaker]

Strange that they would have made such an error. One of the canceled Apollo missions (18) was targeted for Copernicus. We should have gone there and checked it out.

My bad was was that beyond noticing the circle, I also did not really look at the photo that posted. I assumed it was correct and wound up making an ass out of me and although the thrust of the post is really not affected the accuracy is. I don't know where that blog post found THEIR photo, but a concatenation of errors does not excuse my not looking and seeing. I know the difference from studying the Moon many moons ago when i was in my early teens. It was an unconscious error on my part because I was mostly concentrating on the striations of the surroundings, rather than the exact location of the crater. I should have noticed it was not a double crater and the obvious location error. Sheesh!

There would have been a lot to lean from a jaunt to Copernicus, but I think even more could have been learned from going to Aristarchus, which may be one of the newest craters on the Moon. However, there could have been line of sight communication problems, being more on the limb of the Moon than at Copernicus' more central location.

[chimera]

Copernicus is one of my favorite lunar features. I had a 3" refractor with a clock drive and I would spend many hours just looking at it in different lighting and various magnifications. Then some asswipe stole my 'scope in a burglary.

The one reprocessed lunar orbiter view of Copernicus is still pretty awesome:

[ForGod'sSake]

I watched the comet video and was duly impressed. Very compelling presentation. Now I’m off to watch the Mars video before my eyelids start to slam shut. I have marvelled over the various plasma/electromagnetic stuff for some time but never seem to be able to follow through because other interests invariably intrude.