Posted on 07/05/2002 8:39:21 PM PDT by Will_Zurmacht
Russia Proposes Sending Team to Mars Fri Jul 5, 3:58 PM ET By MARA D. BELLABY, Associated Press Writer
MOSCOW (AP) - Russian space officials proposed an ambitious project on Friday to send a six-person team to Mars by the year 2015, a trip that would mark a milestone in space travel and international space cooperation.
Russia's space program hopes to work closely with the American agency NASA ( news - web sites) and the European Space Agency to build two spaceships capable of transporting the crew to Mars, supporting them on the planet for up to two months and safely bringing them home, said Nikolai Anfimov, head of the Central Research Institute of Machine-Building.
The roughly 440-day trip is expected to cost about $20 billion, with Russia suggesting it would contribute 30 percent.
"It must be an international project," said Vitaly Semyonov, head of the Mars project at the M.V. Keldysha Space Research Center. "No one country could cope alone with this task."
Russian space officials said they are receiving encouraging signs of interest from NASA and European counterparts.
But NASA spokeswoman Delores Beasley said Friday that the Russians have not submitted any formal plan and that the agency would not comment on the proposed trip before then. Because of demands from Congress to scale back costs, human travel to Mars has not been on NASA's radar recently.
"We are still very far away," conceded Alain Fournier-Sicre, head of the European Space Agency's permanent mission in Russia. "But this kind of program is a long-term initiative for every space agency in the world," he said, adding that he held a meeting with Russian space officials this week to discuss the project.
Landing humans on Mars has long been a dream of Russian space scientists. But even in the heyday of the Soviet space program, when Moscow reported success after success, its attempts to reach the Red Planet were marked by failure. Soviet scientists began whispering about a "Mars curse."
The Soviet Union kicked off Mars exploration in 1960 by launching two unmanned spacecraft four days apart, but both failed even to make it as far as Earth's orbit. One resulted in an engine explosion that scattered debris and contamination over the Baikonur launch pad in one of the worst accidents in Soviet space history.
That was followed by repeated attempts and often repeated disappointment. The bad luck for Russia continued on Nov. 16, 1996, when the Russians launched an ambitious $300 million spacecraft, Mars 96, which they hoped would prove to the world that despite their economic struggles after the Soviet breakup, they could still run a first-rate space program. Mars 96 suffered an engine failure just after launch and crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
Anfimov said that despite the setbacks, "we never stopped planning and seeking opportunities to reach our next goal: Mars."
NASA's Mars program, plagued by its own series of setbacks, got back on track earlier this year when the unmanned Mars Odyssey spacecraft entered orbit around the planet and began mapping the mineral and chemical makeup of the surface.
Anatoly Grigoryev, director of the Institute of Medical-Biological Problems, which works with all of Russia's cosmonauts, said Russia's plan calls for a cargo and a manned ship, which would consist of a commander, a second pilot, a flight engineer, a doctor and two researchers. Three members of the team would descend to Mars, while the other three would remain onboard the ship in orbit.
Grigoryev said the trip could answer many of the remaining questions about Earth's mysterious neighbor.
"Is there life on Mars? If there is, what kind of life?" Grigoryev said, barely able to suppress his excitement. "This would be historic."
If the Russkies beat us to Mars I'll eat my foot.... I guess they want "International Team"...hmmm
But, a tryout, to qualify for a serious trip to Mars; first, put Ivan on the Moon.
Then, we'll talk.
Da?
And we continue to try to impose our will on the rest of the world. Shame on U.S. - God Bless George Washington and his Farewell Address.
To me at least, the pyramid is four sided and the four triangular sides are clear enough, and I've marked them with green lines. The other part of the image amounts to some sort of an enclosed corridor or causeway leading out from one corner of the pyramid, and then two nearly rectangular features at the end of that causeway, which may be doors or some sort of adjunct buildings. There also seems to be a line going from the Eastern corner of the pyramid to the two rectangular objects, which I've marked with a blue line, but I suspect that's just an edge of sand being blown up into a sort of an apron abutting the pyramid, and that the hollow between the pyramid and the corridor would naturally trap sand.
Nonetheless, there was little or no mention whatsoever in the press of this new pyramid image, and this was largely because press coverage centered around the new image of the face which NASA released:
This image was said to prove the entire controversy regarding Cydonia to be a bunch of buncombe, and to prove that the structures at Cydonia all to be natural geological formations.
More recently, Dr. Tom Van Flandern, a former director of celestial mechanics at the Naval Abservatory, and others have noted that the image which NASA and JPL released, aside from being a worst possible case in terms of viewing angle and lighting, had actually been "cleaned up" or something like that via the use of a high-pass filter which is a standard image processing device for removing detail. Van Flandern notes that the basic help function for Adobe's Photo Shop product notes:
High Pass Filter: Retains edge details where sharp color transitions occur and suppresses the rest of the image. The filter removes low-frequency detail in an image. Useful for extracting line-art and large black-and-white areas from scanned images.
Van Flandern notes that, as to JPL's motives in using such a filter device on this particular image and then handing it to the public, "we are left with an unhappy choice between dishonesty and incompetence."
When we consider that the raw image looks like:
and that the same image with minimal computer enhancement, which does not add any information looks like:
All of that is bad enough, i.e. it might convince people that NASA and JPL told a big, stupid lie to the American people and to the world. But it's getting worse; consider the new and more direct overhead image of the face which NASA released during May of 2001.
Several things are clear. First and most obvious is that anybody still trying to claim that this thing is a mesa or any other kind of natural formation is dillusional. I notice several things, which I have indicated in the marked-up image below
First is that there is only one possible way to build such a thing, i.e. to pile up stones into the rough shape you need, large stones on the bottom and then progressively smaller ones, and then put some sort of a hard facing over the entire thing. You can see how this has been done in the image. On the left side from which wind and sand come, the facing is almost entirely eroded and, even where the underlying stone shows, everything has been worn smooth. On the right side, we can see that part of the facing remains, much of it having fallen off to the side in heaps. We can see the cutout in the facing for the left eye which I have noted, and we can see where the facing fell and broke away from the nose, which is what you would expect. We can also see the rough stones of the nose area, which have not all been worn smooth.
Second is that the megalith is heavily damaged, and has suffered more than one kind of damage. My guess is that the entire rock plate on which the megalith sits was picked up and slammed down, and that the megalith was deformed in the process. You can see the places where the hard casement has been pulled apart on the right side. The megalith has been compressed along the axis from lower left to upper right which I have marked with the blue line, and stretched along the other axis from lower right to upper left. The angle A between the line of the headdress on the left side and the line along the top is thus less than the original 90 degrees. The line through the center of the face has been deformed from the original straight line to the curved line which I have drawn. The basic shape of the mouth is still there, albeit moved to the left as I have noted. You can see where the outer casing has broken away from part of the outline of the mouth on the right.
You can see the ridge along the eyebrows as I have noted, you can see the indentation for the right eye and the outline of the left eye cut into the facing and still in reasonably good shape. You can see the rise for the nose as well as the area where the casing broke away from the nose on the right, and part of the remains of nostrils, and you can see the basic lines of the mouth.
Unless of course you're STUPID like the feebs at NASA who're still working triple shifts trying to convince the world this thing is a mesa. In that kind of case, no amount of technology will help. There has never been a cure for stupidity, and there will never be one.
A short while ago, Dr. Van Flandern and other associates gave a presentation at the National Press Club which may be viewed at Metaresearch.
Information has been coming in for two or three years now from the device presently over Mars. Massive evidence of Mars having been inhabited fairly recently has been accumulating. As Metaresearch and other www sites dealing with the subject note, this includes evidence of settlements:
Click on image for full NASA image. Note the terracing, and the rows of structures which are heavily weathered to the upper right of the image but which retain their rectangular corners on the lower left (leeward) side.
Other human faces have been found carved in the surface, e.g.:
Numerous other things intended to be viewed from off-planet have been documented at Metaresearch, Cydonia Files, and other sites.
What then drives the basic instinct of NASA and JPL to bury this story? One possible motive which has been suggested involves the division of funding between manned and unmanned space missions at NASA and JPL. But, more realistically, the major problem which the Cydonia findings presents to the people in these agencies is one of basic scientific paradigms. Nobody could build all of this stuff on this kind of a megalithic scale with space-suits on; the planet has to be habitable for Cydonia to get built. This is a huge problem, in that it would require a totally different basic theory of the history of our solar system from the one which the scientists have. There is simply no way, given the standard paradigm, in which Mars could have ever been habitable. It would always have been too cold, and it would never have had the gravity necessary to hold a livable atmosphere, assuming that gravity is the only thing which ever holds atmosphere to planets.
The standard scientific axiomatic scheme including the basic doctrine of uniformitarianism, evolution etc. etc. does not allow for solar-system-wide catastrophes within the age of man, nonetheless, that is precisely what we have here. Those newer face images are definitely modern people and not early hominids. Nothing involving modern people here, on Mars, or anywhere else figures to be millions of years gone by, and nothing capable of destroying the planet next to us and making a dead world of it would have gone unnoticed by our ancestors.
What we have here is another case of junk science, i.e. the theory of evolution and the doctrine of uniformity, destroying research and logical thinking amongst scientists. The science pages of our journals are filled by descriptions of NASA projects to search for microbes on Mars while studiously ignoring major evidence that they have found a city there, as if germs were important, and cities were not.
I looked into his "theory" of gravitation in depth. He simply is insane. He contends, e.g., that gravity waves travel faster than light--at infinite speed, in fact.
He has been debunked many times, and has zero credibility.
--Boris
do it..
Van Flandern is a former director of celestial mechanics at the Naval Observatory. What sort of credentials do YOU have to be calling somebody like that a "kook"
Big plans are easy with other people's money.
EXACTLY.
Doc
Only a Master's degree from M.I.T.
As I said, he has been thoroughly discredited; his notions of gravity for instance are risible. And your credentials?
--Boris
I heard on a radio program many years ago, by one of the early CBS NASA reporters that NASA's charter had a clause in it that gave NASA the right to withold exploration discoveries should those discoveries challege fundamental religous beliefs. I've searched and searched on the net for such a statement and have'nt found it yet.
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