November 2003
The news items below are updated daily and will cover any paranormal and interesting topics we come across.
They are written by HUFOS member, Rita A. Jennings, who kindly donates her time and effort in keeping these
News In General pages full of upto date information.
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Rita Jennings |
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Don't forget we hold a monthly meeting every second Tuesday
of every month were we read out more interesting news items like these.
(See Monthly Meetings link on the left hand side of this page)
Eclipse Of The Moon - There is going to be a lunar eclipse of the moon which will take place on November 8th and 9th 2003 from around
10.20 pm. According to the chairman of the Hull and East Riding
Astronomical Society "This will be one to watch."
The first part is when the moon passes through the outer part of the earth's shadow from about 10.20pm. and is
usually hard to see. The first thing you will notice is a darker notch cut out of the uper left of the moon, round about 11.40.pm. Then by about 1.05am.
on Sunday the whole of the sun's disc will appear anything from a bright coppery red to a dark bronze in colour. Click here if you want to watch a
30 second movie clip showing the eclipse in full.
26th October 2003 - Dutch UFO - A couple walking near the
Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) in the Netherlands
took some photo's. The WSRT is located in a park near the village of Westerbork and does astronomical research. It has been trying to locate hydrogen
in nearby galaxies and also Nasa had asked Westerbork to try and locate the missing Mars Polar Lander. When the couple looked at the photo's they
noticed they had captured a UFO. A lot of crop circles as well as UFO's seem to be spotted near radio telescopes. About a year ago a crop circle was
formed with a ET face in England. Some say this circle contained a message to a question we had sent out into space years ago.
Nasa Baffled By Mystery Light - Jonathan Burnett, 15 year, old took a digital photo of a bright light sailing through the sky. And curiously enough,
another photographer captured the same image from a different angle. Scientists around the world have been baffled by the mysterious light, as
apparently it was not a meteor. Jonathan who lives in Wales was with friends when he saw the colourful fireball. Thinking it was a meteor, he took a
photo and sent it off to Nasa. On the 1st October, Nasa's Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell posted the photograph on Space.com saying that "a
sofa-sized rock came hurtling into the nearby atmosphere of planet Earth and disintegrated." They called the picture "One of the more spectacular
meteor images yet recorded." But, it was not a meteor. At first people thought it might be space-junk re-entering the atmosphere and all sorts of
idea's were put forward. But then Nasa discovered that a Julian Heywood who lives 10 miles from Jonathan had also taken a photo of the same object.
This has ruled out the possibility that Jonathan's photo was a hoax and scientists all around the world are now baffled by what this picture shows.
Near Earth Asteroids - On the 1st November 2003 there were 542 known potentially hazardous asteroids. In October 2003, There were 4
asteroids ranging from 8 - 31 ld from Earth.(ld. is the "Lunar Distance" - 1 ld. equal's 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the
Moon.)
China's Moon Plan - China's first astronaut Yong Liwei has been making his first public appearance since he orbited the Earth. China are planning to
launch a probe to orbit the Moon in the next 3 to 5 years the official Xinhua agency says. The Moon probe will be launched on one of China's Long
March 111 A Rockets. They plan to have a permanent manned space station in the future.
Solar Storms - According to scientists, solar activity that is being observed "May not be over yet." The two large gas clouds that reached Earth
this last week have been described as "Unprecedented.". Aircraft traversing the North Atlantic were confined to a narrow corridor to minimise
radiation exposure. Astronauts onboard the International Space Station had to take shelter in the most shielded section of the station. Astronauts
Michael Foale and Alexander Keleri spent 20 minutes per orbit in the Zvezda module, which is the most protected area of the station. This had been
done before in April and November 2001.
Satellites Malfunction - Two Japanese satellites malfunctioned and workers on a Norwegian highway had to stop work as they
relied on satellite positioning The Mars Express spacecraft which is on the way to Mars was hit by a cloud of charged particles, but it is designed to
withstand such events. The Smart-1 mission on its way to the Moon has suffered some disruption to it's "ION" engine. The engine shut down
automatically at one point but then restarted without any problem.
The Spacecraft XMM-Newton and Integral, in highly elliptical orbits had detected
radiation, probably from solar flare, but these are safe and operational. In 2001, XMM-Newton survived the largest solar flare ever recorded. On
Tuesday last week, the sounds of the solar flare were picked up by Nasa's
Cassini Spacecraft which is on it's way to Saturn and it's moons. Astronomers are saying that the "Sun may not
be finished with us yet."
Largest Ever Solar Flare - X-Ray detectors on the GOES satellite detected a massive solar flare which lasted for 11 minutes. It was in 2001
when such a thing last happened. This flare was classified as an X22, the biggest ever recorded, but the latest one has been recorded as the largest ever.
Dr. Ernest Hildner, director of the NOAA/Nasa Space Weather Centre,
stated that "The solar flare today (4th November) is so large that we do not have a chart high enough to register it." They think it is
somewhere between a X-25 and an X-30. Severe radio black-out was noticed in North America by ionizing radiation from the flare hitting the earth's
atmosphere. The explosion also hurled a coronal mass ejection into space which might hit our magnetic field today - 5th November.
No Men On The Moon For China - Apparently, China have now declared "China has no plans in place for a human Moon landing." This is according to Wang Yongzhi.
Chief designer to China's manned space engineering programme. They have now set out three new targets......................
According to other space officials, China plans to send a probe to circle the Moon in 3 - 5 years. Two more astronauts are to be sent into orbit onboard a ship to be called Shenzhou 6.
and this mission will last at least 24 hours The Chinese scientist's are busy at the moment involved in research to create a spaceship to accommodate the two astronauts.
Search For Planets Cancelled - The ESA mission to look for planets circling other stars has been cancelled. The mission due for 2008 has seen over 400 astronomers writing and
requesting that the mission go ahead. But due to budget problems caused by the delay of the troubled Ariane 5 rocket and problems with the lander segment of a mission to Mercury, it
was cancelled. It is the first time an ESA space mission has been cancelled. The Eddington planet-search mission was a state of the art programme designed to observe nearby stars and
look for planets circling them. Also cancelled, the BepiColombo mission to Mercury. ESA and the Japanese space agency JAXA are still to put 2 orbiters around Mercury but it will have no
lander as it was decided to try to land on a planet so near the sun was just too difficult at present. A loan of 100 million euro has temporarily been granted, but has to be paid back out of
present resources by the end of 2006. So the only new mission to be started is the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) pathfinder. This Lisa mission in cooperation with the U.S. is
scheduled for launch in 2012. The mission is the worlds first space-borne gravitational wave astronomical observatory.
Voyager - Voyager 1, launched 26 years ago is now 8.4 billion miles from the Sun (90 times the distance separating the Earth from the Sun) and
may now have reached the end of our Solar System. Scientists are divided on whether it has passed into uncharted regions where the suns sphere of influence begins to wane. Len Fisk,
of the University of Michigan states "Whether Voyager 1 has reached that mark or is still on approach remains unclear, with two teams of scientists providing evidence for both claims in
the journal Nature, he says neither explanation is certain." Scientists have been studying data from Voyager 1 to support their theories. Louis Lanzerotti, of Bell Laboratories, says "The solar
wind speed tailed off in August 2002 - suggesting Voyager 1 temporarily reached the boundary. Other teams from the University of Maryland think "We are not there yet." Voyager 2 is
trailing it's twin Voyager 1 so further observations should resolve the dispute and provide further information about this never before region." The nuclear-fuelled probes should last until
2020.
Martian Soil - In Chiles's Atacama desert they have discovered something that should shed some light on the landings of the Viking spacecraft on Mars in the 1970's - Martian like
Soil. This soil has similar chemical properties to the red planets, dry and largely devoid of organic matter or microbial life. This could explain why tests which were conducted on the Mar's
Viking mission raised false hopes about life on other planets.The Mars spacecraft landed in 1976 and a biology expedition on Viking 1 detected strange signs of activity in the Martian soil,
which was akin to microbes giving off gas. The United States space agency (NASA) did some more tests to look for organic matter, but the Viking experiments failed to find carbon, which
is the basic building block of life. So it was concluded that Mar's was a dead planet. Nasa put the results down to the presence of powerful oxidising agents in the Martian soil. But some
scientists have never accepted this explanation and have asked for the experiments to be repeated, but upto now, this has never been done. Dr. Richard Quinn states "The unanswered
question is whether Viking failed to detect certain types of organic compound on Mars." And so, the possibility remains that organic matter might have been there all the time.
New Experiments now need to be done on Mars.The Soil from Atacama desert is extremely dry and similar to the area's of Mars investigated by the Viking missions. Low water levels and
sunlight have created a chemical cycle that decomposes organic materials and inhibits life, and when the researchers repeated the Viking experiments on the Atacama soil, they came up
with similar results. They did however find minute traces of organic matter at levels lower than the Viking experiments would have been able to detect on Mars. In development now are two
new instruments, one to characterise chemical processes on Mars (Mars Oxidant Instrument)
and one to detect organic compounds (Mars Oxidant Detector).
It is hoped that these instruments can be used on Mars to identify soils that may have contained life at some point in the planet's history. This research has been published in the journal Science.
Space Telescope Greased Up - Nasa's Chandra X-ray observatory has been in orbit since
1999 to study signals from black holes and other distant objects has become coated with grease. New Scientist Magazine says "Some materials used on the space craft can evaporate in
a vacuum and will often gather on nearby cool surfaces." According to Herman Marshall, an
astrophysicist in the United States "There is ten times as much contamination as we expected at launch." Scientists working on the data which it has gathered have been hampered by this
problem, although calculations have been made taking into account this fault. Experts have now to find a way to remove the coating from the filter. One of the possibilities is to heat up the
observatory in order to boil away the contamination. But experts will have to weight this up against damaging the camera and the telescope if they do this. Chandra is one of Nasa's flagship
telescopes, it is of the same programme which saw the Hubble Space Telescope
orbit space and send back some spectacular images of planets and outer space.
Beagle 2 Nears Mars - British spacecraft Beagle 2 is on it's final stage of it's six-month journey to Mars, after the rocket thrust manoeuvred the space craft on a straight course to
the planet. It is now 43.5 Million miles from Earth and has another 12.5. million miles left. Before Mars Express goes into orbit, 6 days before, on the 19th December 2003, Beagle 2 will
detach itself from the mother ship, spinning to keep it on a stable straight path. Both craft should reach Mars about the same time on Christmas Day. Mars Express will circle the planet and
Beagle 2 will parachute down to the surface (Fingers Crossed). It will land on an impact crater called
Isidis Planitia
which is just north to the Martian equator. This is about 620
miles wide and a region where scientists suspect they might find traces of ancient life. It will bounce down onto the surface at 36 mph. on 3 large inflatable balloons and it will then open up
like a pocket watch to expose it's solar panels and instruments.
Ice On The Moon- Predictions about abundant water to be found on the Moon look as though they have been premature. 5 years ago Nasa's Lunar Prospector Spacecraft found
evidence of large amounts of water ice in deep polar craters. These craters never saw the sunlight. Also, high levels of hydrogen, which combines with oxygen to form water were also
discovered. Experts speculated that in the future, Moon Colonies would have abundant water and fuel. A team of scientist at the
Smithsonian Institution
in Washington DC, led by Bruce
Campbell, used the world's biggest radio telescope to probe deep into the moon's polar craters, but it has revealed no sign of thick ice deposits. The
Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico
beamed Radar signals which penetrated 20 ft. but found no sign of thick layers of ice. In the journal
Nature,
findings reported suggest that any water on the moon is likely to exist as
scattered grains or thin layers embedded in rock. They state "Areas of the crater floors at the poles are in permanent shadow from the Sun, which are potential cold traps for water or other
volatiles, and do not give rise to strong radar echoes like those associated with thick ice deposits in the polar craters on Mercury."
Huge Body Circling The Sun - A large object has been found by astronomers orbiting the Sun near Neptune's Orbit. An automated Sky survey project, which searches for
asteroids that may be on a Earth impact course discovered it. It is 570 km across, which makes it one of the largest objects of it's kind in modern times. The new object is made of rock
and ice, is designated 2003 VS2. When re-examing past records, astronomers have found it in images taken as far back as 1998. It is one of the largest objects found in the Kuiper Belt
region of Space. This region of space is littered with small rocky worlds orbiting the Sun.
Kuiper Belt Objects
Icy Planetary bodies that orbit beyond Neptune in the distant region of the Solar System.
More than 400 such objects are currently known.
They are believed to be remnants of the formation of the Solar System and among the most primitive objects available for study.
It was discovered by the automated Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) project using a large telescope at Mount Palomar in California. US.
Beagle 2 - If you have been following the progress of Beagle 2, then if you watch Channel 4 (UK Only) (Xmas Schedule, date not know yet), they are to show a live
broadcast from Mars. This will be 1 of 5 Lectures from Dr. Monica Grady of the
Natural History Museum
and will be devoted to Beagle 2. The probe, Europe 's first, is due to land on Christmas Day. Alex James of the band Blur is to provide the music for the programme.
Roswell May Not Have Been The First UFO Encounter - According to a Mr. Hal McKenzie writing in
cosmictribune.com
a Charlotte Mann states her grandfather, Rev. Williams
Huffman went to a crash site at Cape Girardeau, Missouri in 1941 to "Bless the bodies of 3 dead aliens." When her grandmother died in 1984 she confessed that her husband had been
called to the site. Police, Firemen, FBI agents and photographers were also there. He looked inside the UFO and said he saw hieroglyphics and writing of the kind that had been seen inside
the Roswell craft. Sci-Fi channel has made a TV. documentary on the crash and UFO researcher Ryan Wood obtained Charlotte Mann's testimony stating she "Saw a photograph of one of
the dead aliens." Rev. Huffman described the saucer as metallic in colour, no seams. It had been broken open at one point so he could see inside. He saw a small metal chair, gauges and
dials. The thing that most impressed him was around the inside there were inscriptions and writing. He said it "Looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics." There were 3 (Non-Human) entities lying on
the ground. Two were just outside the saucer and a third was further out (This funnily enough is the same as described at the Roswell site). The entity was about 4 foot tall and
appeared to have no bone structure, soft looking. He assumed he had a suit on, but it could have been his skin. It looked crinkled, like soft aluminium foil. It had very long hands' long
fingers. He thinks there were 3, but cannot recall. The picture was passed down to Charlottes father, Guy Huffman, he gave it to Walter Fisk around 1953 - 55. Stanton Friedman,
(UFO researcher) tracked Fisk down to New Mexico, but so far Fisk has refused to talk to him.
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