Image (Credit): Artist’s rending of the two EscaPADE probems approaching Mars. (NASA)
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is scheduled to be launched tomorrow afternoon with two Martian probes on board. A lot is riding on tomorrow’s launch. The mission is important for Blue Origin, as it tests its new rocket with its first real mission. It is also important to NASA, which is using the probes to better understand the Martian atmosphere.
Blue Origin’s reusable New Glenn rocket will put it in direct competition with SpaceX for future NASA missions. This redundancy is needed, particularly with SpaceX seeming to struggle with its projects related to the Atemis lunar mission.
The $100 million Martian mission, called Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE), involves a pair of identical spacecraft with a the goal of analyzing:
how Mars’ magnetic field guides particle flows around the planet,
how energy and momentum are transported from the solar wind through the magnetosphere, and
what processes control the flow of energy and matter into and out of the Martian atmosphere.
The two probes will be launched towards Lagrange Point 2, where they will sit for more than a year before making an approach towards Mars. The probes are expected to go into orbit around Mars in September 2027.
Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) is very interested in obtaining some additional observational data from NASA regarding the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS. In her letter to NASA (shown below), she said the information is “…of great importance to advancing our understanding of interstellar visitors and their interaction with our solar system.”
It appears this interest follows comments from Harvard scientist Avi Loeb about the object possibly being an alien spaceship.
All of this is starting to sound the plot in Arthur C. Clark’s book Rendezvous with Rama.
Image (Credit): The Pismis 24 star cluster as captured by the JWST. (NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI, A. Pagan (STScI))
This week’s amazingly vibrant image was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It shows a young star cluster, called Pismis 24, which is approximately 5,500 light-years away.
What appears to be a craggy, starlit mountaintop kissed by wispy clouds is actually a cosmic dust-scape being eaten away by the blistering winds and radiation of nearby, massive, infant stars.Home to a vibrant stellar nursery and one of the closest sites of massive star birth, Pismis 24 provides rare insight into large and massive stars. This region is one of the best places to explore the properties of hot young stars and how they evolve.
If you have questions about UFOs, now fashionable called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) to presumably add some seriousness and move it away from the kooky crowd, you might want to check out the upcoming film The Age of Disclosure. It will be available on November 21 on Amazon Prime as well as at select theaters.
Here is the trailer, which might entice you. It has the draw of many entertainment thrillers, and reminds me of the endless videos on YouTube and even Netflix describing secrets only a few know. It comes across as an updated version of the search for Bigfoot and the Arch of the Covenant rolled into one.
The film description states:
The Age of Disclosure is an unprecedented and revelatory film –featuring 34 senior members of the U.S. Government, military, and intelligence community– revealing a cover-up of the existence of non-human intelligent life and a secret war to reverse engineer technology of non-human origin.
The film exposes the profound impact the situation has on the future of humanity, while providing a look behind-the-scenes with those at the forefront of the bi-partisan disclosure effort.
An explosive documentary that reveals an 80-year global cover-up of non-human intelligent life and a secret war among major nations to reverse-engineer advanced technology of non-human origin. Featuring testimony from 34 U.S. Government, military, and intelligence community insiders, the film exposes the profound stakes for the future of humanity.
One of the officials in the trailer is Senator Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State Rubio. If there is any bit of truth to all of this, we should be asking for these UAP files instead of the Epstein files.
The films creator, Dan Farah, was on Real Time with Bill Maher last week discussing the film. You can find the podcast here. Mr. Farah discusses how these non-human actors live in the sea and seem to have appeared right around the time the nuclear age started. Of course, this is also after World War II when new forms of flight and related spying was underway, but why mess up the story.
Mr. Farah also seems surprised they are seen around our military facilities, as if this would not be a prime target for any outside party, human or otherwise. He then states:
…there’s been a few events where UAP activity over nuclear weapon sites has activated the missiles in some case and then turned them off in some cases. And it’s obviously a display of power of some sort. You know, your guess is as good as mine of what the intention is, but it’s concerning.
All of this sounds pretty amazing, yet I think it is more an amazing paste job of various quotes that are then repurposed to create a more dramatic story. For that reason, it may be better for the uninitiated, or just the regular newspaper readers who do not get their news from social media, to first go through the material from the very group set up to study all of this, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, as well as various congressional hearings on this matter. Then you can make up your own mind.
Here are a few congressional hearings to get you started on your search:
We already have too many conspiracies upsetting the public and breeding mistrust of all government entities. Its time to breath and read up on this material yourself.
Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1, which is a single-launch, lunar cargo lander. (Blue Origin)
President Trump has had a change of heart on Jared Isaacman, his initial nominee for NASA administrator until he withdrew that nomination earlier this year.
Earlier today, the President posted the following:
Jared’s passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new space economy, make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new era.
So what has changed in the last few months to make Mr. Isaacman “ideally suited” to lead NASA as compared to when he was determine unsuitable? I cannot think of anything other than the end of the President’s feud with Elon Musk. Of course, that was recently replaced with Elon Musk’s feud with acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, who proposed reopening competition for the first manned Moon landing this century due to delays with SpaceX’s Starship.
Will Mr. Isaacman save Musk’s Moon mission? He may calm some of the acrimony for the time being, but any new NASA administrator had better have a solid plan to get Americans back on the Moon before China does. Mr. Isaacman may be friends with Mr. Musk, but should he be confirmed he will head a weakened space agency that is struggling with a complex Moon mission that may be much less complex without the Starship refueling plans. In fact, Blue Origin just submitted a new Moon mission plan that drops this refueling altogether.
It is not impossible the winds will shift again, leaving Mr. Isaacman adrift once more. That is how it is in Washington these days. Fickle leadership leads to fickle decision-making and fickle planning.
The Chinese are not having these issues at the moment as they aim to be on the Moon by 2030.
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