Break Away

Grew up in a small town
And when the rain would fall down
I'd just stare out my window
Dreamin' of what could be
And if I'd end up happy
I would pray

Trying hard to reach out
But when I tried to speak out
Felt like no one could hear me
Wanting to belong here
But something felt so wrong here
So I prayed I could break away

[chorus]
I'll spread my wings and I'll learn how to fly
I'll do what it takes till I touch the sky
And I'll make a wish, take a chance, make a change
And break away
Out of the darkness and into the sun
But I won't forget all the ones that I love
I'll take a risk, take a chance, make a change
And break away

Wanna feel the warm breeze
Sleep under a palm tree
Feel the rush of the ocean
Get on board a fast train
Travel on a jetplane, far away
And break away

[chorus]
I'll spread my wings and I'll learn how to fly
I'll do what it takes till I touch the sky
And I'll make a wish, take a chance, make a change
And break away
Out of the darkness and into the sun
I won't forget all the ones that I love
I gotta take a risk, take a chance, make a change
And break away

Buildings with a hundred floors
Swinging round revolving doors
Maybe I don't know where they'll take me
But, gotta keep moving on, moving on
Fly away, break away

[chorus 2]
I'll spread my wings and I'll learn how to fly
Though it's not easy to tell you goodbye, gotta
Take a risk, take a chance, make a change
And break away
Out of the darkness and into the sun
But I won't forget the place I come from
I gotta take a risk, take a chance, make a change
And break away

Break away
Break away 

New Blog - Galileo Proposal

I just created a new blog dedicated to the idea of getting a team of people together to design and impliment a private expidition to the Moon called Project Galileo. I'll keep posting here, but will move all relevant posts over there as well. PG would be the better place to post comments directly related to the project, but I'll maintain stuff on FoT as well.

Galileo Project - Transparency

I'd like to note here that I'd like everything that happens in the Galileo Project to be totally transparent. I'd like to publish our finances, timelines, designs, etc. so that the public can see that honest people do exist, and that they can get to the moon.

Some thoughts I've had on the subject:

Publish financial records on website
Publish all designs on website
Update published information on a daily basis
Publically release all information gathered by the expidition in a timely fashion

Galileo Project - Resources

I want to address the issue of resources as it relates to the Galileo Proposal. The first objections that many of you will raise are related to the expense of such a venture. Let me put the issue of finances as plainly as possible:

I can't pay for a moon trip. Likely you can't either. But maybe I could afford $100, maybe you could afford $300. If we could market the moon, if we could be "The Man Who Sold the Moon", we would have all the cash we'd need. Even if there were only 50 million people in the entire world willing to financially back a private space venture, and each of them was only willing to donate $100, we'd stil have 5 billion dollars.

I'm no marketing expert, but, like other donation based organizations, we could erect a donor's wall on the Moon, with the names of those willing to support us. $100 for a small name, $1000 for a big plaque, $100,000 for a monument, etc. Something along those lines, anyway. We have the money.

Another objection often raised, is that of "expertese". I firmly believe that the private scientists and engineers of the world can get us to the moon. Think about all the folks who work in private industry. All the engineers who work in electronics, cars, aireospace, computers, manufacturing, design, etc. Think about all the patents held by private citizens. Who invented the car? Who invented Radio? Who invented the areoplane? Who invented the internet? We did.

I will fully admit we have a long way to go, and there's a lot of hard work to be done. But why should that scare us away? Isn't it worth it? Isn't it a noble and worthy thing to live and work for one's dreams?

Rocketship Galileo

I just want to introduce the idea of a privately funded, engineered, and manned expedition back to the moon. This is in regard to a comment I posted over on the Captain's Blog earlier today. I really believe that a few good people really could build a moon rocket in their basement. It's only a matter of creativity and determination. We have the skills. We have the money. All we need is the drive.

I know that this is kind of what is being done with Spaceship One and the X-Prize. I don't want to diminish the great work being done, but it just seems too slow, too patient, too "whatever". The whole X-Prize almost seems like it could be used to make the public think that private space travel is advancing, while simultaniously making the average citizen think they don't have to do anything to make it happen.

Well, I say we do it. All of us who longed to be beamed up and work in Scotty's engine room. All of us who stare up into the night sky and just say, "Wow!". Those of us who crave to not only know what's out there, but to experience it for ourselves.

The time is now. Who will answer the call?

Exploded Planet Hypothesis - Part III, More Support

I have a few more findings to cover that seem to support the Exploded Planet Hypothesis (EPH). I want to talk briefly about satellites of comets and asteroids, the Late Heavy Bombardment, and finally what Mars has to say about all this.

In the generally accepted model of cometary formation (in the nebular "leftovers" model), comets (and asteroids) should not possess satellites. The spheres of influence of these bodies as they formed would have been too small to ever capture satellites. If the EPH is true, however, just after the explosion, space would have been filled with debris. Large pieces would have attracted many smaller fragments. Some might have found stable orbits and become satellites, and those that could not find stable orbits (due to geometric irregularities) would have de-orbited, and skidded across the surface of the larger piece.

The Galileo spacecraft flew by the asteroid Ida in 1993, and discovered a small satellite in orbit, now named Dactyl. In 2000, the spacecraft NEAR flew by the asteroid Eros, and took an image of a large boulder lying on the surface at the end of a long "roll mark". Precisely what the EPH would predict. When the Hubble Space Telescope zoomed in on Comet Hale-Bopp, it discovered at least one, possible even three, secondary nuclei.

The Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) is thought to have been a period of extreme meteor activity about 4 billion years ago, following a period of relative calm. The date assigned to the LHB is mainly based on analysis of moon rocks and craters, and is highly suspect. It does appear, however, that the solar system did undergo severe cratering some time in its past. This is evidenced by nearly all the solid bodies in the solar system, including Earth. This would fit nicely into the EPH; Planet V being the source of the projectiles.

Mars has some very interesting things to say about the EPH. Most convincingly, Mars is not a perfect sphere, but exhibits two bulges 180 degrees apart: Tharsis and Arabia. The most obvious explanation for these features is that they are tidal bulges; created by a "parent planet" with which Mars was tidally locked.

The Mars Odyssey mission used its neutron spectrometer to measure neutron flux across the surface of Mars, looking for water deposits. The maps that were created from the collected data show the largest quantities of water to rest right on top of Tharsis and Arabia, exactly where you would not expect them to be if Mars was never a moon, and exactly where you would expect if Mars was a moon. (See LANL's website on the topic.)

The Mars Orbital Camera (MOC) on board Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) mission has taken numerous images of recently formed (i.e. present day) short-lived "stains" that appear clustered around both Tharsis and Arabia. This is exactly where one would expect Mars' former oceans to have been. These stains are theorized to be subsurface water that has built enough backpressure to break through an ice dam, and gush onto the surface.

Mars has apparently experienced cataclysmic flooding at some time in its past. This is evidenced by massive mud plains covering large portions of the surface. This could be an indication of the loss of Mars' tidal lock with its parent body, causing the oceans at the bulges to attempting to redistribute themselves to lower altitudes (and thus lower gravitational potential energies).

Mars' "line of dichotomy" can also be explained by the EPH. The southern highlands are heavily cratered, practically wall to wall. The northern lowlands, on the other hand, are relatively smooth and unscarred. This suggests that whatever caused the majority of cratering on Mars was a nearby and short-lived phenomenon. This is consistent with the explosion of Planet V, but not with the traditional LHB models.

A paper by Richard Hoagland and Michael Bara deals with the Mars Tidal Model in a very detailed and technical manner. It's a great read.

Exploded Planet Hypothesis - Part II, Modern Findings

Last time, I talked at the end of my post about the last nail in the EPH coffin: non-intersecting orbits of asteroids discovered by Simon Newcomb in the 1860's. He saw this as evidence that the asteroids did not come from a point source, like an exploding planet, but were better explained as primordial remnants of solar system formation.

Since Newcomb's time, several other factors have come to light that must be incorporated into his experiment and findings. At the time Newcomb was conducting his studies only a few dozen asteroids were known to exist. Because of this fact, Newcomb greatly underestimated (if he considered it at all) the impact (pun intended) of asteroid collisions on their orbits. Such collisions would tend to circularize the orbits of the asteroids around the sun. Newcomb also failed to take into account gravitational perturbations caused by the near approaches of Jupiter, which would have a similar long-term "circularizing" effect to asteroidal collisions.

Another objection to the EPH that is often cited is a problem of mass. If an Earth-sized (or larger) body exploded, where did all the mass go? It is known that the sum of the mass of all bodies in the asteroid belt comes to about .001 Earth masses. So there must be another entry in the balance sheet if the EPH is to remain.

The core of a rocky planet like the Earth is at extreme temperatures and under extreme pressures which increase dramatically with planetary size. In a cataclysmic scenario where a planet is literally shattered, the relatively cool crust would fragment, but remain essentially rock. The hot, highly pressurized liquid core, however, would vaporize almost instantly when exposed to the cold vacuum of space. It is also possible that significant mass from the explosion (in the form of rocky fragments and/or a vapor cloud) was swept up by other planetary bodies, or fell into the sun.

Many meteorites (also fragments of Planet V, in the EPH) are found to contain chondrite, small silicate spherules known to form when superheated rocky material is rapidly cooled (in an hour or two) from temperatures ranging from 1000 to 2000 degrees C, similar temperatures to what is found in the Earth's mantel. Chondrite is often found to contain a compound similar to kerogen, the precursor to fossil-fuels. There is some evidence to suggest that kerogen can form abiotically within the mantel of the Earth. (An index of articles on this subject can be found at the Free Energy News website.) This data suggests that fragments from the crust of Planet V could have collected these condensed droplets of vaporized mantel during or after the explosion.

Another bit of supporting evidence for the EPH can be found by plotting the mean distance from the sun (semi-major axis) for asteroids in the main belt versus their eccentricity. In the solar nebula theory, asteroid orbits should be nearly circular for any semi-major axis. However, if the EPH were true, we should see some minimum eccentricity occurring at the hypothesized exploded planet distance, with increasing eccentricity as we move away from that distance (both towards the sun and away from the sun).

This argument is basically saying that the only asteroids with circular orbits would be those whose semi-major axis is exactly the same as the exploded planet's orbital distance. (Of course there is some random variation due to gravitational interactions with massive planets, and collisions between asteroids, as discussed earlier.)

In fact, we should see almost no asteroids with the same semi-major axis as the exploded planet at all. Only a tiny fraction of the debris from an exploded planet would actually follow the orbital path of the parent body. Some of the debris would be very near the original parent body orbit forming what we know today as the asteroid belt. Most of the debris would be flung away in every other direction, becoming what we call comets.

This is, in fact, what we see when thousands of main-belt asteroids are plotted. Chalk one up for EPH!

I think I should talk about the Oort Cloud here. The Oort Cloud is a hypothetical cloud of comets with a total mass somewhere between 5 and 100 Earth masses, with a mean distance from the sun of about one light-year. It is said to have formed from the "leftovers" of the condensation of the solar nebula in the inner solar system. These leftovers were ejected into highly elliptical orbits by gravitational perturbations of the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn. Subsequently they were re-stabilized into circular orbits far from the sun by the nearby approaches of other stars.

It should be emphasized that no observations of the Oort Cloud have ever been made. It is an entirely hypothetical construct. The only observed object to be labeled as belonging to the Oort cloud is the planetoid Sedna, discovered in 2003. It has a semi-major axis only half of what would be expected for an object in the proposed Oort Cloud. Considering this, any theory of cometary origin based on observational evidence is better than the Oort Cloud hypothesis, and should be favored.

There is another interesting EPH test involving comets supposedly (in the standard model) from the Oort Cloud. The gravitational escape energy of comets can be measured and compared. (For example the Earth has an energy parameter of about -100,000. A value of 0 would be the escape energy.) If a distribution is taken of the number of incoming (towards the inner solar system) comets for each energy parameter, a clustering at about -5 is seen. If the same analysis is done on outgoing comets, there is no clustering anywhere on the plot. This suggests that the comets in the cluster are "first timers"; comets that are approaching the solar system for the first time.

If the EPH is correct, then these comets are returning to the inner solar system for the first time since their parent body exploded. This means that the period of these "new comets" would be the same as the number of years since the planet exploded. When such an analysis is done on the comets in the cluster, a date for the explosion event can be calculated: about 3.2 million years ago...

Richard C. Hoagland

Hoagland is quite an interesting character. If the average person were to hear his name and recognize it, it would probably be in connection with Art Bell, the Face on Mars, and, in general, kooky pseudoscience. What a shame.

This guy has put so much of his life behind Mars research and space exploration, it's truly saddening to see his work reduced to sarcastic jokes between establishment academics. Yet he persists. He endures. He continues to put his neck out, despite the executioner’s wildly swinging axe whirring inches above the block.

What I would call the core of Hoagland's research is centered on the artificiality of observed features throughout the solar system. His arguments are often very insightful and are backed up by numerous sources both inside and outside the established "scientific community".

Many of his arguments just plain make sense. I just hate it when educated people think they aren't "smart enough" to rationally consider a scientific argument and come to their own conclusions, and so defer to whoever seems to be more of an "expert". If there's one thing I've learned working as an engineer, it's that a good engineer isn't smarter or more educated; he's just more thorough, more careful, more patient, more creative, and more of a risk taker. There are no true "experts". There are just people who do their due diligence to come to their own conclusions, and those who buy someone else's conclusions from the lowest bidder. Man that pisses me off!

Anyway, I'll freely admit that some of what Hoagland has to say is pretty off the wall. His "geometric" relationships often have no meaning. The signal-to-noise ratio in some of the relationships he finds between numbers, angles, etc. is just too low. He tends to have the same problem when finding "geometric patterns" in some imagery. Sometimes it's just so darn subjective; one person might see an octagon where another person might see a seahorse.

His "hyper-dimensional physics" has some merit as an idea but I don't see any scientific rigor applied. There are certainly lots of anomalous (when compared to traditional models) things happening in the solar system. I'm dead certain that our current model of physics is severely lacking in many areas. However, Hoagland leaps to such specific conclusions from such general data.

I just want to hit on a few things that with which Hoagland has been right on. He has been following NASA affairs for so long, and with such detail and enthusiasm, he has begun to compile substantial evidence that NASA, as a scientific organization, is rotten to the core. There are so many times when NASA's official explanation for something extraordinary is just so juvenile. Often their explanations for phenomenon could be refuted by a 6th grader with the most basic understanding of the physical sciences.

I'm not saying that there is some horrible conspiracy at NASA designed to hide earth-shaking truths from us. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But at the very least, it shows a serious breach of contract between the American people and NASA. We own all the data collected by every NASA mission. We paid for it. We want it, untouched, in its entirety, now. We also want a little respect. As I said before, NASA scientists aren't any more expert that you or I. They just have a little more experience, and a lot more pride.

Some of Hoagland's arguments for artificiality are also very good. The infamous "face on Mars" is a great example. There are many features of the Face (*groan*, sorry) that present a very compelling case for artificiality. In fact, much of the Cydonia region contains anomalous data that does support artificiality. There are numerous lunar anomalies also, that demand more attention.

I have never said "The face is artificial. The moon was inhabited. Iapetus is a spaceship." All I'm saying is let's consider all the possibilities and apply scientific rigor to the unanswered questions!

Carl Sagan was a jerk. Okay, that's not quite fair since I'm basing this conclusion on a single data point. However, his ridiculous statement "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" has done more to damage true science than anything else in the last hundred years, at least. What makes a claim extraordinary? Who makes that assessment? What sort of scale do you use to measure "extraordinary-ness"? What makes a piece of evidence extraordinary?

Anybody? Any takers?

Gotta Be Something More

Monday, hard to wake up
Fill my coffee cup, I'm out the door
Yeah, the freeway's standing still today
It's gonna make me late, and thats for sure
I'm running out of gas and out of time
Never gonna make it there by nine

[Chorus:]
There's gotta be something more
Gotta be more than this
I need a little less hard time
I need a little more bliss
I'm gonna take my chances
Taking a chance I might
Find what I'm looking for
There's gotta be something more

Five years and there's no doubt
That I'm burnt out, I've had enough
So now boss man, here's my two weeks
I'll make it short and sweet, so listen up
I could work my life away, but why?
I got things to do before die

[Repeat Chorus]

Some believe in destiny, and some believe in fate
I believe that happiness is something we create
You best belive that I'm not gonna wait
'Cause there's gotta be something more

I get home 7:30 the house is dirty, but it can wait
Yeah, 'cause right now I need some downtime
To drink some red wine and celebrate
Armageddon could be knocking at my door
but I ain't gonna answer thats for sure.
There's gotta be something more!

Thoughts on Iapetus, Part II

My last post about Iapetus was really just a teaser. I wanted to introduce the topic, but didn't feel the motivation to go into an in depth analysis.

This moon really is quite extraordinary. It was discovered by Giovanni Cassini in 1671. It is the second largest moon of Saturn (after Titan) and has extremely distant and inclined (almost 15 degrees) orbit. It is also the outermost major moon. The thing that made this Saturnian moon stand out to Cassini though, was that it appeared extremely bright at one end of its orbital path, and so dark at the other end that it dissapeared entirely.

Cassini concluded that Iapetus must have 1. a very light reflective half and a dark non-reflective half, and 2. that Iapetus must be tidally locked with Saturn (so as to always show the same face to Saturn). Both of these conclusions were confirmed by the 1977 Voyager mission and the current Cassini-Huygens mission.

That was just the beginning of discovery...

The current Cassini mission has captured some very detailed imagery of Iapetus on its first (and to this date only) flyby. Cassini revealed the stark contrast between light and dark sides, as well as another totally stunning feature: the "wall".

This wall traverses the dark side of the moon exactly in line with the equator. It is about 20km wide and about 13km high, and extends 1300km across Cassini Regio. This feature appears to be unexplainable through terrestrial geology.

Another interesting find was the non-spherical shape of Iapetus. Cassini was able to take long exposure images of the night side by Saturn-light. This created an overexposed light side, but allowed Cassini Regio to be imaged with greater contrast, and therefore greater detail. This image is interesting because the overexposed light side limb is shown to be almost polygonal, and definitely not spherical. Some have said this is just image blur due to the spacecraft motion. This is not the case. If you read about how the image was aquired, it becomes clear that this is real.

The composition of Cassini Regio has been a scientific curiosity for as long as we've known about Iapetus. Cassini-Huygens used its Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) to study the composition of the surface. It discovered that the light side was rich in water ice, while the dark side was mainly a substance rich in organic material. This supported the conclusions of an earlier (2001), pre-Cassini, paper that studied Iapetus with Earth-based spectra. This paper also stated that "...observations in this spectral region have not revealed this mix of material on any other object observed thus far...".

A 2004 paper showed that Iapetus also has a much lower radar signature than what would be expected from an icy moon. There is also no significant difference between the radar echo returned from the dark side and that returned by the light side. This effect can possibly be traced to the composition of Cassini Regio. If this were the case, it would mean that the bright half of Iapetus would have to be the same dark material as Cassini Regio with clean ice deposited on top of it.

This brings up an interesting question: is the dark organic material a deposite on top of the icy moon, or is the ice a deposite on top of a rather more mysterious moon?

Hopefully we get at least two more flyby's out of Cassini-Huygens, but I wouldn't count on it. Iapetus is rather hard to get to, and there are a lot of interesting things to see in Saturn's backyard...

Right and Left Handedness in Carbohyderates?

I read a short paper by Gilbert Levin, the inventor of the famous Viking Labeled Release experiment, called "Will NASA Unwittingly Confirm Life on Mars". Levin was talking about the ill fated Mars Polar Lander and its Thermal Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) experiment designed to test for the presence of hydrogen peroxide.

NASA claims that the presence of hydrogen peroxide would explain the positive results of the Labled Release (LR) experiment as well as the negative results of the Gas Chromatograph - Mass Spectrometer (GCMS), both onboard Viking I and II. Hydrogen peroxide reacts with organic compounds, destroying them, in a process that could look like metabolism.

TEGA would test for hydrogen peroxide by heating soil samples and analyzing the gasses released. Levin suggested a modification to this experiment that would settle, once and for all, the debate over the LR results.

This is where the carbs come into play!

Levin mentioned that all life uses right-hand carbohyderates and left-hand amino acids. (This is in regard to stereoisomers.) I've never heard this before. It seems like a great way to distinguish between mere chemical reactions (that don't favor one isomer over another) and life (which does).

Unfortunately, NASA, despide initial enthusiasm for Levin's proposal, ultimately rejected the idea. Even more unfortunately, MPL was lost before landing, and any data the probe could have collected is also lost.

Deep Impact

I hadn't followed the Deep Impact mission much. I remember hearing about it maybe even a year or two ago durring its development. It just came back into my mind when I saw on Wikipedia that the impact had actually occurred as planned.

I haven't seen the latest results yet, but I did see some pretty spectacular imagery of the impact. We should get some good insight into the composition of comet Temple 1, and hopefully of comets in general. It'll be really interesting to see what impact (pun intended) this will have of the Exploding Planet Hypothesis (EPH).

The EPH maintains that comets (and asteroids) are the debris remaning after planet 5 (orbiting between Mars and Jupiter) exploded. This model has been consistent with many observations of comets and asteroids including their orbits, comet fragmentation, and possibly even asteroid density (within the belt).

The EPH is more than just a curious theory to explain some characteristics of comets and asteroids though. It has far reaching implications in a variety of fields.

If the EPH is true, what caused the destruction of an entire planet? What effect did it have on the orbits of nearby planets (Mars in particular)? Was Planet V inhabitable? Did it support life? Intellegent life?

I know, as soon as I said the "L" word I lost half of my readers. It seems that if a person hypothesizes about extra-terrestrial life he is automatically consigned to "kookdom". I'll have to write another post explaining how extra-terrestrial life was already confirmed by both Viking landers. But that's a story for another time...

Thoughts on Iapetus

Highly eccentric orbit
Outermost moon of Saturn
Light/Dark halves
Density slightly greater than water
Equatorial "Wall"
Polygonal Limb

What does all this mean?

My imagination can go wild when I think of the possibilities. I grew up on Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury, Burroughs, etc. I can't help but think of what this could mean.

Sometimes the fear of the ordinary takes over though. What if there is no great mystery to solve? What if the Universe really is just a few boring gas particles? What if there really isn't anything going on "out there"?

But what if there is?