Did we really land on the moon?

It’s a telling sign of our times that you can sit with your laptop and bounce around between opposing documentaries on the same subject. Take the July 1969 US lunar landing mission known as Apollo 11. One visits Netflix, and the series Conspiracies flashes in your face. One episode features the click-bait tease, “Was the moon landing a fake?”

Of course, this has been a standard conspiracy theory trope since, well, men first landed on the moon, and the Conspiracies episode does its darnedest to sow confusion and doubt about the very elaborate, expensive and meticulously planned moon mission known as Apollo 11. We’ve already seen the documentary Room 237, which amassed fringe fan theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, one of which is that the director was hired by NASA to fake the moon landing on a film set located in Area 51. The theory goes that Kubrick was later forced to keep his participation a secret, so he passively-aggressively dropped all kinds of clues in The Shining, such as Danny Torrance wearing a lumpy Apollo 11 sweater in one scene.

Nailed it!

For conspiracy theorists, all it takes is a set of adjacent facts for causality to exist. The sheer mass of evidence showing otherwise is no match for the paper-chain links that seem to suggest a government conspiracy lurks behind every shady door. The Conspiracies episode points out that astronaut Gus Grissom died in a fire inside a capsule during a NASA preflight testing, along with two other astronauts, and notes that he’d been “critical” of the moon mission just days before that.

Silenced!


Of course, more extensive research shows that the Apollo program was riddled with costly mistakes — test rockets blowing up on launch pads, jet test flights ending in disaster. Many astronauts died. Why NASA saw the need to kill off one mouthy astronaut, rather than simply cut him from the program, is something only conspiracy theorists can truly grasp.

Of course, we live in a world where truth is under fire every day. We have competing narratives huffing and puffing on our screens, attacking us with exclamation points and explosive comment threads. Navigating “the truth” is a head-spinning enterprise in the best of times, because “the truth” only exists in itself; our impression of every event passes through a subjective lens, and we are more than willing to seek assistance from outside sources when interpreting those events. Thus, we look for perspectives from shows like Conspiracies. (The uncanny is fertile ground for the conspiracy-minded. One episode looks at the “Black Dahlia” murder case, and wonders why an aspiring actress was left dead, surgically severed at the waist, in a Hollywood park in 1947. Uncanny! Creepy! Was it the work of police covering up for Hollywood moguls? Was it the mob? Was it an evil doctor afraid of blackmail? That’s the theory posited in Conspiracies, and — surprise! — there’s even a connection to the Philippines: Hollywood surgeon George Hodel, who was investigated for the murder, fled the US in 1950 to live in the Philippines until his death in 1990; his son still maintains his dad was the killer. The “Black Dahlia” remains a legitimate murder mystery, still unsolved after 70 years. Which makes it a wonderful vacuum for conspiracies.)

Most uncanny for moon landing doubters are those crisp images of astronauts, cavorting around on the lunar surface. They say it looks too real — “like a movie set.” Why is it so bright? (Sunlight hits and reflects off the moon’s surface, illuminating its every crater, as we can see very plainly every night when we gaze upward from earth.) And why didn’t the Russians ever make it to the moon? (They tried. They failed. They did send an unmanned probe that landed on the surface in 1959.)

One crystal-clear document of the moon mission comes in a new documentary released for the 50th anniversary. Apollo 11 gathers, with very little narration (save Walter Cronkite, NASA engineers and three space-bound astronauts), archival film and images from hundreds of hours of 70mm footage, some of it in hyper-real detail, gathered by NASA to record the historic launch. The film is moving, almost heart-pounding, even if you know the ending. The astronauts sit in a tiny capsule above a massive rocket, ascend into the skies as a million Floridians watch from the Cape Canaveral banks (and millions more live on television). Rooms full of engineers monitor the progress of the flight — eminently convincing, unless you believe they’re all actors or in on the conspiracy. We see the Apollo 11 capsule circle the moon and the lunar module descend on the Sea of Tranquility. We watch as Neil Armstrong steps down a ladder to touch the moon’s surface — this time in strikingly clear footage taken from inside the lunar module, not those fuzzy, high-contrast TV images sent across 186,000 miles of space through a Unified S-band and downloaded onto an FM subcarrier back on earth. The photos taken by “Buzz” Aldrin during the astronauts’ several hours of moonwalking are riveting, otherworldly — which they, indeed, spectacularly, are. (Uncanny!) They capture a location that no other human had ever managed to take a selfie on before July 20, 1969. (And only a handful since. Another conspiracy query goes: “Why didn’t the Americans go back to the moon?” They did, on five other missions during the 1970s. Remember those moon rovers, the ones designed by Pinoy mechanical engineer Eduardo San Juan? They’re still up there, as are five of the six planted US flags, according to high-resolution images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2012.)

And finally, presented with the best available evidence — crystal-clear documentary footage — the conspiracy theorists will still shrug and say, “Well, sure, it’s easier now for NASA to fake even better footage to back up the 1969 hoax. Just look at CGI!” What can you do in the face of this kind of skepticism? Just hire a boat and live on an island somewhere, away from all the digital battles? Maybe.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dismiss all conspiracy theories. Governments lie, lie, lie. Political leaders lie, lie, lie. But I’m selective about my conspiracies: I cherry-pick them. I won’t take every crackpot theory as equal on its face.

The real danger of conspiracy theories is not just their seductiveness (everyone loves a mystery), but their corrosiveness. You have to ask yourself who benefits, say, when a US president contends — all available evidence to the contrary — that Russia never meddled in US elections in 2016 or that climate change isn’t happening or that the previous US president wasn’t born in America. Consider the provenance of the conspiracy peddler. Consider the motive.

But if you start from the notion that truth simply doesn’t exist — as a smug young lawyer, now working for the Duterte administration, tried to convince me during dinner one night — then all that is left is competing piles of facts. And even those facts are constantly under fire. We all become not just armchair pundits, but armchair Pontius Pilates, shrugging at every mystery: Quid est veritas? What is truth?

No wonder the truth is an endangered species.

source: philstar.com

NIGHT DELIGHT | 'Supermoon' to grace Earth's skies

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA - The largest, brightest full moon in nearly seven decades will be on display in the coming days, promising Earth-bound sky-watchers a celestial "supermoon" spectacle.

The full moon will come nearer to Earth than at any time since 1948, astronomers said. At closest approach, which occurs at 6:23 a.m. EST on Monday, the moon will pass within 216,486 miles (348,400 km) of Earth's surface, about 22,000 miles (35,400 km) closer than average, they added.

The moon's distance from Earth varies because it is in an egg-shaped, not circular, orbit around the planet.

If skies are clear, the upcoming full moon will appear up to 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than usual, making it what is called a supermoon, according to NASA.

A supermoon occurs when the timing of a full moon overlaps with the point in the moon's 28-day orbit that is closest to Earth.

About every 14th full moon is a supermoon, said University of Wisconsin astronomer Jim Lattis.

The next time a full moon comes as close to Earth will be in 2034.

"If you could stack up full moons next to each other, there is clearly a difference," Lattis said, but to a casual observer it is going to look very similar to a regular full moon.

Weather permitting, sky-watchers in North America and locations east of the International Dateline will have a better view on Sunday night since the moon will set less than three hours after closest approach on Monday.

"The difference in distance from one night to the next will be very subtle, so if it's cloudy on Sunday, go out on Monday. Any time after sunset should be fine," Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, said in a statement.

source: interaksyon.com

Astronomers identify hundreds of new galaxies behind Milky Way

SYDNEY -- There's a mysterious force pulling the Milky Way galaxy towards it at 2 million kilometers per hour and scientists may have finally found out why.

An international team of researchers led by the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research at the University of Western Australia (UWA) have discovered 883 galaxies hidden in the nearby universe, 250 million light-years from earth, behind the Milky Way, a third of which had never been seen before.

"An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars, so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn't know about until now," University of Cape Town professor of Astronomy, Renee Kraan-Korteweg said in a statement on Wednesday.

The study's lead author, UWA professor of radio astronomy Lister Staveley-Smith said this discovery may help explain the "Great Attractor" region that is pulling the Milky Way and several other galaxies towards it with the gravitational force equivalent to a million, billion Suns.

"We don't actually understand what's causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it's coming from," Staveley-Smith said.

"We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometers per hour."

Astronomers have been trying to map the galaxies hidden in the so-called Zone of Avoidance, a part of the sky obscured by the Milky Way, since major deviations in the rate of expansion of the universe in this area were detected during the 1970s and 1980s.

By using Australia's chief scientific body CSIRO's Parks radio telescope, located in the middle of a sheep paddock in central New South Wales state and used in NASA's Apollo missions, the team were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way into Zone of Avoidance.

"We've used a range of techniques but only radio observations have really succeeded in allowing us to see through the thickest foreground layer of dust and stars," Kraan-Korteweg said.

The Parks radio receiver, known in Australia as The Dish, has recently been fitted with innovative technologies, such as a 21-cm multi-beam receiver, that allow scientists to map the sky 13 times faster that they could before.

The study, published on Wednesday in the Astronomical Journal, involved researchers from Australia, South Africa, the United States and the Netherlands.

source: interaksyon.com

Mystery of Saturn's 'F ring' cracked, says study

PARIS - An enigmatic ring of icy particles circling Saturn, herded into a narrow ribbon by two tiny moons, was probably born of a cosmic collision, according to a study published Monday.

The so-called F ring, some 140,000 kilometers (87,000 miles) beyond the sixth planet from the Sun, orbits at the border between Saturn's other rings and several moons.

Further toward Saturn, millions of ice blocks populating the planet's haunting halos are prevented from cohering into moons by its powerful tidal forces.

Further out are Saturn's main moons, distant enough to have cohered into spheres with their own gravity: Mimas, Enceladus and Titan, which is the only moon in our Solar System with a substantial atmosphere.

And in the boundary zone F ring's icy particles whirl around the planet in a band barely 100 kilometers (60 miles) across, itself orbited by moons Prometheus and Pandora.     

Scientists have long known that these so-called shepherd moons were partly responsible for keeping the F ring in tight formation.

What they did not know was how this unusual configuration came into being.

Ryuki Hyodo and Keiji Ohtsuki, astronomers from Kobe University in Japan, used computer simulations to show that Prometheus and Pandora are likely the by-product of a collision at the outer edge of Saturn's ring system.

Previous speculation along these lines concluded that two icy mini-moons crashing head-on would have simply disintegrated, adding yet another ring to Saturn's collection.

But what if the objects were made of something less fragile, and hit each other at an angle?

In that case, "such an impact results in only partial disruption" of the mini-moons as opposed to their total destruction, the authors conclude.

The collision would also produce "the formation of a narrow ring of particles" which becomes a new ring.

Hyodo and Ohtsuki further speculate that this sort of process might not be a once-off oddity but rather the "natural outcome" of ring formation under certain conditions for giant gas planets.

This "may explain not only Saturn's F ring, but also features of the Uranian system," Aurelien Crida, a scientist at France's National Centre for Scientific Research wrote in a comment, also in Nature Geoscience.

Saturn is the second largest planet in our Solar System after Jupiter, and has a radius about nine times greater than Earth.

Its spectacular ring system has nine complete rings and several discontinuous arcs, all of them mainly made of ice particles, with lesser amounts of rocky debris and dust.

Some 60 moons circle Saturn, not including hundreds of "moonlets" such as the F ring's Prometheus and Pandora.

Much of the data and high-resolution images we have from Saturn and its rings was collected by the Cassini space probe, which arrived near the giant planet in 2004.

source: interaksyon.com

NASA to grow turnips on the Moon by 2015

WASHINGTON -- NASA is planning to grow plants and vegetables - such as turnip and basil - on the Moon, by 2015, to understand whether humans can live and work on the Earth's natural satellite.

The US space agency will deposit plants, on-board a commercial lunar lander, on the Moon's surface within the next two years, NASA said.

The initiative is being driven by the Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team.

source: interaksyon.com

Quiet Sun prompts questions about impact on Earth

WASHINGTON DC - The surface of the sun has been surprisingly calm of late -- with fewer sunspots than anytime in in the last century -- prompting curious scientists to wonder just what it might mean here on Earth.

Sunspots have been observed for millennia -- first by Chinese astronomers and then, for the first time with a telescope, by Galileo in 1610.

The sunspots appear in roughly 11-year cycles -- increasing to a daily flurry and then subsiding drastically, before amping up again.


But this cycle -- dubbed cycle 24 -- has surprised scientists with its sluggishness.

The number of spots counted since it kicked off in December 2008 is well below the average observed over the last 250 years. In fact, it's less than half.

"It is the weakest cycle the sun has been in for all the space age, for 50 years," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association physicist Doug Biesecker told AFP.

The intense electromagnetic energy from sunspots has a significant impact on the sun's ultraviolet and X-ray emissions as well as on solar storms.

Solar storms can interrupt telecommunications and electronic networks on Earth. Sunspot activity can also have an impact on the Earth's climate.

Cycle 23 hit its maximum in April 2000 with an average of 120 solar spots a day. The cycle then wound down, hitting bottom around December 2008, the point at which scientists marked the start of the current cycle.

The minimal solar activity at the end of cycle 23 led astronomers to predict a slow cycle 24. But the reality fell even below expectations.

In the first year of the cycle, during which solar activity should have risen, astronomers counted 266 days without a single sun spot.

"The forecast peak was 90 sunspots," Biesecker said, noting that even though the activity has risen over the past year, "it's very clear it is not going to be close to 90."

"The sunspots number peaked last year at 67, almost half a typical cycle," he added.

The last time a sunspot cycle was this slow was in February 1906, the peak of cycle 14, with just 64 spots a day.

The "very long minimum: three years, three times more than the previous three cycles of the space age" was a major surprise, said University of Montana physicist Andres Munoz-Jamillio.

A magnetic switch

Cycle 24 has also diverged from the norm in another surprising way.

Typically, around the end of each 11-year sunspot cycle, the sun's magnetic fields switch direction. The northern and southern hemispheres change polarity, usually simultaneously.

During the swap, the strength of the magnetic fields drops to near zero and reappears when the polarity is reversed, scientists explain.

But this time, something different seems to be happening. The north pole already reversed its polarity several months ago -- and so it's now the same polarity as the south pole.

According to the most recent satellite measurements, "the south hemisphere should flip on the near future," said Todd Hoeksema, director of the Wilcox Solar Observatory at Stanford University.

He didn't seem concerned about the phenomenon.

But scientists are watching the sun carefully to see whether cycle 24 is going to be an aberration -- or if this solar calmness is going to stretch through the next cycle as well.

"We won't know that for another good three or four years," said Biesecker.

Some researchers speculate this could be the start of a prolonged period of weak solar activity.

The last time that happened, during the so-called "Maunder Minimum" between 1650 and 1715, almost no sunspots were observed. During the same period, temperatures dropped sharply on Earth, sparking what is called the "Little Ice Age" in Europe and North America.

As the sunspot numbers continue to stay low, it's possible the Earth's climate is being affected again.

But thanks to global warming, we're unlikely to see another ice age. "Things have not started to cooling, they just have not risen as quickly," Biesecker said.

source: interaksyon.com

Scientists find farthest galaxy so far

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida -- Astronomers have found the most distant galaxy yet, a discovery that pushes back scientists' view of the universe to about 700 million years after it is thought to have come into existence.

Light from the galaxy, designated by scientists as z8_GND_5296, took about 13.1 billion years to reach the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, both of which detected the galaxy in infrared light.

"We are learning so much about a region so far back in time it's hard to comprehend. This galaxy we're seeing is almost 13.1 billion years ago and so this was something like 8 billion years before our sun was even born and of course much longer after that until life came around," said lead researcher Steven Finkelstein, an assistant professor with the University of Texas at Austin.

Surprisingly, out of a pool of 43 candidate distant galaxies, z8_GND_5296 was the only one that revealed the key chemical evidence needed to confirm its distance.

That left Finkelstein and colleagues wondering if they had uncovered a clue to a bigger mystery: How soon did light from the universe's first stars and galaxies pierce an obscuring veil of hydrogen gas that existed early in its history?

Scientists believe that at some point, high-energy ultraviolet radiation from exploded stars split the intergalactic hydrogen atoms into electrons and protons. Once ionized, the hydrogen would be electrically conductive and no longer scatter light.

That may have happened about the time of z8_GND_5296's existence.

The galaxy, which is about a billion times as massive as the sun, has two unusual characteristics, which may be a factor in why it is visible, while potential sister galaxies are not.

First, z8_GND_5296 is forming stars at a very fast pace, pumping out about 100 times more stars than the Milky Way galaxy, so it may be brighter than the other candidate galaxies.

Second, it contains a surprisingly high percentage of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

Those elements are forged by nuclear fusion inside stars, so either the galaxy contains the exploded remains of lots of massive stars or it formed in a region of space that had been previously seeded with the remnants of a prior generation of stars, scientists said.

"It could be that this one galaxy lives in an over-dense region of (ionized hydrogen) so we can see it ... but that's a little bit of conjecture. For all we know these other galaxies have just a lot more hydrogen gas within the galaxies themselves and that's why we can't see them," Finkelstein said.

He and colleagues hope to conduct a wider survey for ancient galaxies with Hubble, but more details about z8_GND_5296 will likely have to wait until NASA launches its successor observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, targeted for launch in 2018.

The research appears this week in the journal Nature.

source: interaksyon.com

Meteor that hit Russia may have had close shave with sun

PARIS - The meteor that injured over 1,500 people when it exploded and showered debris over Russia in February may have had a close shave with the Sun earlier, researchers said Tuesday.

A study of its composition showed the space rock had undergone "intensive melting" before entering Earth's atmosphere and streaking over the central Russia's Chelyabinsk region in a blinding fireball, they said in a statement.

This "almost certainly" points to a near-miss with the sun, or a collision with another body in the solar system -- possibly a planet or asteroid, said study co-author Victor Sharygin from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Geology and Mineralogy.

The findings were presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Florence, Italy.

The meteor is estimated to have been 17 meters (56 feet) wide before exploding with the equivalent force of 30 times that of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.

Its shockwave blew out windows and damaged buildings across five Russian regions.

The meteor's fragments lie scattered over a large area around Chelyabinsk -- the largest piece is believed to lie at the bottom of Chebarkul Lake from where scientists are trying to raise it.

source: interaksyon.com

Asteroid to pass close to earth but no impact expected

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A small asteroid will pass closer to Earth next week than the TV satellites that ring the planet, but there is no chance of an impact, NASA said Thursday.

The celestial visitor, known as 2012 DA14, was discovered last year by a group of amateur astronomers in Spain.

The asteroid is about the size of an Olympic swimming pool at 150 feet (46 m) in diameter and is projected to come as close as 17,100 miles (27,520 km) from Earth during its Feb. 15 approach.

That would make it the closest encounter since scientists began routinely monitoring asteroids about 15 years ago.

Television, weather and communications satellites fly about 500 miles (800 km) higher. The moon is 14 times farther away.

Even so, "no Earth impact is possible," astronomer Donald Yeomans, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told reporters during a conference call.

The time of the asteroid's closest approach will be 2:24 p.m. EST (1924 GMT), daylight in the United States, but dark in Eastern Europe, Asia and Australia where professional and amateur astronomers will be standing by with telescopes and binoculars to catch a view.

DA14 will soar through the sky at about 8 miles (13 km) per second. At that speed, an object of similar size on a collision course with Earth would strike with the force of about 2.4 million tons of dynamite. The last time that happened was in 1908 when an asteroid or comet exploded over Siberia, leveling 80 million trees over 830 square miles (2,150 sq. km).

"Although they wouldn't (cause) a global catastrophe if they impact the Earth, they still do a lot of regional destruction," said Lindley Johnson, who oversees the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA headquarters in Washington DC.

NASA has been on a mission to find and track all near-Earth objects that are .62 miles (1 km) in diameter or larger. The effort is intended to give scientists and engineers as much time as possible to learn if an asteroid or comet is on a collision course with Earth, in hopes sending up a spacecraft or taking other measures to avert catastrophe.

About 66 million years ago, a 6-mile diameter (10 km) object smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico leading to the demise of the dinosaurs as well as most plant and animal life on Earth.

The planet is regularly pelted with objects from space, adding up to about 100 tons of material per day, Yeomans said.

"Basketball-sized objects come in daily. Volkswagen-sized objects come in every couple of weeks. As you get to larger and larger sizes the number of objects out there is less and less, so the frequency of hits goes down," Yeomans said.

Something the size of DA14 can be expected to strike Earth about every 1,200 years.

"For objects of this size, this is the closest predicted encounter that we're aware of," Yeomans said.

source: interaksyon.com