Space Talk

Is anyone beginning to wonder why we keep sending probes to Mars? The Maven probe made it to Mars recently and entered orbit. If the moon is a yardstick for how we feel about exploration of heavenly bodies, I guess we will just continue to send probes to these places, but it does make me wonder if we are continuously sending probes because we think there is something at these places such as ruins or traces of life we haven’t been told about, or we are just going to do this until we finally colonize these places? If one probe has the same capabilities as one which was already sent to the Moon or Mars would we send it or is each probe more advanced than the last? I can tell you what NASA said about the latest probe to Mars, the Maven, they said it was the first dedicated to studying the atmosphere of the Red planet and indicated it was necessary to set the stage for human habitation of the planet. Are all these probes just a stalling tactic to make us think we will eventually colonize Mars when we have already? It is certainly possible with our ultra-secret space program.

Why would I even suspect such a thing? The evidence is building up. There were several leaks indicating we have had an advanced space fleet for years and we may not be the only country. Another thing which seems confusing is the fact when NASA scientists talk about sending humans to Mars they keep talking about at least a nine month trip each way when they have the capability to get there using a Ion engine far faster. Some say we can get there in about thirty days. There are the photos which were taken by the various rovers on Mars. A couple clearly show some very strange things like a footprint and a cigarette butt on the Martian surface. There are several indications in photos which show what looks like different skeletons and strange structures. These things are never discussed and if they make it into the news NASA scientists will reply they are tricks of light or just ordinary rocks. This sort of reminds me of the old swamp gas excuse which was given out frequently by Project Blue Book, which was supposed to be investigating sightings of UFOs but was really there to put out disinformation.

Just when we think we know so much about space and what is in it, we find out something so tremendously huge it boggles our minds. This is how I feel about the recent discovery indicating every galaxy is connected by a web of cosmic filaments. Who would have ever believed this? First of all the distances between galaxies is so huge it is hard to imagine this is possible. It does make one wonder if these filaments could be used like currents in the ocean. What I mean by this is maybe spacecraft can take advantage of this in some unknown way to make travel between galaxies either possible or faster. Scientists found a giant nebula which was at least twice as big as any found before and it was so bright it lit up gas beyond its own galactic environment and this gave them the first real picture of the gas between galaxies. This had been predicted by computer simulations in the past, but never seen.

Scientists are still trying to figure out how the rocky planets in our solar system were created. They now think they have a clue. They have found the remains of a tremendous collision near a young star. A large disk of debris was around the star. The scientists believe the cloud is two years old. Let me give a caveat here. We are looking at an object which is 1,140 light years away and we are only seeing something the way it looked 1,140 years ago, so while this may show us something only two years old, it took that light 1,140 years to reach us. We wouldn’t even know if the star was still there. Anyway scientists are excited because this is the first time they detected a planetary collision outside of our solar system. To make things even more exciting for them, the star they are looking at is approximately the same size as our sun, but is only 35,000,000 years old. I must interject here. I often wonder if someday we will find our system of dating stars will prove faulty.

One would think that Voyager 1, which has been flying since 1972 and has reached interstellar space, Β would be far enough away from the sun to be unaffected by anything it does. Not so however. Scientists admit interstellar space is usually a very quiet place, but when our star, the sun, sends out a burst it is not so quiet anymore. The burst creates a shockwave and it takes about one year to reach the current position of Voyager 1. Scientists are calling these waves tsunami waves. Voyager 1 is the first human made probe to enter the void between stars.

I have mentioned the fact before that there exists a type of star which is speeding through space on its own. It is usually called a rogue star. This happens when the star is somehow kicked out of its orbit in the solar system it is in. These stars are very rare and the number found to date is about twenty. Recently a new one was found. These stars are also called hypervelocity stars. They are usually named for the observatory that discovered them. The latest one discovered in now about 42,000 light years from us and has attained a speed of about 1.1 million miles per hour heading out from the center of the galaxy. Astronomers wanted to know how often a star became a rogue so they did some research and calculated it happens approximately every 100,000 years in our galaxy. I guess if we were to multiply that by the number of galaxies there would be quite a few of these stars around. I wonder if we will ever find one which has a planet or planets still orbiting it as it travels out into uncharted space?

Accepting what we are told as fact sometimes backfires even when these so called facts come from respected scientists. Such was the case recently when an announcement was made which stated two distant earth like planets really didn’t exist and the astronomers got confused. Hey we are all human and I don’t find this statement an explanation for carelessness and I respect the fact the scientists had the courage to admit their mistake. This does show us however some of what we might think we know could certainly be proven wrong at any time even when told these facts by experts.