time travel

France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades.

The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists.

“It is a world first,” said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of “non-identified aerospatial phenomena.”

Known as OVNIs in French, UFOs have always generated intense interest along with countless conspiracy theories about secretive government cover-ups of findings deemed too sensitive or alarming for public consumption.

“Cases such as the lady who reported seeing an object that looked like a flying roll of toilet paper” are clearly not worth investigating, said Patenet.

But many others involving multiple sightings — in at least one case involving thousands of people across France — and evidence such as burn marks and radar trackings showing flight patterns or accelerations that defy the laws of physics are taken very seriously.

A phalanx of beefy security guards formed a barrier in front of the space agency (CNES) headquarters where the announcement was made, “to screen out uninvited UFOlogists,” an official explained.

Of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, nearly 25 percent are classified as “type D”, meaning that “despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we can’t explain,” Patenet said.

On January 8, 1981 outside the town of Trans-en-Provence in southern France, for example, a man working in a field reported hearing a strange whistling sound and seeing a saucer-like object about 2.5 meters (eight feet) in diameter land in his field about 50 meters (yards) away.

A dull-zinc grey, the saucer took off, he told police, almost immediately, leaving burn marks. Investigators took photos, and then collected and analyzed samples, and to this day no satisfactory explanation has been made.

The nearly 1,000 witness who said they saw flashing lights in the sky on November 5, 1990, by contrast, had simply seen a rocket fragment falling back into earth’s atmosphere.

Patenet’s answer to questions about evidence of life beyond Earth was sure to inflame the suspicions of those convinced the government is holding back: “We do not have the least proof that extra-terrestrials are behind the unexplained phenomena.”

But then he added: “Nor do we have the least proof that they aren’t.”

The CNES fields between 50 and 100 UFO reports ever year, usually written up by police. Of these, 10 percent are the object of on-site investigations, Patenet said.

Other countries collect data more or less systematically about unidentified flying objects, notably in Britain and in the United States, where information can be requested on a case-by-case basis under the Freedom of Information Act.

“But we decided to do it the other way around and made everything available to the public,” Patenet said.

The aim was to make it easier for scientists and other UFO buffs to access the data for research.

The website itself — which crashed host servers hours after it was unveiled due to heavy traffic — is extremely well organized and complete, even including scanned copies of police reports.

To visit the website: www.cnes-geipan.fr.

Having explored Mars for three-and-a-half years in what were missions originally designed for three months, NASA’s Mars rovers are facing perhaps their biggest challenge.

For nearly a month, a series of severe Martian summer dust storms has affected the rover Opportunity and, to a lesser extent, its companion, Spirit. The dust in the Martian atmosphere over Opportunity has blocked 99 percent of direct sunlight to the rover, leaving only the limited diffuse sky light to power it. Scientists fear the storms might continue for several days, if not weeks.

“We’re rooting for our rovers to survive these storms, but they were never designed for conditions this intense,” said Alan Stern, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

If the sunlight is further cut back for an extended period, the rovers will not be able to generate enough power to keep themselves warm and operate at all, even in a near-dormant state. The rovers use electric heaters to keep some of their vital core electronics from becoming too cold.

Before the dust storms began blocking sunlight last month, Opportunity’s solar panels had been producing about 700 watt hours of electricity per day, enough to light a 100-watt bulb for seven hours. When dust in the air reduced the panels’ daily output to less than 400 watt hours, the rover team suspended driving and most observations, including use of the robotic arm, cameras and spectrometers to study the site where Opportunity is located.

On Tuesday, July 17, the output from Opportunity’s solar panels dropped to 148 watt hours, the lowest point for either rover. On Wednesday, Opportunity’s solar-panel output dropped even lower, to 128 watt hours.

NASA engineers are taking proactive measures to protect the rovers, especially Opportunity, which is experiencing the brunt of the dust storm. The rovers are showing robust survival characteristics. Spirit, in a location where the storm is currently less severe, has been instructed to conserve battery power by limiting its activities.

“We are taking more aggressive action with both rovers than we needed before,” said John Callas, project manager for the twin rovers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

By Opportunity’s 1,236th Martian day, which ended Tuesday, driving and all science observations had already been suspended. The rover still used more energy than its solar panels could generate on that day, drawing down its battery. “The only thing left to cut were some of the communication sessions,” Callas said.

To minimize further the amount of energy Opportunity is using, mission controllers sent commands on Wednesday, July 18, instructing the rover to refrain from communicating with Earth on Thursday and Friday. This is the first time either of the rovers has been told to skip communications for a day or more in order to conserve energy. Engineers calculate that skipping communications sessions should lower daily energy use to less than 130 watt hours.

A possible outcome of this storm is that one or both rovers could be damaged permanently or even disabled. Engineers will assess the capability of each rover after the storm clears.

NASA will provide mission updates as events warrant. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the rover project for the Science Mission Directorate.

For more information about the rovers, visit:

From http://www.nasa.gov/rovers

Scientists have recently discovered that the planet Saturn is turning 60 – not years, but moons.

“We detected the 60th moon orbiting Saturn using the Cassini spacecraft’s powerful wide-angle camera,” said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team scientist from Queen Mary, University of London. “I was looking at images of the region near the Saturnian moons Methone and Pallene and something caught my eye.”

The newly discovered moon first appeared as a very faint dot in a series of images Cassini took of the Saturnian ring system on May 30 of this year. After the initial detection, Murray and fellow Cassini imaging scientists played interplanetary detective, searching for clues of the new moon in the voluminous library of Cassini images to date.

The Cassini imaging team’s legwork paid off. They were able to locate numerous additional detections, spanning from June 2004 to June 2007. “With these new data sets we were able to establish a good orbit for the new moon,” said Murray. “Knowing where the moons are at all times is important to the Cassini mission for several reasons.”

One of the most important reasons for Cassini to chronicle these previously unknown space rocks is so the spacecraft itself does not run into them. Another reason is each discovery helps provide a better understanding about how Saturn’s ring system and all its billions upon billions of parts work and interact together. Finally, a discovery of a moon is important because with this new knowledge, the Cassini mission planners and science team can plan to perform science experiments during future observations if and when the opportunity presents itself.

What of this new, 60th discovered moon of Saturn? Cassini scientists believe “Frank” (the working name for the moon until another, perhaps, more appropriate one is found) is about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) wide and, like so many of its neighbors, is made mostly of ice and rock. The moon’s location in the Saturnian sky is between the orbits of Methone and Pallene. It is the fifth moon discovered by the Cassini imaging team.

“When the Cassini mission launched back in 1997, we knew of only 18 moons orbiting Saturn,” said Murray. “Now, between Earth-based telescopes and Cassini we have more than tripled that number – and each and every new discovery adds another piece to the puzzle and becomes another new world to explore.”

Murray and his colleagues may get the chance to explore Saturn’s 60th moon. The Cassini spacecraft’s trajectory will put it within 7,300 miles (11,700 kilometers) in December of 2009.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

From http://www.fda.gov

There is no such thing as a free lunch, some say, but they would be wrong. In fact, the entirety of the universe defies them. According to Stanford physics Professor Andrei Linde, one of the architects of the inflationary theory, our universe (and all the matter in it) was born out of a vacuum.

“Recent developments in cosmology have irreversibly changed our understanding of the structure and fate of our universe and of our own place in it,” says Linde, who will discuss the inflationary view of the universe at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb. 18 in San Francisco.

In the same session, titled “Multiverses, Dark Energy and Physics as an Environmental Science,” physics Professor Leonard Susskind of Stanford will talk about string theory and its relation to inflationary theory and physics Professor Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University will represent the skeptic view.

The conventional theory of the Big Bang says that the newborn universe was huge, containing more than 10^80 [ten raised to the power of eighty] tons of matter. But physicists were stumped for an explanation of where all this matter came from. Inflationary theory solves this problem by showing how our universe could emerge from less than a milligram of matter, or perhaps even from literally nothing.

From the Big Bang theory to inflation

Physicist Alan Guth of MIT proposed the inflationary theory in 1981, but its original version did not work until Linde improved it. Guth and Linde realized that rather than expanding at an ever-decreasing rate, as was predicted by the Big Bang theory, the universe could have inflated at exponentially rapid speeds.

Just as a landscape is diverse with peaks and valleys, quantum fluctuations in the fabric of space-time form an energetic landscape. The energy driving expansion of the universe, Linde explained, is a bit like a ball rolling around a bowl. As the ball rolls down the side of the bowl, the intensity of quantum fluctuations decreases until it reaches the stable point at the bottom. The heat created by these oscillations at the bottom of the bowl is what caused the Big Bang, and the preceding stage of inflation is what made the bang so incredibly big, Linde said.

“Quantum events are taking place all around us,” he said. “They are very, very small.” Some of these small quantum events caught up in the process of rapid expansion of space became galaxies along the way.

“If galaxies are the result of quantum fluctuations,” said Linde with a shrug, “imagine what we are.”

‘An unexpected gift’ from string theory

The possibility that enormously large galaxies originated from tiny quantum fluctuations may seem too strange to be true. But many aspects of inflationary theory were confirmed by recent astronomical observations, for which the observers won the Nobel Prize in 2006. This gives some credence to an even more surprising claim made by Linde: During inflation, quantum fluctuations can produce not only galaxies, but also new parts of the universe.

Take an expanding universe with its little pockets of heterogeneous quantum events. At some point one of those random events may actually “escape” from its parent universe, forming a new one, Linde said. To use the ball analogy, if it experiences small perturbations as it rolls, it might at some point roll over into the next valley, initiating a new inflationary process, he said.

“The string theorists predict that there are perhaps 10^1,000 [ten raised to the power of one thousand] different types of universes that can be formed that way,” Linde said. “I had known that there must be many different kinds of universes with different physical properties, but this huge number of different possibilities was an unexpected gift of string theory.”

According to string theory, there are ten dimensions. We live aware of four of them-three of space plus one of time. The rest are so small that we cannot experience them directly. In 2003, Stanford physicists Shamit Kachru, Renata Kallosh and Andrei Linde, with their collaborator Sandip Trivedi from India, discovered that these compacted dimensions want to expand, but that the time it would take for them to do so is beyond human comprehension. When a new universe buds off from its parent, the configuration of which dimensions remain small and which grow large determines the physical laws of that universe. In other words, an infinite number of worlds could exist with 10^1,000 different types of physical laws operating among them. Susskind called this picture “the string theory landscape.”

For many physicists, it is disturbing to think that the very laws and properties that are the essence of our world might only hold true as long as we remain in that world. “We always wanted to discover the theory of everything that would explain the unique properties of our world, and now we must adjust to the thought that many different worlds are possible,” Linde said. But he sees an advantage in what some others could see as a problem: “We finally learned that the inflationary universe is not just a free lunch: It is an eternal feast where all possible dishes are served.”

From Stanford University

After four years of intensive collaboration, 18 top mathematicians and computer scientists from the United States and Europe have successfully mapped E8, one of the largest and most complicated structures in mathematics, scientists said late Sunday.

Jeffrey Adams, project leader and mathematics professor at the University of Maryland said E8 was discovered over a century ago, in 1887, and until now, no one thought the structure could ever be understood.

“This groundbreaking achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge, as well as a major advance in the use of large scale computing to solve complicated mathematical problems,” Adams said.

He added that the mapping of E8 may well have unforeseen implications in mathematics and physics which won’t be evident for years to come.

E8 belongs to so-called Lie groups that were invented by a 19th century Norwegian mathematician, Sophus Lie, to study symmetry.

The theory holds that underlying any symmetrical object, such as a sphere, is a Lie group.

Balls, cylinders or cones are familiar examples of symmetric three-dimensional objects.

However, mathematicians study symmetries in higher dimensions. In fact, E8 itself is 248-dimensional.

Today string theorists search for a theory of the universe by looking at E8 X E8.

While the human genome, which contains all the genetic information of a cell, is less than a gigabyte in size, the result of the E8 calculation, which contains all the information about E8, is 60 gigabytes in size, they said.

This is enough to store 45 days of continuous music in MP3-format. If written out on paper, the answer would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

From Forward Unlimited