Scientists Are Baffled by “Huge Mass” Under the Moon’s Surface

futurism.com

We know it's there but we don't know where it came from

A Mass-ive Anomaly

The Moon’s largest crater — the 1,240 mile-across and four billion years-old South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin — is hiding something enormous and metallic under its surface, as discovered by researchers from Baylor University and revealed to the world this week.

It’s a discovery that continues to puzzle scientists. Where did this 4.8 quintillion pound growth come from? What is it made of?

“Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground,” Peter B. James, author of the paper, said in a press release. “That’s roughly how much unexpected mass we detected.”

 A Tale of Two Theories

There are the two reasons why the mass exists, according to the researchers who discovered it.

The first is “that the metal from the asteroid that formed this crater is still embedded in the Moon’s mantle,” said James. The second is that the Moon’s liquid magma surface solidified billions of years ago, leaving dense oxides of nickel and iron.

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NASA Releases Video Announcing We're Going Back To The Moon By 2024 (And Staying There)

Geekologie

This is a video released by NASA and narrated by William Shatner announcing the organization's plans to return to the moon by 2024 and maintain a presence there as we push human exploration further into the solar system and beyond (the plan includes 'Gateway', a space station orbiting the moon and serving as a recharge and repair station for reusable lunar landers). The scientists and engineers in the video view the moon as a sort of jumping-off point for future missions into space, already outside the difficulty of escaping earth's atmosphere. So -- do you think you would be able to survive on the moon? That was a trick question, and the answer is only if I decide to let you, because I will be the leader of a ruthless barbarian moon tribe.

Keep going for the video and get amped about space.

The Race to Develop the Moon

Rivka Galchen
The New Yorker

n January, the China National Space Administration landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, the side we can’t see from Earth. Chang’e-4 was named for a goddess in Chinese mythology, who lives on the moon for reasons connected to her husband’s problematic immortality drink. The story has many versions. In one, Chang’e has been banished to the moon for elixir theft and turned into an ugly toad. In another, she has saved humanity from a tyrannical emperor by stealing the drink. In many versions, she is a luminous beauty and has as a companion a pure-white rabbit.

Chang’e-4 is the first vehicle to alight on the far side of the moon. From that side, the moon blocks radio communication with Earth, which makes landing difficult, and the surface there is craggy and rough, with a mountain taller than anything on Earth. Older geologies are exposed, from which billions of years of history can be deduced. Chang’e-4 landed in a nearly four-mile-deep hole that was formed when an ancient meteor crashed into the moon—one of the largest known impact craters in our solar system.

You may have watched the near-operatic progress of Chang’e-4’s graceful landing. Or the uncannily cute robotic amblings of the lander’s companion, the Yutu-2 rover, named for the moon goddess’s white rabbit. You may have read that, aboard the lander, seeds germinated (cotton, rapeseed, and potato; the Chinese are also trying to grow a flowering plant known as mouse-ear cress), and that the rover survived the fourteen-day lunar night, when temperatures drop to negative two hundred and seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Chang’e-4 is a step in China’s long-term plan to build a base on the moon, a goal toward which the country has rapidly been advancing since it first orbited the moon, in 2007.

If you missed the Chinese mission, maybe it’s because you were focussed on the remarkably inexpensive spacecraft from SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit organization, which crash-landed into the moon on April 11th, soon after taking a selfie while hovering above the lunar surface. The crash was not the original plan, and SpaceIL has already announced its intention of going to the moon again. But maybe you weren’t paying attention to SpaceIL, either, because you were anticipating India’s Chandrayaan-2 moon lander, expected to take off later this year. Or you were waiting for Japan’s first lunar-lander-and-rover mission, scheduled to take place next year. Perhaps you’ve been distracted by the announcement, in January, on the night of the super blood wolf moon, that the European Space Agency plans to mine lunar ice by 2025. Or by Vice-President Mike Pence’s statement, in March, that the United States intends “to return American astronauts to the moon within the next five years.”

Fifty years ago, three men journeyed from a small Florida peninsula to a dry crater some two hundred and forty thousand miles away called the Sea of Tranquillity. Hundreds of millions of people watched on black-and-white TVs as a man from Wapakoneta, Ohio, climbed slowly down a short ladder and reported in a steady voice that his footprint had depressed the soil only a fraction of an inch, that “the surface appears to be very fine-grained as you get close to it, it’s almost like a powder down there, it’s very fine.”

Shortly before NASA launched Apollo 11, it received a letter from the Union of Persian Storytellers, begging NASA to change the plan: a moon landing would rob the world of its illusions, and rob the union’s members of their livelihood. During the spacecraft’s flight, the Mission Control Center, in Houston, asked the crew to look out for Chang’e, and for her bunny, too. Houston said that the bunny would be “easy to spot, since he is always standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree.” Buzz Aldrin responded, “We’ll keep a close eye out for the bunny girl.” 

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Goldman Sachs Rep Discusses Militarizing the Moon

American Intelligence Report

The idea of colonizing Earth’s moon and creating a whole world from scratch has always been a notion of science-fiction, until now NBC reports. The European Space Agency has put in motion a plan to build a ‘moon village‘ accessible to ESA member states and other nations globally. The village will offer fresh business, leisure and community opportunities. “A village is something where different people are gathering with different capabilities, different opportunities, and then they build a community,” Johann-Dietrich Wörner, director general of the ESA, said during this years 32nd Space Symposium. “It’s not one village with some houses, a church.”

As space technology is advancing, the amount of time to reach local planets and moons is decreasing. Forget witnessing a sunset, how about an Earthset? The moon has also been slated to be a tourist and vacationing spot, and the aspirations do not stop  there.

“I think we should go first to the moon and then further on,” Wörner said.

“I would not call Mars the ultimate goal. I am quite sure humans will go further,” he added.
The mission will also make use of state-of-the-art robot and 3-d printing technology .

Robots will land on the moon prior and use 3D printers to construct a safe environment, including daily life-support requirements for travelers and permanent residents.

It’s unsure of what type of government will be established on the moon in the early phases of development, if any.

However, it would not be to far-fetched to believe that the moon would be run by corporate policies, rather than a community run system. Majority of the colony will be employed by big investors to accomplish work on the Earth’s moon.

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NASA acknowledging Electric Universe?: New NASA model gives glimpse into the invisible world of electric asteroids

phys.org

Space may appear empty - a soundless vacuum, but it's not an absolute void. It flows with electric activity that is not visible to our eyes. NASA is developing plans to send humans to an asteroid, and wants to know more about the electrical environment explorers will encounter there.

A solar wind blown from the surface of the sun at about a million miles per hour flows around all solar system objects, forming swirling eddies and vortices in its wake. Magnetic fields carried by the solar wind warp, twist, and snap as they slam into the magnetic fields around other objects in our solar system, blasting particles to millions of miles per hour and sending electric currents surging in magnetic storms that, around Earth, can damage sensitive technology like satellites and power grids.

On airless objects like moons and asteroids, sunlight ejects negatively charged electrons from matter, giving sunlit areas a strong positive electric charge. The solar wind is an electrically conducting gas called plasma where matter has been torn apart into electrons, which are relatively light, and positively charged ions, which are thousands of times more massive. While areas in sunlight can charge positive, areas in shadow get a strong negative charge when electrons in the solar wind rush in ahead of heavier ions to fill voids created as the solar wind flows by.

The surface of Earth is shielded from the direct effects of this activity by our planet's magnetic field, but airless objects without strong repelling magnetic fields, like small asteroids, have no protection from electrical activity in space.

NASA-sponsored researchers funded by the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) (formerly the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI)) have developed a new computer model that can predict and visualize the interaction between the solar wind, solar radiation, and the surface of asteroids in unprecedented detail.

"Our model is the first to provide detailed, two-dimensional views of the complex interaction between solar activity and small objects like asteroids, using an adaptive computational technique that makes these simulations highly efficient," said Michael Zimmerman, project lead at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

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Nasa says Mars mystery rock that ‘appeared’ from nowhere is ‘like nothing we’ve seen before’

Comment: The shock and surprise at a little rock causing a ruckus should pale into insignificance when you compare it to the massive symmetrical anomaly - and a host of others both on the Moon, Mars and our very own planet Earth over the decades - which have baffled and disturbed scientists. Though some are clearly faked from people with too much time on their hands, many others are very genuine indeed. They remain very outside the mainstream media purview.

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The Independent 

A mysterious rock which appeared in front of the Opportunity rover is "like nothing we've ever seen before", according to Mars exploration scientists at Nasa. 

Experts said they were "completely confused" by both the origins and makeup of the object, which is currently being investigated by Opportunity's various measuring instruments.

Astronomers noticed the new rock had "appeared" without any explanation on an outcrop which had been empty just days earlier. The rover has been stuck photographing the same region of Mars for more than a month due to bad weather, with scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California monitoring the images it sends.

Nasa issued a Mars status report entitled "encountering a surprise", and lead Mars Exploration rover scientist Steve Squyres told a JPL event it seems the planet literally "keeps throwing new things at us".

He said the images, from 12 Martian days apart, were from no more than a couple of weeks ago. "We saw this rock just sitting here. It looks white around the edge in the middle and there’s a low spot in the centre that's dark red - it looks like a jelly doughnut.

"And it appeared, just plain appeared at that spot - and we haven't ever driven over that spot."

 

 Images captured by Opportunity show the mysterious rock 'appeared' on an outcrop that had been empty just 12 Martian days ('Sols') earlier Squyres said his team had two theories on how the rock got there - that there's "a smoking hole in the ground somewhere nearby" and it was caused by a meteor, or that it was "somehow flicked out of the ground by a wheel” as the rover went by.

"We had driven a metre or two away from here, and I think the idea that somehow we mysteriously flicked it with a wheel is the best explanation," Squyres said.

Yet the story got even stranger when Opportunity investigated further. Squyres explained: "We are as we speak situated with the rover's instruments deployed making measurements of this rock.

"We've taken pictures of both the doughnut and jelly parts, and the got the first data on the composition of the jelly yesterday.

"It's like nothing we've ever seen before," he said. "It's very high in sulphur, it's very high in magnesium, it's got twice as much manganese as we've ever seen in anything on Mars.

"I don't know what any of this means. We're completely confused, and everyone in the team is arguing and fighting (over what it means).

"That's the beauty of this mission... what I've realised is that we will never be finished. There will always be something tantalising, something wonderful just beyond our reach that we didn't quite get to - and that's the nature of exploration."

Squyres was speaking at an event marking the 10th anniversary of the arrival of Opportunity and Spirit on the surface of Mars.

While Spirit lost contact with Earth and was later declared "dead" in 2010, Opportunity has now roamed the planet far in excess of what was originally planned as a three-month mission. Nasa said that with its maximum speed of just 0.05mph, as of "Sol 3547" (15 January 2014) Opportunity had covered just over 24 miles (38km).