Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

'Mushroom-shaped light and loud boom' rocks remote Siberia

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Meteor

SOTT Focus: Spectacular Russian rocket launch - more evidence of comet dust loading our atmosphere

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Earlier today SOTT posted this video of a rocket launch cum 'UFO spiral'. The person who uploaded it to YouTube managed to convince him or herself that the spectacular display was the result of UFOs "taking over control of the rocket" once it reached a certain altitude. Well I've since located other videos of the launch minus the misleading text and the "blinking lights" (which appear to have been added later for effect, if not for outright disinformation purposes). Here is a YouTube video entitled 'Launch of the Soyuz 2 rocket carrying Glonass-K satellite':


No blinking lights surrounding the rocket and no text to tell you it's aliens from another planet taking remote control of it either.

Meteor

Drip, drip disclosure! NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite

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© Journal of Cosmology / Riccardo Guerrero / Richard B. HooverA photograph taken through a scanning electron microscope of a CI1 meteorite (right) is similar in size and overall structure to the giant bacterium Titanospirillum velox (left), an organism found here on planet Earth, a NASA scientist said.
We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought.

That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.

Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies -- comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.

Meteor

In Case You Thought We Were Safe: Earth Under Threat From Dark Comets

Comets could be the most significant impact hazard to Earth, with sky surveys underestimating the number that are potentially devastating by a factor of between 10 and 100, British astrophysicists say.

Astronomers may be missing these so-called 'dark comets' because their icy and reflective surfaces have become hidden under an obscuring layer of dust.


Comment: We recommend reading the works of James McCanney, especially his Plasma Theory of Comets, to understand that comets are not "dirty snowballs" after all.


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© NASAUnrecognised risk: Earth may lie in the path of many thousands of unseen 'dark' comets.
Near Earth objects (NEOs) are comets or asteroids that have been nudged into a possible collision path with the Earth. The international program to discover NEOs; Spaceguard, which includes NASA's NEO program, has identified around 6,000 NEOs so far, most of which are asteroids.

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Beautiful Time-Lapse of Milky Way over Lake Tahoe


Meteor

What's Hitting Earth?

Delta Aquarid Fireball
© NASAA Southern Delta Aquarid fireball streaks over one of the network cameras in July 2010: movie.

Every day about 100 tons of meteoroids -- fragments of dust and gravel and sometimes even big rocks - enter the Earth's atmosphere. Stand out under the stars for more than a half an hour on a clear night and you'll likely see a few of the meteors produced by the onslaught. But where does all this stuff come from? Surprisingly, the answer is not well known.

Now NASA is deploying a network of smart cameras across the United States to answer the question, What's Hitting Earth?

Did that meteor you saw blazing through the sky last night come from the asteroid belt? Was it created in a comet's death throes? Or was it a piece of space junk meeting a fiery demise?

"When I get to work each morning and power up my computer, there's an email waiting with answers," says William Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "And I don't have to lift a finger, except to click my mouse button."

Meteor

Just another asteroid hurtling toward Earth ...

Hollywood hype aside, close encounters of a rocky kind are fairly common. But they're fascinating to local scientists who want to learn how it all began, and maybe fend off armageddon.

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© Dina Rudick/Globe StaffFrancesca DeMeo, an MIT postdoctoral researcher, records asteroid movements from her lab in Cambridge.
At 4:33 a.m. on a recent Friday, Timothy Spahr was startled awake by a beep from his cellphone: A text message alerted him that a rocky object was hurtling toward Earth. He told his wife it was "some asteroid thing'' and went to check his computer.

In Hollywood, this would be the opening scene to a doomsday movie. But for Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, it is just another day. About once a month, an object on a potential crash course with Earth disturbs his slumber.

They almost always miss - and this time was no different. The asteroid was just a few feet across and on track to miss by about 11,000 miles. He sent a note to contacts at NASA and posted information about it online.

People have long been fascinated by the threat of apocalypse by asteroid, as depicted in movies such as the 1998 film Armageddon and 1979's Meteor, which was inspired by an MIT student project to create a plan to avoid a theoretical collision.

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Top Ten Meteor Video Captures

Fires from beneath, and meteors from above,
Portentous, unexampled, unexplained,
Have kindled beacons in the skies; and the old
And crazy earth has had her shaking fits
More frequent, and foregone her usual rest.
Is it a time to wrangle, when the props
And pillars of our planet seem to fail,
And nature, with a dim and sickly eye,
To wait the close of all?


~ 'The Time-Piece,' Task, Book ii, lines 58-66. William Cowper

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Comet Spiral Russia February 26, 2011

A recent sighting of another strange object over Severodvinsk Russia captured February 26, 2011.

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comet,russia,feb, 26,2011

Comment: For more information about this type of phenomenon see:
Dome of the Rock UFO and Kazakhstan Comet - Something Chaotic This Way Comes


Meteor

Flashback Best of the Web: Major Impact Soon: British MP says, "We're living in a bowling alley"

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I hope you will excuse my cynicism but there is something quite remarkable about this interview with Lembit Opik, the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Montgomeryshire. You will not find one single trace of political gobbledegook or point scoring.

What you will find are the thoughts and feelings of an individual who passionately believes in what he is trying to achieve. This is a brave man carrying a message that no one wants to hear and he is prepared to take the brickbats and mocking that inevitably accompany such a message.

What other tribute could I possibly offer, aside from accusing him of also being a very warm, approachable human being, other than to say that I only wish he was my Lembit Opik MP...

Lembit is the leading voice in the UK on asteroids and the little matter of one of them smacking into us, probably sooner rather than later. And one of those bits of rock doesn't have to be particularly large in order to cause immense devastation and loss of life. Or rather, let me put it this way. If on Christmas day last year I had told you that a giant wave would sweep across south East Asia, hit land and cause the loss of 220,000 lives (so far), you would not have believed me. There's no argument - you wouldn't have believed me. The next day it happened.

We need to wake up rapidly and do something.

Comment: Did you notice the politician's surprise that an asteroid "actually travelled between the moon and the Earth" early in the last decade?

That has happened multiple times since then. Just three weeks ago a rock came as close to Earth as it could have done being pulled into our atmosphere; the planet's gravity instead changed the rock's direction by nearly 90 degrees.

It is highly unlikely that world leaders at the highest level are not aware of the threat of a meteorite impact. We have been suggesting that they ARE aware, and have been for a very long time. The reader might wish to peruse Laura Knight-Jadczyk's Comets and Catastrophe series. They are also aware that they cannot do anything to prevent impacts such as those described in the above article. And so, they marginalize the subject and feign disinterest all the while they are making their own preparations to survive.

There is much evidence to strongly suggest that much of the landmass of Western Europe was destroyed in an meteorite impact around 540 AD, ushering in what is known today as "the dark ages". Further evidence from the study of fossilised tree rings and ice core samples, not to mention historical records, suggests that this most recent event was but one of many events that have happened in a cyclical pattern throughout the course of human history.

As far as we know, no human has ever got out of this place "alive". Perhaps now that the Universe, by posing a clear and present danger to our very existence, is drawing attention to that existence, we might all begin, even at this late hour, to ponder just what the real meaning of our lives, individually and collectively, really is.