The seemingly barren moon may actually be a treasure-trove of priceless resources: a potentially bountiful, mineral-rich – yet untapped – cosmic quarry. Still, few see the moon as an alluring mining site, ripe for the picking of rare elements of strategic and national security importance...."Resource knowledge is one aspect of lunar exploration that certainly drives the non-US space-faring nations. It is disappointing that planners in our [U.S.] space program have not invested in that scope or time scale," Pieters added. "Other than the flurry over looking for water in lunar polar shadows, no serious effort has been taken to document and evaluate the mineral resources that occur on Earth's nearest neighbor. Frustrating!"
From: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/small-exploding-asteroids-big-risk-101005.html
Forget Big Asteroids: It's the Smaller Rocks That Sneak In and Blow Up
By Leonard David
SPACE.com’s Space Insider Columnist
posted: 05 October 2010
08:08 am ET
Put aside the vision of Bruce Willis wrestling with huge space rocks threatening to doom Earth "Armageddon"-style. It turns out that people should be more worried about smaller space rocks that explode in our atmosphere.
While smaller than Earth-busting asteroids, these "airbursters" — like the space rock that exploded in 1908 high over Tunguska, Siberia — are more immediate threats, scientists say. They can cause localized destruction and may intrude in our airspace with little warning time.
When an airbursting asteroid, called a bolide, exploded over an island region of Indonesia late last year, it rocked the residents' world with an estimated energy release of about 50 kilotons, equal to some 110,000 pounds of TNT.
Such objects are expected to impact the Earth on average every two to 12 years. [Brilliant Fireball Video]
Physics of airbursts
The risks of exploding asteroids and the need to keep watch for hazardous near-Earth objects took center stage at September's Space 2010 conference in California, sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
"We used to think that the only real threat was from impacts that hit the ground ... and that the atmosphere would protect us from the small ones," said physicist Mark Boslough of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. "We never really thought about the physics of airbursts. ... There hasn't been that much research."
Given his modeling of airbursts, Boslough pointed out that smaller NEOs detonating in the atmosphere release intense heat and create very high blasts of wind that can reach the ground.
"So yes, you do have to sweat the small stuff," Boslough told SPACE.com.
Also, a space rock big enough to make it deeper into the Earth's atmosphere before it explodes can result in a sizzling jet of gases that incinerates anything volatile on the ground. Vegetation would be vaporized. Rocks would melt to form glass — in short, a hellish explosion.
A similar situation is thought to have occurred in the Libyan desert some 30 million years ago, Boslough said. The region was strewn with surface material fused into glass. Large deposits of shattered glass were discovered where there should be none.
"Just statistically, it's almost certain that the next destructive impact will be an airburst," Boslough said.
More and more of the big NEOs are being found, he said, so the statistical probability of Earth getting slam-dunked by a large object is going down.
"But there are many, many more small ones," Boslough said, advocating a priority on spotting less hefty, imminent impactors. "If big dollars are to be spent, I think they should be spent on more telescopes."
If a small NEO were discovered, say, two weeks in advance, "we have no choice but to take the hit," Boslough said.
In terms of planetary defense and mitigation efforts, Boslough advised focusing more attention on small airbursting objects, with "mitigation being a form of civil defense."
Tunguska fallout
The classic asteroid event occurred 102 years ago in Tunguska, Boslough said. It involved an object that broke up in a cascading way, leading to a rapidly expanding fireball and subsequent blast wave.
"That blast wave hit the ground, and the wind associated with it was high enough to actually blow over trees," he said.
The downed trees covered at least 2,000 square kilometers (more than 770 square miles) — with no crater associated with the explosion located.
Boslough said that, in his opinion, the Tunguska asteroid was probably a 40-meter (131-foot) object. "Tunguska wasn't the lower threshold. You could imagine something 30 meters (98 feet) across," he said, and in that case, it would explode with a little bit less energy and a little higher in the atmosphere.
"But if you just happened to be directly under it, yes, it could be fatal," Boslough added.
Boslough stressed that the probability of a Tunguska is on the order of once every thousand years. "But the next object that has the chance of killing somebody is almost certainly going to be an airburst like Tunguska — maybe bigger, maybe smaller," he said.
Continuing threat
Other panel members of the AIAA session, while highlighting varying aspects of NEO research, concurred about the troublesome issue of smaller incoming objects.
"We talk about the big ones all the time, and we're getting rid of the threat for those," said Bill Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies.
"But the small ones are going to be a continuing threat. And the challenge is what do we do about that," said Ailor, also a leading planetary defense expert at The Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, Calif. "We might not see them in time."
Similar in view was Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"We're doing very well with detecting the large ones. But we've got a long way to go for the small ones," Yeomans added.
His message regarding planetary defense:
"We need to find them before they find us."
From: http://fireballs-meteorites.blogspot.com/2010/10/october-2010.html
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Sott.net
Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:00 CDT
Sott.net
Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:00 CDT
Destroying history means, of course, destroying large segments of the human population who pass history on to their offspring. When you find a blank spot in history, a discontinuity, you can pretty well figure out that something really awful must have happened.
I've recently been wading through the complete works of Anatoly Fomenko. Those of you who have read my book The Secret History of the World know that I referred to him and his theories, but this was based on the available articles about it in English at the time. I've now been gifted with volumes 1 through 4 of his 7 volume work, along with the images from the final three volumes which are still being translated. It's a real revelation.
Now, for those of you who are familiar with this work, let me assure you that I am not reading uncritically. What I do find is that Fomenko's deconstruction is masterful. His method and results that prove that our history has been falsified are, in my opinion, incontrovertible. The numbers simply do not lie. What I am not very impressed by are some of his interpretations of what he does accept as data and his reconstruction is not satisfactory at all. He seems to be entirely unaware of why history must have needed to be re-written: repeated cometary destruction of Europe and the Mediterranean regions over the past 2000 years or more. That general ignorance is widespread and it has a powerful bearing on the 'Disclosure' issue, I think.
Some of the recent 'Disclosure' trends seem to include information from 'government insiders' who have told their stories, or whispered hints of amazing technology just waiting for all of us when this 'inevitable' event happens. Sorry, but I think its all wishful thinking. Why? Because what is interesting to me is the fact that, with all the tracking of government documents and conspiracies and so on, it seems that no one has mentioned to the purveyors of 'Disclosure' just how interested the government actually is in cometary impacts.
On 4 November 1996, Edward Teller wrote to then British Prime Minister, John Major:
Every few human lifetimes, there is a bombardment event like that which occurred in Siberia in 1908, wiping out most life over an area of about 10,000 square miles... Quantitatively, the time-averaged loss-of-life is comparable to that due to large floods, earthquakes and aeroplane crashes... The advent during the last half-century of reasonably large-scale rocket propulsion has given us the technological means necessary to avert such impacts.Teller, apparently, believed that the greatest threat to humankind is not nuclear war, but asteroid or comet impact.
Some groups within the military believe the problem to be very serious indeed. A document on the subject of impact threat - now cleared for public release but formerly classified - was prepared by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1996. (Planetary Defense: Catastrophic Health Insurance for Planet Earth, 1996)
Due to a lack of awareness and emphasis, the world is not socially, economically, or politically prepared to deal with the vulnerability of impacts and their potential consequences. Further, in terms of existing capabilities, there is currently a lack of adequate means of detection, command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C41), and mitigation...Dr. Jasper Wall, director of Britain's Royal Greenwich Observatory, Cambridge noted that the Tunguska blast could have had far more serious consequences, would have changed history, if it had occurred at a different time.
In terms of courses of action in the event of a likely impact of an ECO, [earth crossing object], other than a nuclear option, no defensive capability exists today. However, new technologies may yield safer and more cost-effective solutions by 2025. These authors contend that the stakes are simply too high not to pursue direct and viable solutions to the ECO problem. Indeed, the survival of humanity is at stake.
Had Earth moved for another three hours or so before the impact occurred, the target would not have been a barely populated corner of Siberia, but Moscow itself. Ten million people would have died. [interview conducted by Austen Atkinson, 1998]Tunguska sized events occur every 30 to 100 years and smaller incidents occur more frequently. Just such an event occurred in Brazil in 1931. They seem to be increasing, so any day there could be another Tunguska anywhere on the planet... or multiple Tunguska-size events.
The technology needed to detect and deflect these 'small' high-speed objects simply does not exist.
Something like 250 atomic-bomb-sized detonations due to comets and asteroids have been registered by the USA's nuclear-detection system and spy satellites over the course of a single decade up through 1999. These explosions were all at relatively high altitudes, but came with a frequency of at least 2 per month. The recent closing of this data to scientists and the public suggests that there is something to be hidden.
There is a 1-in-24,000 chance that you will be killed by a comet or asteroid impact during a 70 year lifespan. The chances of you getting CJD (mad-cow disease) is 1-in 15 million during the same lifespan. Despite the fact that you are 625 times more likely to die from a comet or asteroid impact and are extremely unlikely to die from CJD, the CJD risk has been highly propagandized, British beef was banned from tables, and everyone totally ignored the far more pressing problem of possible imminent death from space rocks. The MOD has taken no action while the Ministry of Agriculture certainly did.
Why such a strange state of schizophrenia?
Perception. The people perceive that the government can do something about a disease, but can do nothing about space rocks.
The approach of those promoting 'Disclosure' reflects the general lack of knowledge of the problems we face that are real and far more pressing than aliens on our planet. Mike Baillie points out that there is still enormous ignorance of the dangers even within the archaeological community. There is still no archaeological or historical paradigm to deal with the historical presence and influence of impacts. This is particularly troublesome in regards to 'Disclosure' since strange sightings in the skies and strange beings and events historically accompany cometary events. It's as though there is some dimensional doorway-opening capacity connected to the comets/asteroids.
Mike Baillie once asked for a show of hands at an archaeological conference, when he asked the audience if they were aware of the impact phenomenon and its probable role in killing off the dinosaurs and its relevance to human history. Only 10% raised their hands.
Is this an example of "ignorance is bliss"? Do people really think that all will be well if we close our eyes and minds to reality? Unfortunately, Nature is not usually very kind to the slothful or apathetic. It's not adaptive and such individuals may not pass on their genes to future generations.
Because of the hold that religious uniformitarianism has on the minds of most members of our civilization, the concept of cometary impacts has been relegated to popular fiction and entertainment. The scientific community has been uniformly slow in understanding the wider implications across disciplines from astronomy to geology to economics and history.
It all seems so remote to them... what with our Earthly troubles, politics, war, economic troubles, etc. If people could only step back for a moment and really understand that those problems are meaningless in the context of the fact that it all could come to a sudden, fiery end in an instant; death that is unwelcome, terrible, and without mercy.
In 1979, Victor Clube and Bill Napier published their seminal scientific paper in the British journal Nature, titled "A Theory of Terrestrial Catastrophism". There was little notice paid to this paper. It was seven months later that Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter, linked this theory with their geological mystery: the extinction of the dinosaurs. They published their work in 1980 in the American journal, Science. There was an uproar and an immediate backlash from the Uniformitarian school. In 1990, ten years after the Alvarez paper, the K/T impact crater was found in data obtained from oil drilling geophysicists. Here we notice that it is private industry that is controlling the scientific data that is needed so desperately by all of humanity. This should change!
Nowadays, the detractors of the impact theory are in the minority and look increasingly like lunatics in denial. The Uniformitarian view has gripped science for so long that some of them will go to their graves denying the overwhelming evidence. Some of them will accept the K/T impact, and then comfort themselves with the idea that it only happens at millions of years intervals.
Not so.
We must not be seduced into thinking that this is a threat that is remote from us, nor be hypnotized by thinking only about large, global extinction impactors such as the K/T event. The primary threat is that of the 'deathrock' in the size range of 300 meters to 2 kilometers. The risk from these objects is very, very real and can produce catastrophes that kill millions, if not billions, and render vast tracts of the globe uninhabitable for long periods.
Tree-ring chronologies along with ice-cores have been very valuable in assessing the possibility that impacts have been far more frequent, and dangerous, than ever previously suspected. Many events have occurred since 2345 BC and have continued to the present day.
Historical records can also provide precious clues if they are looked at properly. There are many historical accounts of what can only be understood as impact phenomena in history that have been, up to now, wrongly interpreted.
The only way to develop coherent understanding and theories about these matters is via cross-disciplinary studies. There is so much information available in all fields that, if it is all cross-referenced and correlated, a true picture of our past - and future - can be had.
Unfortunately, very few scientists are studying the matter in a polymathic way. I'm not a scientist, but I guess I'm a polymath. More of such are needed, desperately.
The U.S. Military is, apparently, as I've already noted, quite concerned about these matters and it is surprising that the 'Disclosure' advocates have missed this fact. A 1 kilometer asteroid traveling at an average speed of 50 km/s will impact the Earth with an explosive force equivalent to 30,000 megatons of TNT. That is the equivalent of 2.5 million Hiroshima-sized bombs!
Smaller impactors in the 50 to 1 meter range can generate H-bomb-sized explosions, the equivalent of 10 to 20 megatons of TNT. Tunguska experienced just such an event in 1908, as did Brazil in 1931.
The Tunguska event produced a global scattering of iridium discovered in the Greenland ice cores.
As noted, you have a 1-in-24,000 chance of being killed by a comet or asteroid. This is about the same risk factor you experience when you get on an airplane. See the problem? An enormous amount of money is spent on aircraft safety, and virtually none spent on the same time-averaged risk of impact threat.
Since the 'Disclosure' advocates have gotten so close to the military technology people (according to them), perhaps they are aware that military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and government agencies such as NASA, have become extremely concerned by the potential impact threat. Lockheed Martin used its energy laboratory at Sandia to research the impact threat. Using energy equations similar to those developed by Teller, which take into account environmental and atmospheric factors, Sandia's team of scientists were able to create virtual-reality simulations of a catastrophic impact. This project was led by David Crawford and Arthurine Breckenridge. They modeled the impact of a 1.4 kilometer-diameter comet, weighing approximately 1,000 million tons and traveling at 60 km/s as it strikes the Atlantic Ocean 25 miles south of New York. This work was done with the most advanced computation equipment on the planet. This was no computer game. Sandia's team also modeled the impacts of Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter with stunning accuracy.
The conclusions were horrifying.
The comet impacts with the ocean and instantly vaporizes 300 to 500 cubic kilometers of water forming a temporary cavity in the ocean. The equivalent of 300 gigatons of TNT energy is released at that instant - ten times the explosive power of all the world's nuclear weapons together. The heat generated is in excess of 5,000 degrees Celsius.
Five seconds after the comet hits the ocean, a tremendous impact plume composed of superheated debris, earth and water, smothers most of Long Island.
Eleven seconds after impact, the New York coastline is swept by superheated steam and ejected debris. At the same time, a large proportion of the ejected debris has now penetrated Earth's atmosphere in sub-orbital trajectories. Molten ejecta begins to fall on New York and the heat generated by the impact has begun to incinerate everything in its path - entire cities and forests are turned into cinders almost instantly.
Finally, the global debris cloud rapidly lowers temperatures worldwide and this is followed by the moisture evaporated into the atmosphere starting to fall as snow. David Crawford, leader of the Sandia team, said:
It's almost like doing an experiment - one you could never do. One you would never want to do. {Sandia National Laboratory, PR: 5 May 1998}What is interesting is how our "fearless leaders" are looking at this problem. Their question is: "Is Earth and its human population worth saving?"
My guess is that they are trying to get everything locked down so that they can eliminate a lot of people with plausible excuses, and get away with it; that is, do it without risking the entire population turning against the PTB. And so, they play war games, they create terrorism, they play out farces of being at odds with one another when it is really the average human being in all countries who is the enemy of the leaders, all of whom - even if they play at being opposed to one another - are in the same club.
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