Who Parked The Moon?

[crikkett]

Icke was on Red Ice the other day and they spent a lot of time talking about wtf the the moon might be and how the fcuk it got there.

Does anyone take David Icke seriously? Why?

Should I start a thread?

[WakeUpAndLive]

:?:

Icke was on Red Ice the other day and they spent a lot of time talking about wtf the the moon might be and how the fcuk it got there.

Does anyone take David Icke seriously? Why?

Should I start a thread?

I never took well to his reptile stuff, just seemed too far fetched to me. He does have some interesting viewpoints which make me think he is not an agent of the state.

[Bruce Dazzling]

Apollo 18 (film)

Apollo 18 is an upcoming 2011 American horror film directed by Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego and produced by Timur Bekmambetov. The film centers around a fictional premise of an actual Apollo 18 mission that was launched in December 1974, that supposedly never returned and as a result, signified the real reason why the United States never commissioned another expedition to the moon. The film is shot in a mockumentary found footage style, supposedly of the lost footage of the Apollo 18 mission that was only recently discovered. The film will be Lopez-Gallego's first English-language film.
After various release date changes, the film is currently scheduled to be released on September 2, 2011.

Plot

Apollo 18 is a found footage style film set in December 1974, about a post-Apollo 17 mission to the Moon that takes on a premise of why NASA discontinued the Apollo moon missions. The plot involves a government coverup of the Apollo 18 mission after parasitic lifeforms on the Moon discovered the crew and began to attack them. Much of the back-story remains unknown; however, the movie posters in English indicate the KGB's role in Soviet lunar conspiracy and the Russian movie posters show inscriptions in English suggesting an American government cover up in lunar conspiracy.[3][4] In the trailer, an American astronaut finds a dead cosmonaut and a Soviet LK Lander on the lunar surface.

Production

The film was shot in Vancouver, British Columbia and stars actors Lloyd Owen and Warren Christie. [5] However it has been promoted as a "found footage" film that does not use actors. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Dimension Films head Bob Weinstein denied the film was a work of fiction, stating that “We didn’t shoot anything, we found it. Found baby!” [6][7] The film will be distributed by Dimension Films.[8]
The Science & Entertainment Exchange provided a science consultation to the film's production team.[9]

[Gnomad]

Nasa releases new images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, showing Apollo landing sites:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/n ... sites.html

(via http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/09 ... ding-Sites )

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/5843 ... 7_area.jpg

[brainpanhandler]

Nasa releases new images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, showing Apollo landing sites:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/n ... sites.html

(via http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/09 ... ding-Sites )

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/5843 ... 7_area.jpg

Finally. Well, that's all settled now.

The lunar tracks remind me of the trails snails leave behind them.

[justdrew]

and the GRAIL mission is about to launch...

http://moon.mit.edu/

The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, mission is a part of NASA's Discovery Program. It is scheduled to launch in 2011. GRAIL will fly twin spacecraft in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field in unprecedented detail. The mission also will answer longstanding questions about Earth's moon and provide scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed.

Scientists will use the gravity field information from the two satellites to X-ray the moon from crust to core to reveal the moon's subsurface structures and, indirectly, its thermal history.

The measurement technique that GRAIL will use was pioneered by the joint U.S.-German Earth observing Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, mission launched in 2002. The GRACE satellites measure gravity changes related to the movement of mass within Earth, such as the melting of ice at the poles and changes in ocean circulation. As with GRACE, both GRAIL spacecraft will be launched on a single launch vehicle.

[LilyPatToo]

:?:

Icke was on Red Ice the other day and they spent a lot of time talking about wtf the the moon might be and how the fcuk it got there.

Does anyone take David Icke seriously? Why?

Should I start a thread?

I'd love to read a thread on Icke, since i have the same questions. He's one of the few upper tier fringe authors willing to talk to trauma-based mind control program survivors, but has chosen some who are controversial, ignoring other less-sensational people. And even Cathy O'Brien griped about how he'd taken something she said completely out of context in order to shore up his pet Reptilian mythos, despite the fact that she made repeated attempts to set the record straight.

I tend to take him with a humongous grain of salt, but I'm drawn to his material over and over again, notwithstanding. He bugs me. I want to believe that a non-psyops-compliant researcher can make it to his level of exposure, but after a dose of his wilder-eyed stuff, I find myself wondering if he's not being used to do disinfo meme spreading entirely unwittingly...?

BTW, did anyone else see that Strieber interview on (I think) HuffPo? Might have been another Left gatekeeper source, but it was surpassingly strange to see him quoted anywhere in the Left media. And it was on his meeting with "The Master" in that Canadian hotel room, too.

LilyPat

Also--even more on-topic: how did those of you who saw Apollo 18 feel about the experience of seeing the film? Was it worth the price? Matinee or evening cost?

[justdrew]

:?:

Icke was on Red Ice the other day and they spent a lot of time talking about wtf the the moon might be and how the fcuk it got there.

Does anyone take David Icke seriously? Why?

Should I start a thread?

I'd love to read a thread on Icke, since i have the same questions. He's one of the few upper tier fringe authors willing to talk to trauma-based mind control program survivors, but has chosen some who are controversial, ignoring other less-sensational people. And even Cathy O'Brien griped about how he'd taken something she said completely out of context in order to shore up his pet Reptilian mythos, despite the fact that she made repeated attempts to set the record straight.

I tend to take him with a humongous grain of salt, but I'm drawn to his material over and over again, notwithstanding. He bugs me. I want to believe that a non-psyops-compliant researcher can make it to his level of exposure, but after a dose of his wilder-eyed stuff, I find myself wondering if he's not being used to do disinfo meme spreading entirely unwittingly...?

BTW, did anyone else see that Strieber interview on (I think) HuffPo? Might have been another Left gatekeeper source, but it was surpassingly strange to see him quoted anywhere in the Left media. And it was on his meeting with "The Master" in that Canadian hotel room, too.

LilyPat

Also--even more on-topic: how did those of you who saw Apollo 18 feel about the experience of seeing the film? Was it worth the price? Matinee or evening cost?

here it is...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/07/communion-author-whitley-strieber_n_943681.html

they have a whole 'weird news' section now

[82_28]

I was just now reading slashdot and a commenter on the thread about this new incontrovertible evidence that Mars once had liquid water on its surface:

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/12 ... er-on-mars

This is what mentioned commenter had to say:

Titan is larger than earth's moon.

Mars is smaller than the Earth.

Smashing titan into mars would probably be a bad thing. (A very, very bad thing. That is, unless you like the idea of scattering huge chunks of rock into space. See for instance, the collision simulation for the hypothesis of earth's moon's formation.)

Better, would be to go ahead and nudge the moon out of saturns orbit, have it fall into the inner solar system, sweep a wide orbit of the sun, then fall into orbit around mars.

Best to use a trans ecliptic orbit, so that the falling body doesn't adversely effect other inner planet systems.

Once in martian orbit, titan's gravity would cause intense mantle heating of the red planet. It is likely that titan's atmosphere would freeze and snow out after being dislodged from saturn's orbit, due to the lack of tidal heating while it transits. Mars' tidal forces would be miniscule compared to saturn's, though being in the habitable zone might be enough to heat titan enough to reconstitute the atmosphere. Unknown.

It is concievable that with both bodies in the habitable zone, that both bodies could be actively terraformed.

Titan is presumed to have a silicate core, and not an iron nickle one like mars and earth. This means that it wouldn't disrupt the new martian magnetosphere. (Like our moon doesn't.)

Mars is more massive than titan, and if the atmosphere reconstitutes, mars might just rip it off titan.

Then I found this, which takes into account this "parking" of the moon we're talking about:

Saturn's moon Titan belongs to a very select club within the solar system. It is one of only four "terrestrial" planets or moons—those with solid bodies, as opposed to those made largely of gas, like Jupiter and Saturn—that has a substantial atmosphere. The other three that wear blankets of gas are Venus, Mars, and our own Earth.

Why just these four? Why not also Mercury, or Jupiter's biggest moons, or our own moon? How did those lucky four come by their atmospheres?

It turns out that getting an atmosphere, and holding on to it, really comes down to how big and how close to the sun you are—or, for Titan, how close you are to a really big planet. For astrophysicists, it's infinitely more complex than that. But if you just want the quick and dirty answer, that's it, and here's why:

How did Saturn's moon Titan secure an atmosphere when no other moons in the solar system did? The answer lies largely in its size and location. Here, Titan as imaged in May 2005 by the Cassini spacecraft from about 900,000 miles away. Enlarge Photo credit: Courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Original gas

The story of planetary atmospheres begins back at the beginning of our solar system, when the planets were forming. During that period, the so-called inner planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—all developed the same kind of air, a so-called primary atmosphere. It consisted mostly of hydrogen and helium, the two elements that today make up 98 percent of the sun and gas giants like Jupiter.

Like planet-sized magnets, the proto-planets had sufficient gravity to draw these two gaseous elements in from the solar nebula, the vast cloud of gas and dust that surrounded the sun early in the solar system's history. In that primordial time, the sun was not very bright and thus not very hot, and this allowed the four inner planets to hold onto those atmospheres.

Three factors play into a gas's ability to escape the pull of a planet's gravity: temperature, molecular mass, and escape velocity, the speed a molecule needs to achieve to escape into space. Hotter, lighter, and faster particles more easily slip out of a planet's gravitational grip into space than cooler, heavier, and slower particles.

Hydrogen and helium are two of the lightest molecular-weight molecules out there. And as the sun grew brighter and hotter, the molecules of hydrogen and helium that the four inner planets had been able to retain became hotter and faster, finally reaching escape velocity. When that happened, perhaps within a few hundred million years after the formation of the inner planets, these gases escaped into space, leaving Earth and its three companions little more than balls of rock in space.

The four giant outer planets, meanwhile—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—were able to keep their hydrogen and helium because of their size. Their gravitational pull is mighty enough to contain those two light gases, and the sun is too far away for its heat to make any difference. So those four gas giants still host their primary atmospheres.

Notwithstanding its rocky core, one might say that Saturn, seen here in an image taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft, is nothing but atmosphere, like its fellow "gas giants" Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. Enlarge Photo credit: Courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Putting on air

Fortunately for us, there are secondary atmospheres, otherwise we wouldn't be here. These are atmospheres that arise long after a planet's primary atmosphere has vanished into the ether. Yet not all rocky bodies have the means to sustain them. Mercury, for one, is too close to the sun to hold onto any type of gas. So how did the four solid bodies that have them win the atmospheric lottery?

Leaving Titan aside for the moment, Earth, Mars, and Venus all began developing their secondary atmospheres in the same way. Over time their envelopes of air would become as unlike as heaven and hell—in the case of Earth and Venus, for example—but initially they likely appeared largely the same. The reason is that, despite their differences today, these three planets lie in roughly the same neighborhood of the solar system and are thought to consist of roughly the same mix of elementary stuff.

Earth became heavenly, Mars froze solid, and all hell broke loose on Venus. What happened?

While Earth, Mars, and Venus eventually got to the point where they could no longer embrace hydrogen and helium, they did have sufficient gravity and cool enough surface temperatures to retain heavier molecular-weight gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor. And they had plenty of these two substances stored away in one form or another within their stony bodies. The CO2 and H2O came from two sources: the original building blocks out of which the planets formed as well as comets that regularly slammed into the planets early in their history.

Fortunately, again, for us, these crucial substances of CO2 and H2O—and also nitrogen, which comprises 78 percent of our atmosphere—were not irretrievably locked in the rocks. These substances had a catalyst that helped free them: heat. Within each planet, a molten core created during the planet's initial formation released heat, and so did the slow decay of radioactive elements deep beneath the surface. This heat kept each planet toasty enough to produce volcanic eruptions, which spewed these gases out of the interior.

Despite increased warmth from the sun, these heavier molecules could not escape the gravity of Earth, Mars, and Venus, respectively, and so they began building up just above each planet's surface. The result was a secondary atmosphere—or what most of us know simply as the air.

But, in time, Earth became heavenly, Mars froze solid, and all hell broke loose on Venus. What happened?

These clouds, photographed on Mars by the Viking 1 lander, are not condensed water vapor as they would be on Earth but condensed carbon dioxide. Any water long since froze out of the atmosphere and is now locked as ice beneath the Red Planet's surface. Enlarge Photo credit: Courtesy NASA
From heaven to hell

This is where the how-close-you-are-to-the-sun part comes in. On Earth, all that water vapor belched out of volcanoes condensed in the young atmosphere into liquid water, then fell to the surface as rain. Over eons, this formed the oceans. Most of the CO2, meanwhile, became incorporated into the seas and into sedimentary rocks. Most, but not all, and this is crucial. Enough CO2 remained as gas in the atmosphere to create the greenhouse effect, which maintains our planet at a life-sustaining average global temperature of about 59°F. Everything eased into a wonderful balance, all brought about by our ideal distance from the sun.

As for Mars, its secondary atmosphere had two strikes against it from the start: the planet's size (too small) and its distance from the sun (too far). In its first 500 million years or so, the Red Planet had a warm atmosphere and liquid-water oceans, just like Earth. But Mars is so small that its internal heat engine burned out early on, and it is so far away from the sun that all the water vapor that its once-active volcanoes had erupted eventually froze out of the atmosphere, becoming trapped beneath the surface as ice. All this left the Red Planet as cold and barren and apparently lifeless as the moon. Mars still has an atmosphere, but its pressure is 100 times less than Earth's and it's almost entirely composed of CO2—about the last thing we'd want to breathe.

Venus has roughly the same concentration of CO2 as Mars, yet its atmosphere went in precisely the opposite direction. Size wasn't an issue: Venus has about the same mass as Earth so is plenty hot within. But distance from the sun has made all the difference. Venus is near enough to our star that all the water vapor released from its volcanoes burned off long ago, and without liquid water, the planet could not form oceans that could absorb the CO2.

The result has been a runaway greenhouse effect. While a greenhouse effect raises the temperature of Mars by about 5°F and Earth by about 35°F, on Venus it has jacked up the temperature by around 500°F. The resulting atmosphere is truly nasty from our perspective: hotter than a self-cleaning oven, with a density about 10 percent that of water and a pressure about what you'd feel a half-mile down in the ocean.

Venus is a furnace of a planet, with a noxious atmosphere bearing a pressure 90 times that on Earth. Enlarge Photo credit: Courtesy NASA/JPL
A moon with atmosphere

And what about Titan? Why did it get an atmosphere when, for example, none of Jupiter's big moons, which are a lot closer to the sun, did? Well, in this case, distance from the sun doesn't really come into it; the moons of the outer planets are so far away that it's a moot point. But distance does factor in—distance to a giant planet. And, again, size matters. In fact, a moon needs the right balance of nearness to a giant neighbor and adequate gravity—that is, size—to gain and hold an atmosphere, and of all the moons in the solar system, only on Titan did Nature strike that balance.

Clearly atmospheres can change drastically—look at Mars.

Titan is close enough to Saturn that it gets squeezed by tidal forces powerful enough to heat up its interior. So the volcanic activity that long ago died out, for instance, on our similarly sized moon has continued there. That activity releases CO2 and water vapor, but since Titan's mean surface temperature is -289°F, both of those quickly fall out as ice on the surface. That leaves nitrogen, which remains a gas at that temperature, and methane, which builds up in an interaction between sunlight and CO2 ice. The result is an atmosphere that is roughly 90 percent nitrogen and 7 percent methane. (Interestingly, as radically different as Titan's atmosphere is to our own, it is still worlds closer in composition and pressure to Earth's nitrogen-rich air than are the CO2-dominant atmospheres of either Mars or Venus.)

Saturn makes Titan's gases come out; Titan's size ensures some of them stick around in an atmosphere. Jupiter's moon Io, being so close to its humungous neighbor, has plenty of volcanic activity, but the moon's mass is too small to wield the kind of gravity needed to maintain a hold on the gases that gush out of its insides. (editor's note: But possibly just enough to make the gases gush out of Earth's insides, no?)

While the air on both Mars and Venus is over 95 percent carbon dioxide, atmospheric CO2 on our planet amounts to just 0.03 percent—just enough to give us a pleasant global average temperature of about 59°F. Enlarge Photo credit: Courtesy NASA
Up in the air

Some atmospheric scientists say that the different tacks the four terrestrials with atmospheres took should offer a cautionary tale to us as we unintentionally monkey with ours. By burning fossil fuels, we are releasing far more CO2 into the atmosphere than Nature has done anytime in the recent geologic past—an atmosphere that has been likened in thinness to a dollar bill wrapped around a standard-sized globe. This may upset the exquisite equilibrium between carbon in the air and carbon in the rocks and seas that our planet has maintained to one degree or another for billions of years, with unknown but potentially dire consequences.

Clearly atmospheres can change drastically—look at Mars. Whether we humans could ever severely or permanently alter our own atmosphere is unknown, but some experts are now asking, Do we really want to take that chance?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/how- ... phere.html

[Ben D]

Earth has always had two moons

ANI – Thu, Dec 22, 2011

London, Dec 22 (ANI): The Earth has always had a temporary second moon, new study has claimed.
When astronomers caught sight of a mysterious titanium white object circling around the Earth in 2006, they assumed it was a spent rocket.

But it was actually a small asteroid captured by the Earth's gravitational field that rotated around the Earth until June 2007.
In the new study, astrophysicists at Cornell claim that this little moon was not an anomaly as these asteroids come and go so often it means our planet always has a temporary second moon.

According to Cornell University's Mikael Granvik, Jeremie Vaubaillon and Robert Jedicke, they have calculated the population of "irregular natural satellites that are temporarily captured" by Earth.

In their study, researchers say that while these moons are small, the scientific implications of this discovery are phenomenal.
"At any given time, there should be at least one natural Earth satellite of 1-meter diameter orbiting the Earth," the Daily Mail quoted the team as saying.

Instead of having to send crews to asteroids astronomers can wait until they come closer to Earth to intercept and learn more about the origins of our solar system.

Although the small asteroids, which measure just a few metres across they qualified as a natural satellite just like our Moon, are difficult to track, astronomers believe they could potentially save millions if NASA waited for it to orbit the earth, instead of launching missions into the solar system.

Even though NASA couldn't land on an asteroid, which was just a few metres, it could get close to collect information on fact finding missions.

"At any given time, there should be at least one natural Earth satellite of 1-meter diameter orbiting the Earth," the team added.
The study has been published on the Cornell University website. (ANI)

[vanlose kid]

We should scour the moon for ancient traces of aliens, say scientists

Online volunteers could be set task of spotting alien technology, evidence of mining and rubbish heaps in moon images

Ian Sample, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 December 2011 16.31 GMT
Article history


A pit in Mare Ingenii, possibly the result of a collapsed lava tube. Natural tunnels like this would be ideal sites for an alien moon base. Photograph: Nasa

Hundreds of thousands of pictures of the moon will be examined for telltale signs that aliens once visited our cosmic neighbourhood if plans put forward by scientists go ahead.

Passing extraterrestrials might have left messages, scientific instruments, heaps of rubbish or evidence of mining on the dusty lunar surface that could be spotted by human telescopes and orbiting spacecraft.

Though the chances of finding the handiwork of long-gone aliens are exceptionally remote, scientists argue that a computerised search of lunar images, or a crowd-sourced analysis by amateur enthusiasts, would be cheap enough to justify given the importance of a potential discovery.

Prof Paul Davies and Robert Wagner at Arizona State University argue that images of the moon and other information collected by scientists for their research should be scoured for signs of alien intervention. The proposal aims to complement other hunts for alien life, such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), which draws on data from radiotelescopes to scour the heavens for messages beamed into space by alien civilisations.

"Although there is only a tiny probability that alien technology would have left traces on the moon in the form of an artefact or surface modification of lunar features, this location has the virtue of being close, and of preserving traces for an immense duration," the scientists write in a paper published online in the journal Acta Astronautica.

"If it costs little to scan data for signs of intelligent manipulation, little is lost in doing so, even though the probability of detecting alien technology at work may be exceedingly low," they add.

The scientists focus their attention on Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has mapped a quarter of the moon's surface in high resolution since mid-2009. Among these images, scientists have already spotted the Apollo landing sites and all of the Nasa and Soviet unmanned probes, some of which were revealed only by their odd-looking shadows.

Nasa has made more than 340,000 LRO images public, but that figure is expected to reach one million by the time the orbiting probe has mapped the whole lunar surface. "From these numbers, it is obvious that a manual search by a small team is hopeless," the scientists write.

One way to scan all of the images involves writing software to search for strange-looking features, such as the sharp lines of solar panels, or the dust-covered contours of quarries or domed buildings. These might be visible millions of years after they were built, because the moon's surface is geologically inactive and changes so slowly.

The seismometer on Nasa's Apollo 12 mission detected only one impact per month from roughly grapefruit-sized meteorites within a 350km radius. According to Davies and Wagner, it could take hundreds of millions of years for an object tens of metres across to be buried by lunar soil and dust kicked up by these impacts.

An alternative approach would be to send tens of thousands of amateur enthusiasts images over the internet for examination, though this could lead to disagreements over what constituted an unusual, and potentially alien, feature.

The easiest artefact to find would probably be a message left behind intentionally. This might be held in a capsule and left in a large fresh crater like Tycho in the moon's southern highlands, the scientists write. Some longer-lasting messages could be buried at depth but fitted with transmitters that penetrate the lunar surface, they add.

Alien life might once have set up a lunar base in the underground networks of lava tubes beneath the moon's dark, basaltic plains, and perhaps have left rubbish when they departed. "The same factors that make lava tubes attractive as a habitat imply that any artefacts left behind would endure almost indefinitely, undamaged and unburied," the scientists write.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/ ... ces-aliens


and if someone trips a wire of sorts Krugmans dreams are realized...

[slimmouse]

Todays C2C podcast, on moon anomalies. It strikes me that there is little doubt that there is much more to this stuff (as per usual ) than meets the eye. This includes a reference to the infamous ringing sound mentioned much earlier in this thread.

The interview with an ex photograph processor for NASA starts in part two at this link;

www.youtube.com/user/MrSuperpotatotomat ... raCJ_0sl8g

[Ben D]

This mission should help understand the inside...

NASA's Twin Grail Spacecraft Reunite in Lunar Orbit

by Staff Writers
Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 01, 2012

The second of NASA's two Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft has successfully completed its planned main engine burn and is now in lunar orbit. Working together, GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B will study the moon as never before.

"NASA greets the new year with a new mission of exploration," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

"The twin GRAIL spacecraft will vastly expand our knowledge of our moon and the evolution of our own planet. We begin this year reminding people around the world that NASA does big, bold things in order to reach for new heights and reveal the unknown."

During GRAIL's science mission, the two spacecraft will transmit radio signals precisely defining the distance between them. As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity caused by visible features such as mountains and craters, and masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, the distance between the two spacecraft will change slightly.

Scientists will translate this information into a high-resolution map of the moon's gravitational field. The data will allow scientists to understand what goes on below the lunar surface. This information will increase knowledge of how Earth and its rocky neighbors in the inner solar system developed into the diverse worlds we see today.

[Avalon]

LilyPat, to belatedly answer your question about Apollo 18 -- I haven't been to that many films this year, but I did get out to see it in the theatre, and enjoyed it. Nice feel of life in a lunar capsule, spook house "made you jump" scary surprises and great depresso ending. Don't know that I'd buy it outright for more than 5 bucks.

[LilyPatToo]

Thanks, Avalon. Might wait for Ridley Scott's new one--Prometheus instead.

LilyPat