Although fainter now, Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) will pass through the bowl of the Big Dipper this month, making it easier for novice comet seekers to find it. That also provides the perfect excuse to linger l onger in the dipper, surely the most well-known group o f stars in the heavens.

If you get binoculars out to spy the comet, it's easy to find other intriguing jewels and surprising quirks in the big pot with the long handle.

Will The "Doomsday Asteroid" Toutatis Exterminate Earth Civilization In 2004?

Constantin I. Ivanenko, Ph. D. Independent Inner Space explorer
Founder of Russian Initiative Group for the Defence of Earth
St Petersburg, RUSSIA Via Email

(Hidden exopolitical background of Cosmic Threat)

As there is fast approaching 29 September 2004: calculated by astronomers more than a decade ago fateful moment of most close during entire century approach to Earth of "doomsday asteroid 4179" Toutatis (named by its influenced by ‘mystic apprehensions’ discoverers after dreaded God of Death of ancient Celts), there is activated discussion between informed members of Global Leading Edge community what this approach does portend to inhabitants of Earth.

In Russia there exists an influential group of "politically active Inner Space explorers" (called "The Internal Predictor of Russia", allegedly supported by certain government agencies) which is seriously concerned about possible results of this approach; - which might, in their opinion, bring global-scale disaster similar to that which had destroyed remains of Atlantis about 11 500 years ago.

This opinion is shared by a group of scientifically advanced opponents of unlimited spreading of technologies for production of "free energy" (especially of "free vacuum energy"); - which are basing thei r arguments on data extracted by numerous explorers of Akashic Archives: such as E. Cayce & various authors mentioned by Sh. Andrews in her book "Atlantis: Insights from a Lost Civilization" from ‘Akashic Archives’ of past Atlantean supercivilization.

(However, - as believe competent Russian Inner Space explorers, - most valuable data were obtained in ‘30s-‘40s in Nazi Germany by large highly disciplined & trained team of Ahnenerbe psychics; - which got direct order of Himmler to put as much efforts as possible into psi-investigation of Atlantean technologies of "ultimate extermination".)

According to their version, final destruction of (situated in the region of present Bermuda Triangle) Atlantean metropolis, - which happened about 11 500 years ago, - was brought about by precisely aimed strike of medium-sized "killer asteroid"; - which had been directed at its target by antigravity drives (upgraded variants of Podkletnov’s disk) of battleships of Galactic Spacefleet, which were stationed around Earth.

(Thus data of astronomical calculations made on basis of laws of "conventional" Celestial Mechanics, - which demonstrate that Toutatis, during its coming approach, will pass at a considerable distance (about 1 million of miles) away from Earth, - may be not relevant in this case; - because Toutatis’ trajectory could be "corrected" by ETs - at such moment when it’ll be already too late to rep el it with the help of nuclear missiles or using other methods requiring considerable preparation time.

Besides, use of, eg, controlled from Earth via radiochannels nuclear missiles for defelection of asteroids’ trajectories, - as proposed E. Teller, - might be conterproductive in case of "ET- guided killer asteroids"; - as such missiles could be intercepted by highly technologically advanced ET operators – and directed back to Earth - as it happened with some of Mars probes.)

Destruction of Atlantis hadn’t been an act of unprovoked wanton cruelty (says "official version", received by Russian contactees during seances of mental communications with ETs): this drastic action was undertaken (like US intervention into Iraq) only after numerous warnings & ultimatums; - which demanded Atlantean government to stop unauthorized by Galactic experts research in area of vacuum energies (cf. "Iraqi WMD research").

As said Galactic Ultimatum, "in absence of proper precautions – which could be based only on profound theoretical knowledge about Structure of Universe (which Atlantean scientists did not possess, in opinion of Galactic experts) – blind clumsy tamperings with powers of Cosmic Magnitude could bring disaster of Universal scale, damaging protective armour of vacuum which protects fragile body of physical Universe fr om unimaginable fury of Cosmic Fire".

Regretfully, weak government of decaying Atlantean Empire could not resist concentrated pressure of "populistically oriented partisans of unlimited energy"; – whose tempting (as proposals of con men) slogans of the type: "Unlimited Energy of Space for (limitlessly multiplying: T. Malthus/G. Hardin) starving masses" were enthusiastically supported by uneducated massess, organically incapable to foresee long-term consequences of such decisions. (Russian "ET climate expert" Dr Karnaukhov says that these "partisans of unlimited energy" were abetted & secretly guided by ‘Luciferites’: descendants of fugitives from Venus; - which had been transformed into incandescent hell by careless experiments wi th "free energy" of its former ‘less than truly intelligent’ inhabitants – which, in spite of their technological achievements, lacked common prudency.)

As writes an eminent American climatologist A. Bates in his publ. in ’90 popular book "Climate in Crisis" (with Foreword by Al Gore, Dr Bates’ school friend), this situation is being repeated now with striking similarity.

Thus, - with much regret, as They dislike very much to use physical violence (or at least such is Their official position: cf. official position of US Government Re Iraq), - Representatives of Galactic Government were forced to take recourse to "ultimate arguments" in o rder to save Earth & Universe from "terrible consequences of reckless actions inspired by aggressive ignorance".

"A loving parent might slap a child playing with hand grenade, when there isn’t enough time to act gently" – thus was explained this ancient drama in psi-messages of "Public Representatives of Galactic Government" to Russian ET contactees.

(As a proof of Their basically good intentions Galactic Messengers named the fact that Their spaceships on sentry duty around Earth had no special armaments; - so use of antigravity generators of spacecraft engines for aiming of "killer asteroid" was an ad hoc/last moment improvisation.

Schematic drawings of disk-based antigravity generators which formed key components of engines of Galactic spacecraft are presented on Figs. 22 & 23 of "Two-Thirds" by D. Percy & D. Myers; Aulif Publ., London, 1993.

It’s easy to see similarity of these ET devices to widely publicized after 1999, - see, eg, in publ in 2000 "Hunr for Zero Point" by N. Cook & an article "Going Up" by D. Cohen in 12 Jan 2002 issue of "New Scientist", - disk-based "antigravity generator" of Russian inventor Dr. E. Podkletnov; - which is regarded by experts of US NASA as a possible prototype of drives of interstellar spaceships of the F uture.)

Already in ’96 in St Petersburg Leading Edge magazine "Terminator" there was published my proposition to organize in 2004: "the Year of Advent of Hell on Earth", as say Prophecies of The Great Pyramid (see, eg, in J. Michell’s "A new View over Atlantis" & other sources) Global Internet-based Meditation for the Defence of Earth from Space Threat.

This Meditation will allow to increase the level of inner coherency of Global Psi-Field; - transforming it into an "active psychotronic shield of Earth Defence", - impenetrable both to "gross physical" (such as asteroid strike) & "subtl e level" (such as chaotic turbulent energies of ‘Photon Belt of Pleiades’) attacks.

(In published in ‘30s works of Russian Spiritual teachers N. & H. Roerich and G. Gurdjiev it was said that similar techniques of Defence of Earth from frequent then attacks of "space pirates" were used by ancient global supercivilization whose metropolis was situated in then free from ice Antarctica.

Using ‘Energy of Big Bang’, - which this advanced civilization could extract through ‘South Polar hypertunnel/Time Machine’, - they could transform near-Earth vacuum into a kind of impenetrable ‘vac uum chain mail’: cf. picture on p. 76 of Feb. ’94 issue of "Scientific American".

Also, this energy could be concentrated into sharply focussed psychokinetic ray of irresistible power, capable to repel even most heavily armed spaceships of cosmic aggressors.)

In this connection it might be instructive to mention here data of psychics which are investigating the history of extermination of Martian civilization. Majority of explorers of Akashic Archives of Solar System agree that it was destroyed by a frontal hit of large asteroid, which tore away in a few seconds Martian atmosphere. Russian psychics say that this "killer asteroid", - which had been teleported via hyperspace by profe ssional team of "ET planet killers", - has emerged into "conventional space" in front of Mars just a few fractions of second before impact.

Because of this possessing advanced enough defensive technologies Martians, - which, however, hadn’t yet established reliable enough "Predictor Service", capable to warn them timely about coming threats, - were unable to take necessary measures of self-protection.

Collating data presented in abovementioned "Two-Thirds" & "The Montauk Project" by P. Nichols & P. Moon (Sky Books, 1992), it’s possible to conclude that Martians tried (and almost succeeded – before they were exterminated) to instal inside The Great 5-sided Martian Pyramid (called ‘The Tor’ in "Two-Thirds") so-called ‘Aspis Crystal’; - whose purpose was to defend entire Solar System from unauthorized interventions from outside through altering of ‘crystal lattice of vacuum’ – which’ll become impenetrable to ‘enemy spacecraft’.

(As was demonstrated on abovementioned picture from "Sci. Am.", this crystal lattice has "multispiral" structure resembling that of quartz – or of created with the help of advanced ET nanotechnologies "magic crystal" mentioned in SF novel of f. DIA officer M. Caidin "Dark Messiah").

As guess Russian explorers of history of Martian civilization, Martians’ efforts to realize this project had provoked their extermination; - as "kangaroo court" of said space pirates (which called itself by nobly sounding title of "Government of Galactic Federation") naturally was against this.

Here may be drawn parallels with (unsuccessful, in this case) attempts of British government in 18th century (and later) to thwart gaining of independence by British colonies in America.

In ‘80s Spiritual Guru of Pentagon Meditation Club the late Swami Satchidananda put forward the plan of Spiritual Defence I nitiative, based on creation, – with the help of Global Meditation, - of impenetrable "shield of Spiritual Defence" around entire Earth; - which could prevent attacks of both inner & outer Enemies of Earth, - repelling both nuclear missiles launched by "rogue states" & "killer asteroids" directed by space aggressors.

Such Meditations of Global Defence may be organized, using "Internet-upgraded variant" of developed in ‘70s by Russian defence-oriented psi-explorers computer-aided technique of precise intersynchronization of psi-fields of crews of naval & spaceships.

(Such intersynchronization, - allowing to form "group mind" o f ships’ crews, - helped to increase survival abilities of these ships in emergency/battle situations; - increasing efficiency of crewmembers’ teamwork & raising the level of captain’s precognitive ability.)

Dr Sergeyev: director of Special Advanced Research Group of f. Soviet Navy which had developed these techniques, used in his work research materials of an eminent Russian Inner Space explorer Dr. Barchenko: director of opened in ’25 first in the world government-sponsored psi-research lab; - who had developed, already in ‘20s-‘30s, efficient designs of collective meditations, - whose purpose was establishing of psi-contact with Ascended Masters of Shamballa & advanced cosmic civil izations.

(Hints about these designs - also used by members of Dr Sergeyev’s group - can be found in books of Roerichs’ Teachings. It’s said that Dr Barchenko was ‘telepathically assisted’ in his work by Masters of Shamballa: Spiritual Capital of Earth; - which was called in books of Roerichs "military camp of armed Defenders of Earth".)

After beginning of "perestroika", - when heretofore top secret materials of Dr Sergeyev’s research were partially declassified, - he addressed to his colleagues in other countries (which were aware of his work thanks to ‘70s "international psychotronic bestseller": known to all members of global psi-research community book of S. Ostrander & L. Schroeder "Psychic Discoveries behind The Iron Curtain") with proposition to use developed by his group collective computer-aided ESP training technologies for fast training of entire human crew of endangered Spaceship Earth in difficult but necessary art of Defence of our Common Global Home.

A large meteor may have been what residents in Oklahoma, Texas and parts of the south-central United States saw Wednesday night, officials said.

The National Weather Service said it had received numerous reports of a fireball in the sky around 9:30 p.m. from central and southwestern Oklahoma to northern Texas and other parts of the South.

After discussions with the Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency, the weather service said officials concluded that what residents saw was likely a large meteor.

John Clabes, a regional spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said there were no reports of missing aircraft in the area.

In Tulsa, John Southern said he saw what he thought was an airplane on fire while driving near U.S. 75 in Tulsa.

"It looked like an airplane going down in flames really hard or fast _ or space debris," said Southern, a freelance photographer. "It was coming from a southwesterly direction."

When he got a closer look, he saw that the object had a definite central mass.

"This was just like a blob," Southern said. "I wouldn't say it was a UFO, but I don't know. I thought surely something had happened."

Southern s aid the object flew to the southeast before he lost sight of it.

"It was just a flash in the pan. It was over in about three seconds," he said.

A similar phenomenon occurred Dec. 1, 2001, when residents in Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska witnessed space debris breaking up as it entered the atmosphere.

Witnesses reported seeing long streaks of light moving across the sky and breaking into about 30 "little balls with tails."

If you saw an unusual object light up the night sky Wednesday, you weren't alone.

Many people – some of whom thought a plane had crashed – notified authorities and media outlets acros s North Texas about 9:20 p.m.

What they saw was a meteor, said Alan Moller of the National Weather Service in Fort Worth.

"Although they're very small objects, they burn like mad," when they enter the Earth's atmosphere, he said.

Jeff Barton, a member of the Texas Astronomical Society, agreed the object might have been a meteor or what's called a bolide, an exploding meteor.

"Bolides tend to be larger and move a little slower," he said. "They will be in the sky for 10 to 15 seconds. Someone at a game can use their vide o camera and capture it. ... If it was a bright, slow-moving bolide, it could have been caught. There's been a spate of bolides recently."

Mr. Barton said the object also might have been space junk, but he noted that the Aquarids meteor shower is visible from mid-July to mid-August.

Although scientists sometimes can predict when meteors will make their entry, this one was unexpected.

Skygazers can expect another spectacular performance later this summer.

According to NASA, the Perseid meteor shower will start in mi d-July and peak Aug. 12. It will be more visible in the Northern Hemisphere.

The shower occurs as Earth travels into the periphery of a cloud of debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle.

Observations challenge standing view of how and when galaxies formed

Johns Hopki ns University
Wednesday, July 07, 2004

A rare glimpse back in time into the universe's early evolution has revealed something startling: mature, fully formed galaxies where scientists expected to discover little more than infants.

"Up until now, we assumed that galaxies were just beginning to form between 8 and 11 billion years ago, but what we found suggests that that is not the case," said Karl Glazebrook, associate professor of physics and astronomy in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-principal author of a paper in the July 8 issue of Nature. "It seems that an unex pectedly large fraction of stars in big galaxies were already in place early in the universe's formation, and that challenges what we've believed. We thought massive galaxies came much later."

Using the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, Glazebrook and a multinational team of researchers called the Gemini Deep Deep Survey (GDDS) employed a special technique called the "Nod and Shuffle" to peer into what had traditionally been a cosmological blind spot. Called "the Redshift Desert," this era - 8 billion to 11 billion years ago, when the universe was only 3 billion to 6 billion years old - has remained relatively unexplored until now, mainly because of the challenges inherent in collecting data from the faintest galactic light ever to be dissec ted into the rainbow of colors called a spectrum. In all, the team collected and analyzed spectra from 300 galaxies, making it the most complete sample ever taken from the Redshift Desert.

"This was the most comprehensive survey ever done covering the bulk of the galaxies that represent conditions in the early universe," Glazebrook said. "We expected to find basically zero massive galaxies beyond about 9 billion years ago, because theoretical models predict that massive galaxies form last. Instead, we found highly developed galaxies that just shouldn't have been there, but are."

These findings challenge the dominant theory of galactic evo lution, which posits that at this early stage, galaxies should have formed from the bottom up, with small pieces crashing together to build small and then ever larger galaxies. Called the "hierarchical model," this scenario predicts that normal-to-large galaxies such as those studied by GDDS would not yet exist.

"There are obviously some aspects of the early lives of galaxies that we don't yet completely understand, Glazebrook said. "We do find fewer massive galaxies in the past, but there are still more than we expected. This result is giving us a big clue as to how stars form from invisible gas in the hierarchical model, which is something not well understood under current theories. Some new ingredient is required to make more stars form earlier in the big gala xies. But what that ingredient is, we don't yet know." [...]

BEIJING, July 9 (Xinhuanet) -- NASA scientists say solar s torms might have torn away the water that used to cover parts of Mars.

They monitored the after-effects of a monster solar storm that hit Earth in last October and November. CRIENGLISH.com reported Friday.

They think repeated battering by this kind of space weather could have ripped away Mars' water veil.

According to observations by the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, astronomers believe Mars once had enough surface water to support life, but they have not determined where that water went some 3.5 billion years ago.

Scientists think the solar radiat ion events could have affected the surface of Mars because the planet has so little protection.

Unlike Earth, only isolated zones of Mars has a protective magnetosphere that guards the planet against bombardment by high-energy particles during a solar storm.

Record-breaking blasts from unseasonable solar storms seen in late 2003 are just now reaching the edge of the Solar System, scientists reported on Thursday.

More than a dozen coronal mass ejections - eruptions of super-heated gas triggered by tangled magnetic fields on the Sun's surface - shot from the star over a period of 20 days last October and November.

In the events, which pointed in different directions because of the Sun's rotation, radiation and high-speed particles surged ahead of gas from the blasts themselves. On 28 and 29 October, that gas reached Earth in record time - about 20 hours, sweeping past the planet at five million miles per hour.

"If you look at the overall speed of the events - the sheer momentum of it - it's the biggest event we've measured in space," University of Michigan astronomer Thomas Zurbuchen told reporters at a NASA teleconference.

An unprecedented number of spacecraft tracked the blasts as they sped outward from the Sun, producing a trove of data that may help scientists predict the effects of future space storms. The blasts produced auroras as far south as Flori da in the US, shut down power in a city in Sweden, and forced astronauts aboard the International Space Station to duck into a relatively well shielded service module.

Martian impact

A few hours after reaching Earth, the blasts hit Mars, which has no global magnetic field to shield it from solar storms. The events disabled a radiation-monitoring instrument on the orbiting spacecraft Mars Odyssey. And computer simulations suggest they also blew off part of the planet's upper atmosphere, an effect that may have helped erode the planet's surface water over 3.5 billion years.

"We know there used to be a lot more water than there is right now. Where did it go?" Zurbuchen said. "One of the key ideas people are talking about is the connection to these space storms."

The Ulysses spacecraft near Jupiter and the Cassini spacecraft near Saturn both detected radio waves when the blasts slammed into the planets' magnetic fields.

In April, the blasts - slowed to 1.5 million miles per hour - even caught up with the Voyager 2 probe, which has travelled about 7 billion miles from the Sun since its launch in 1977. And preliminary data suggest they may have reached the Voyager 1 spacecraft, nearly 9 billion miles from the Sun this Tuesday, eight months after erupting from the star.

At those distances, the Sun's magnetic influence begins to wane as solar wind particles come into contact with particles from interstellar space. The blasts are expected to temporarily expand - by 400 million miles - the boundary of this heliosphere, which they will probably reach by early 2005.

[...] The "Halloween" solar storms in October-November 2003 launched billions of tons of electrified gas (plasma) that blasted by Earth within a day and past Mars hours later.

[...] The Halloween storms were the most powerful ever measured. The storms broke all-time records for X-ray intensity and for speed and temperature of the solar wind observed near Earth. About a third of the total particle radiation emitted by the Sun in the last decade in the deadly 30-50 MeV energy range came from these st orms, even though the solar activity cycle was well pas t its maximum.

[...] The shocks created by the storms in the inner solar system not only accelerated electrons and protons to high energy, they also trapped the particles in the inner heliosphere. This resulted in elevated radiation levels everywhere between Venus and Mars that decayed only gradually over a period of weeks. This kind of event will have significant implications for radiation protection requirements for explorers who venture outside of the Earth's protective magnetosphere (magnetic field).

DALLAS -- Astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting a star in the constellation Orion - without ever actually seeing it. They watched the star, about 140 light-years or roughly 800 trillion miles away, and deduced the presence of a planet by how much the star wiggled.

The planet, called HD 37605b, is a gas giant at le ast 2.8 times the mass of Jupiter. HD 37605b zips around its star - HD 37605, near the bright star Betelgeuse - once every 54 days.

It is 123rd planet known beyond the solar system.

The astronomers made the discovery, reported in Thursday's online edition of The Dallas Morning News, using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope.

"This will be the first of many planets coming out of the HET," said William Cochran, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and leader of the research team.

The telescop e uses 91 mirrors, each in the shape of a hexagon, to gather light across a surface 30 feet across.

Boaters at the Gulf of Finland witnessed an unusual light phenomenon in the sky on Monday night. This was due to a meteor shower rarely seen in the area.

Rescue teams across the Gulf of Bothnia were inundated with calls reporting red balls of light in the skies above the towns of Pietarsaari, Kokkola and Himanka in central Finland.

According to the air-sea rescue center in Vaasa, these were not distress rockets sent by boaters, but a type of meteor shower rarely seen in Finland.

Witnesses reported seeing balls of light moving quickly over the area, sending out sparks clearly visible to the human eye. Later they changed into white light balls, leaving a trail of smoke behind them.

SPACE.com -- A mission to smash into a space rock to deflect it and study its structure has been given priority over five other poten tial asteroid projects by the European Space Agency.

The slam-bang 'Don Quijote' mission would help scientists figure out how to deflect or destroy any asteroid in the future that might be found to be on a collision course with Earth. The project uses the Spanish spelling of Don Quixote, the protagonist in Cervantes' novel who has chivalrous ideas that tend toward the impractical.

The lofty modern-day Don Quijote would help solve a practical problem.

Scientists don't know enough about asteroid insides to predict how one would respond to attempts to nudge it off an Earth-impact course or turn it into harmless dust. While no asteroids are curren tly known to be on track to hit the planet, experts say a regional catastrophe is inevitable in the very long run-- over millennia. And run-ins with small asteroids that could incinerate a large city occur ever few thousand years.

"We want to investigate the internal structure of an asteroid, and at the same time develop and test the technology necessary, in a worst case scenario, to deflect a sizeable asteroid," says Andrea Milani, an asteroid expert at the University of Pisa who is helping to plan the mission.

China's largest city and the communist gia nt's gleaming business hub, Shanghai has decided to build a 60,000-square-metre multipurpose 'underground city'.

The multi-level 'underground city', four-storeyed in some places, will be equipped with stores, garages, restaurants and all kinds of entertainment centres and facilities, a Shanghai-based newspaper said.

It is scheduled to be completed in 2006 and has been listed as a major scientific and technological programme by the Shanghai municipality, the Jiefang Daily reported.

The construction of the 'underground city' will comprehensively utilise the underground room o f and around the existing subway pivots as well as thei r ground facilities.

The reports quoting experts from the Shanghai municipal government said due to lesser and lesser ground space in big cities, city dwellers have now begun to favour underground stores and garages.

They also said that they will build a sound ventilation system in the 'underground city' and introduce sunlight to build a greenbelt system in places where conditions permit.

Shanghai is China's largest city with a population of over 17 million.

A solar wind gust from the indicated coronal hole could reach Earth on July 16th or 17th. Image credit: SOHO Extreme UV Telescope

None of these explosions hurled a coronal mass ejection directly toward Earth, so the chances for bright auroras remain low despite the high solar activity.

Strong solar activity should continue for days to come. Sunspot 649 has a tangled "beta-gamma-delta" magnetic field that harbors energy for more X-class solar flares. Meanwhile, another big sunspot appears to be hidden on the far side of the sun. Solar rotation will carry it over the sun's eastern limb, and into plain view, as soon as July 17th.

MYSTERY METEOR SHOWER?

Sea-rescuers were on alert in Finland on July 12th when reports of emergency flares poured in from the Gulf of Bothnia. They soon realized that no ship was in distress. The flares were "meteors." Johan Geisor was on a photo-expedition in the Gulf; he saw a bright fireba ll and took this picture of its smoky debris at 9:16 p.m. GMT: (continued below)

News reports of the event (#1, #2, #3, #4) describe a slow-moving fireball, red and sparkling, perhaps shedding fragments. This sounds remarkably like a piece of re-entering space junk--e.g., an old rocket engine or a satellite. Yet no such objects were scheduled to decay over Finland on July 12th. Likewise, no intense meteor showers were due. What was this display? Probably a small space rock disintegrating in Earth's atmosphere.

Comment: There have been two more X class flares today, Friday, including one that clocks in at 3.1. That is five in two days. And they're telling us the solar maximum was three years ago Look at this graph:

LONDON—An instrument orbiting Mars may have detected a whiff of life on the Red Planet.

Data from a spectrometer aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express probe appears to have recorded radiation indicating pungent ammonia gas in Mars' atmosphere, BBC News Online reports.

Since ammonia can survive for only a few hours in the Martian atmosphere before breaking down, it must be constantly replenished from one of two possible sources: active volcanoes — of which none have been found on Mars — or microbes.

"Ammonia could be the key to finding life on Mars," a NASA scientist told the BBC. "There are no known ways for ammonia to be present in the Martian atmosphere that do not involve life."

Ammonia is a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen atoms. Nitrogen is rare in the Mars environment, and researchers say the presence of ammonia may indicate that Martian microbes may be hoarding it.

Allied Signal -- Developed and planned over many years, the pioneering Rosetta mission is one of the most challenging ever undertaken in the history of space exploration.

In May 2003, however, engineers were presented with a new challenge when ESA's Science Programme Committee announced that comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko would replace comet 46P/Wirtanen as Rosetta's objective. [...]

The historic touchdown on the pristine surface of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko is expected to take place in November 2014. "We anticipate a landing on the 'summer' side of the nucleus, where there is maximum illumination," said Philippe Kletzkine.

Mr Kletzkine's email states:

Subject: Article re Rosetta
From: xxxxxxxx
Date: 16/07/2004
To: Signs@cassiopaea.com

Your website contains an article about "Rosetta Ready to Land on Larger Comet".

Your publication infringes on copyrights. In addition, some material you have added is factually incorrect. Other cannot be correctly understood because
you removed key material.

You are requested to remove this article from your publication immediately.

P. Kletzkine
European Space Agency

To which Ark responded:

From: Arkadiusz Jadczyk
To: xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Article re Rosetta
Date: 16/07/2004 16:16

Hi,

I believe you mean http://quantumfuture.net/signs/signs303.htm

In the case that concerns you, there is no "article" to remove. We are quoting representative paragraphs (in this particular case 8 lines), with links to the original publications.

Therefore it is physically impossible to remove "the article". Probably you never heard about "fair use", or you have wrong understanding of what it means.

As for what is factually correct or incorrect, you are invited to send us a correction, and we will publish it and respond to it.

Regards,

Prof. dr. Arkadiusz Jadczyk

To which Mr Kletzkine responded:

From: xxxxxx
To: Arkadiusz Jadczyk
Subject: Re: Article re Rosetta
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004

Namely, Allied Signal has nothing to do with the Rosetta achievement. Quoting "Allied Signal" at the very beginning of the article robs the European Space Agency and the companies that did participate in this achievement of receiving proper credit. This is not "fair use". Therefore I ask you again to remove your item, whether you call it an "article" or whether you call it something else. Besides, the 8 lines that were arbitrarily extracted, because they leave out information contained in the original article, make it sound like it was a sudden whim of the Science Program Committee that changed the target comet and are therefore projecting an inaccurate image of ESA's programs.

P. Kletzkine
European Space Agency

Project given high priority by Europe's space agency

Europe 's space chiefs have backed a suicide mission which will end in a head-on collision with an approaching asteroid.

Astronomers so far know of about 1,200 objects in space more than half a mile across which might one day collide with Earth.

An impact with a large object from space 65m years ago helped wipe out the dinosaurs. Even a much smaller object could cause widespread devastation. But so far, the in terception of asteroids has happened only in Hollywood disaster movies.

The European Space Agency's near-Earth object advisory panel has recommended high priority for a Spanish mission to smash into a distant asteroid.

"If you think about the chain of events between detecting a hazardous object, and doing something about it, there is one area in which we have no experience at all and that is interacting directly with an asteroid, trying to alter its orbit," said Alan Harris, chairman of the advisory panel.

The mission, named Don Quijote, will use two spacecraft. One, called Sancho, will head for a target asteroid 500 metres (1,540ft) in diameter and go into orbit around it for at least seven months. It will drop detectors to measure the asteroid's internal structure.

The second spacecraft, Hidalgo, will be launched at the same time but approach on a longer orbit - and smash into the asteroid at more than 22,000mph, while the first spacecraft watches the fireworks.

The collision would hardly stop the asteroid in its tracks but it might slow it on what could be a collision course with Earth.

"It is just to test a technique: can we change their orbits by runnin g a kinetic energy impactor?" said Matt Genge, an asteroid expert at Imperial College, London.

"Can we change its orbit by less than a centimetre per second? If we ever find an asteroid that is on collision course with Earth, at some point in the future, whether it is 10 orbits away, or 20 orbits away, just giving it a small nudge will make it miss the Earth."

Last year Dr Genge calculated that a steady push might be more effective in steering an asteroid away from a collision course.

He worked out that a thrust equivalent to that from a Reliant Robin could deflect a 1bn tonne asteroid in just 75 days.

The Don Quijote mission takes its name from Cervantes' novel, and the scene in which Don Quijote tilts at windmills while Sancho Panza watches from a distance.

"In this case, Don Quijote is fighting an asteroid," said José Gonzales of Deimos Space, which planned the mission.

The Spanish scientists will now look for partners for the mission. With international cooperation, Don Quijote could be launched between 2010 and 2015. Hidalgo will be the first true attempt at deflecting an asteroid.

But it won't be the first direct assault on one of the solar system's loose cannonballs. In December Nasa will launch Deep Impact, which will fire a copper projectile into a comet, deliberately gouging out a crater.

And a European space mission called Rosetta is on its way to an encounter with a distant comet in 2014.

On 9 July 2004, the Near-Earth Object Mission Advisory Panel recommended that ESA place a high priority on developing a mission to actually move an asteroid. The conclusion was based on the panel's consideration of six near-Earth object mission studies submitted to the Agency in February 2003.

Of the six studies, three were space-based observatories for detecting NEOs and three were rendezvous missions. All addressed the growing realisation of the threat posed by Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and proposed ways of detecting NEOs or discovering more about them from a close distance.

A panel of six experts, known as the Near-Earth Object Mission Advisory Panel (NEOMAP) assessed the proposals.

Alan Harris, German Aerospace Centre (DLR), Berlin, and Chairman of NEOMAP, says,

"The task has been very difficult because the goalposts have changed. When the studies were commissioned, the discovery business was in no way as advanced as it is now."

"Today, a number of organisations are building large telescopes on Earth that promise to find a very large percentage of the NEO population at even smaller sizes than visible today."

As a result, the panel decided that ESA should leave detection to ground-based telescopes for the time being, until the share of the remaining population not visible from the ground becomes better known.

The need for a space-based observatory will then be re-assessed. The panel placed its highest priority on rendezvous missions, and in particular, the Don Quijote mission concept.

"If you think about the chain of events between detect ing a hazardous object and doing something about it, there is one area in which we have no experience at all and that is in directly interacting with an asteroid, trying to alter its orbit," explains Harris.

The Don Quijote mission concept will do this by using two spacecraft, Sancho and Hidalgo. Both are launched at the same time but Sancho takes a faster route.

When it arrives at the target asteroid it will begin a seven-month campaign of observation and physical characterisation during which it will land penetrators and seismometers on the asteroid's surface to understand its internal structure.

Sancho will then watch a s Hidalgo arrives and smashes into the asteroid at very high speed. This will provide information about the behaviour of the internal structure of the asteroid during an impact event as well as excavating some of the interior for Sancho to observe.

After the impact, Sancho and telescopes from Earth will monitor the asteroid to see how its orbit and rotation have been affected.

Harris says, "When we do actually find a hazardous asteroid, you could imagine a Don Quijote-type mission as a precursor to a mitigation mission. It will tell us how the target responds to an impact and will help us to develop a much more effective mitigation mission."

On 9 July, the findings were presented to the scientific and industrial community. Representatives of other national space agencies were also invited in the hope that they will be interested in developing a joint mission, based around this concept.

Andrés Galvez, ESA's Advanced Concepts Team and technical officer for the NEOMAP report says, "This report gives us a solid foundation to define programmatic priorities and an implementation strategy, in which I also hope we are joined by international partners". With international cooperation, a mission could be launched as early as 2010-2015.

Small meteorites impact our planet several times a year, and—despite Hollywood's doomsday scenarios—life on Earth survives. Almost all of these meteorites are from asteroid collisions that occurred 3 to 60 million years ago.

A new study suggests, however, that the violent destruction of an asteroid can create a long-lasting rain of meteorites. The space rocks would be delivered to Earth by a "meteorite express," the study says.

Total travel time to our planet: a mere hundred thousand years.

The research, which is described in tomorrow's edition of the science j ournal Nature, was conducted by scientists who studied meteorites preserved in 480- million-year-old sediments in southern Sweden.

The scientists found that the meteorites contained gases produced by cosmic rays that suggest the meteorites' transfer to Earth occurred much faster than for more recent ones.

The data led researchers to conclude that a violent collision in our solar system's distant asteroid belt 500 million years ago produced meteorites that traveled to Earth in a relatively scant hundred thousand years.

"It's the first physical confirmation of unusually short transfer times [of meteorites] after a major asteroid collision,& quot; said Philipp Reza Heck, the report's lead author. Heck studies cosmochemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

His research was partially funded by a grant from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.

Diverted by Jupiter

The general term "meteor" comes from the Greek meteoron, meaning "phenomenon in the sky." Meteoroids, in particular, are fragments of asteroids produced by collisions.

Meteoroids in our solar system spend most of their time in the asteroid belt betwee n Mars and Jupiter, unless they encounter a phenomenon known as orbital resonance and change course.

A meteorite is a meteoroid that reaches the surface of the Earth without being completely vaporized by the Earth's atmosphere.

While most meteoroids are rocky in composition, some are almost pure metal.

Intense meteorite showers can only occur after a very large collision between asteroids. Such events have been rare in the last billion years of the solar system's history.

Scientists say that meteorite showers are also r are because Jupiter's titanic gravitational pull diverts much of the space debris before it has a chance to venture toward Earth.

The phenomenon known as orbital resonance plays a key role in the "meteorite express" described in the new study. Resonance occurs when two orbiting bodies exert a gravitational influence on each other.

As Heck explained: "If a [meteoroid] goes into an important orbital resonance with Jupiter, for example the 3:1 resonance, then while Jupiter goes once around the sun, the [meteoroid] circles the sun three times."

"So the small object experiences periodically a gravitational tug from Jupiter, and its orbit gets changed quite fast," he said.

The efficient transfer of asteroid material into the inner solar system—the basis of the so-called meteorite express—only happens when an asteroid collision occurs close to a resonance, however.

"Once the fragments are injected into the resonance, their orbital shape is changed rather quickly until they become Earth-crossing," Heck said. This is what has happened in the distant past, scientists believe.

L Chondrites

Hec k and his colleagues studied meteorites that measured several centimeters in diameter. They were found in Thorsberg, a rock quarry in southern Sweden.

Around 500 million years ago the meteorites, of a type known as chondrites, fell into a shallow sea. There, they were covered with fine-grained marine sediments and well preserved.

A chemical analysis showed the meteorites were all of the same class, the so- called L chondrites class. Scientists believe that L chondrites come from a precursor to the Flora family of asteroids, a prominent group of asteroids circling the sun near the inner edge of the asteroid belt. Most L chondrites experienced a major gas loss 500 million years ago, which is best explained by a violent collision in space.

"The transfer time [of these meteorites] to Earth is around a hundred thousand years, consistent with a long-lasting rain of meteorites after the destruction of an asteroid and the existence of at least one trajectory [in which] material was flung towards the inner solar system," Heck said.

The findings do not contradict present scientific thinking about the rate at which meteoroids can travel. But the short transfer times suggested by the new study are at the very low end of theoretical predictions.

The sunspot number soared this weekend when sunspot 652 and its companion 'spot 653 emerged over the sun's eastern limb. Sunspot 652 is big, about the size of the planet Jupiter, and easily seen from Earth. Both sunspot 652 and, especially, sunspot 649 pose a threat for powerful X-class solar flares.

NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of such a flare during the next 24 hours. Warning: Don't look directly at the sun

CAIRO (Reuters) - A series of f ires in the southern Egyptian province of Sohag has destroyed some 160 houses, giving rise to rumors that spirits are at work or mysterious balls of fire are falling from the sky, a local official said Sunday.

But the causes are mundane -- kerosene stoves, cigarette butts and electrical short circuits, Brigadier Ezzat Aboul Kassem told Reuters. Flaming pigeons, their feathers set alight in the blazes, may explain talk of balls of fire, he added.

Two children have died in the fires, which started last month, and about 30 people have been injured, either from burns or from smoke inhalation, security officials said.

Aboul Kassem, who is director of police investigations in Sohag, said the number of fires was higher than usual this year, at 25 for the first half of July against 15 in the same period last year, possibly because the weather has been hotter.

"Investigations have shown that there are burned pigeons on top of some of the burned houses and it's probable that they fell there after catching fire at other houses," he said. "Maybe that explains the rumors of balls of fire falling from the sky."

A sunspot group aimed squarely at Earth has grown to 20 times the size of our planet and has the potential to unleash a major solar storm.

The amorphous mix of spots, together called Number 652, has been rotating across the Sun and growing for several days. On Friday, it sat at the center of the solar disk.

Sunspots are areas of intense magnetic energy, cooler and darker than the surrounding surface of the thermonuclear furnace. Sometimes the magnetic fields let loose and huge amounts of radiation and charged particles are hurled into space.

The Sun's last bout of intense storminess occurred last fall, when a string of 10 major flares over two weeks knocked out satellites, damaged others, and forced the FAA to reroute airlines away from exposed polar routes.

No one can say if this sunspot group will let loose with a major storm, but it has the characteristics of a potentially big event.

"The implications of this spot have scientists on the edge of their seats," NASA said in a statement Friday. "If the active region generates coronal mass ejections (CMEs), massive explosions with a potential force of a billion megaton bombs, it w ill be a fairly direct hit to Earth and its satellites and power grids."

The Sun is now in a generally quiet period of a well-known 11-year cycle of activity. But sunspots and flares can occur at any time. Scientists do not fully understand why the spots appear or how they erupt.

Summer is the season for shooting stars, and this year could be among the best as the annual Perseid meteor shower promises to be better than usual.

Anyone gazing at the summer night sky for even a short length of time now through the end of August is likely to spot a few streaks of otherworldly light. In general, the Earth encounters richer meteoric activity during the second half of the year.

The best meteor display of the summer comes during the second week of August, during the Perseid event. At its peak around the nights of Aug. 11 and 12, the shower can produce 50 to 100 fast, bright meteors per hour for any observer with a wide-open view of a dark sky.

Great prospects

This year will be a n excellent one to watch for the Perseids, partly because bright moonlight will not interfere as in past years, and also because Earth might encounter a heavier concentration of meteoric debris, astronomers predict, leading to better than normal meteor activity.

In the southern Austrian province of Carinthia, a "very bright" appearance of light has been observed on 2.35 on Monday, 26. July. According to local astronomers at the observatory in Klagenfurt, the phenomenon was, "with high degree of probability", an unusually large meteor.

Several eyewitnesses claim that the size of the apparition was comparable to the full moon.

The article claims that meteors burning in the atmosphere can be expected to be observed two or three times per year at most. However, the article goes on that on 2.17 (correct time?) another "unusual light apparition" has been seen in the sky. The astronomer of the observatory explains that this was caused by one of the 70 satellites belonging to the telephone system "Iridium", which fly at a height of 300 km above ground and can be "as bright as the street light of a car" when the sun's light is caught on its surface.

A huge meteor has been seen in the skies over central Victoria.

There have been reports of a big red and blue light streaking over the Castlemaine area just after 1:00am AEST today.

Policewoman Senior Constable Sharon McEachern says she was on patrol duty with a colleague in Maldon when she saw the light in the sky.

She says it was a spectacular sight that lasted about 15 seconds.

"A bright blue light going across the sky...not coming straight down and it just had a large blue tail and a bright red ball and then as it went across it just exploded into pieces, so I'm not sure whether it was a comet, or a meteor, or what it was," she said.

Astronomers were lucky enough to record the spectrum of a bright meteor when it happened - by sheer chance and against all reasonable odds - to cross the narrow slit of the FORS1 instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile.

At the time of this unlikely event, the telescope was performing a series of 20-minute spectroscopic exposures of a supernova in a distant galaxy in order to establish constraints on the dark en ergy content of the Universe. Thanks to its enormous light-collecting and magnifying power, the VLT recorded the spectrum of the meteor trail perpendicular to its path on one of these exposures. "We really hit the jackpot", says ESO astronomer Emmanuel Jehin: "The chances of capturing a meteor in the narrow slit of the FORS1 spectrograph are about as big as for me winning the national lottery."

Meteor spectra have on occasion been obtained serendipitously during photographic