Tag: nasa

NASA Denies Existence of Classified Briefings on James Webb Telescope Discoveries

In recent weeks, rumors spread rapidly on social media suggesting that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) had made an extraordinary discovery—potentially alien life—and that members of Congress had been briefed about it.

The rumors intensified after U.S. Representative Andre Carson, who had previously chaired a congressional hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), declined to answer a question about classified briefings when asked by @AskaPol_UAPs run by journalist Matt Laslo on X.

The speculation prompted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, filed by The Black Vault on September 22, 2024, seeking any records—classified or unclassified—about JWST briefings provided to Congress, particularly related to the telescope’s findings. The request aimed to clarify whether any congressional briefings had been held about significant discoveries made by JWST, which has been in operation since 2021.

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Former NASA Scientist Doing Experiment to Prove We Live in a Simulation

Could we be trapped inside a simulated reality, rather than the physical universe we usually assume?

It’s a tantalizing theory, long theorized by philosophers and popularized by the 1999 blockbuster “The Matrix.” What if there was a way to find out once and for all if we’re living inside a computer?

A former NASA physicist named Thomas Campbell has taken it upon himself to do just that. He devised several experiments, as detailed in a 2017 paper published in the journal The International Journal of Quantum Foundations, designed to detect if something is rendering the world around us like a video game.

Now, scientists at the California State Polytechnic University (CalPoly) have gotten started on the first experiment, putting Campbell’s far-fetched hypothesis to the test.

And Campbell has set up an entire non-profit called Center for the Unification of Science and Consciousness (CUSAC) to fund these endeavors. The experiments are “expected to provide strong scientific evidence that we live in a computer-simulated virtual reality,” according to a press release by the group.

Needless to say, it’s an eyebrow-raising project. As always, extraordinary claims will require extraordinary evidence — but regardless, it’s a fun idea.

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NASA built a Moon rover but can’t afford to get it to the launch pad

NASA has spent $450 million designing and building a first-of-its-kind robot to drive into eternally dark craters at the Moon’s south pole, but the agency announced Wednesday it will cancel the rover due to delays and cost overruns.

“NASA intends to discontinue the VIPER mission,” said Nicky Fox, head of the agency’s science mission directorate. “Decisions like this are never easy, and we haven’t made this one, in any way, lightly. In this case, the projected remaining expenses for VIPER would have resulted in either having to cancel or disrupt many other missions in our Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) line.”

NASA has terminated science missions after development delays and cost overruns before, but it’s rare to cancel a mission with a spacecraft that is already built.

The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission was supposed to be a robotic scout for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the next few years. VIPER was originally planned to launch in late 2023 and was slated to fly to the Moon aboard a commercial lander provided by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, which won a contract from NASA in 2020 to deliver the VIPER rover to the lunar surface. Astrobotic is one of 14 companies in the pool of contractors for NASA’s CLPS program, with the goal of transporting government-sponsored science payloads to the Moon.

But VIPER has been delayed at least two years—the most recent schedule projected a launch in September 2025—causing its cost to grow from $433 million to more than $609 million. The ballooning costs automatically triggered a NASA review to determine whether to proceed with the mission or cancel it. Ultimately, officials said they determined NASA couldn’t pay the extra costs for VIPER without affecting other Moon missions.

“Therefore, we’ve made the decision to forego this particular mission, the VIPER mission, in order to be able to sustain the entire program,” Fox said.

“We’re disappointed,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic. “It’s certainly difficult news… VIPER has been a great team to work with, and we’re disappointed we won’t get the chance to fly them to the Moon.”

NASA said it will consider “expressions of interest” submitted by US industry and international partners by August 1 for use of the existing VIPER rover at no cost to the government. If NASA can’t find anyone to take over VIPER who can pay to get it to the Moon, the agency plans to disassemble the rover and harvest instruments and components for future lunar missions.

Scientists were dismayed by VIPER’s cancellation.

“It’s absurd, to be honest with you,” said Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It made no sense to me in terms of the economics. You’re canceling a mission that is complete, built, ready to go. It’s in the middle of testing.”

“This is a bad mistake,” wrote Phil Metzger, a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida, in a post on X. “This was the premier mission to measure lateral and vertical variations of lunar ice in the soil. It would have been revolutionary. Other missions don’t replace what is lost here.”

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NASA SCIENTIST SAYS PATENTED ‘EXODUS EFFECT’ PROPELLANTLESS PROPULSION DRIVE THAT DEFIES PHYSICS IS READY TO GO TO SPACE

A patented experimental propellantless propulsion drive is finally ready to go to space, according to its inventor, a veteran NASA scientist with decades of expertise in electrostatics.

Dr. Charles Buhler, the technology’s creator, says the propulsion system may represent a working version of Quantized Inertia, a theory first proposed by University of Plymouth professor Mike McCulloch. The proposition has been subjected to criticism from mainstream scientists in the past because it seemingly violates Newton’s third law of motion.

The controversial technology, which The Debrief covered in April, is privately owned by Exodus Propulsion Technologies and is not affiliated with NASA.

After almost a decade of research, design, and testing, Buhler says he and his team are confident they have verified the force, one his team calls the Exodus Effect(TM), in “nearly every way conceivable on Earth.” The final step required to officially demonstrate the validity of their discovery is to send the propulsion drive unit into space.

“We’ve done everything we could have in vacuum chambers here on Earth. We’ve tested it every which way you can, but the real validation is to have this thing move in space,” Buhler told The Debrief in a lengthy interview. “That’s the bottom line.”

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NASA RADAR DATA CONFIRMS EXISTENCE OF SUBSURFACE “TUNNEL” NEAR FAMOUS APOLLO-ERA LUNAR LANDING SITE

For the first time, scientists have confirmed the existence of an underground tunnel-like feature near the landing site of the first crewed mission to the Moon. The discovery concludes almost half a century of speculation involving the suspected existence of caves below the lunar surface.

On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the lunar surface after making a soft landing in the Apollo 11 Lunar Module on the mare plain of the Moon’s famous Mare Tranquillitatis, Latin for “Sea of Tranquility.”

Now, according to the findings of an international team of researchers led by the University of Trento in Italy, the existence of a subsurface tunnel-like lava tube cave beneath the Mare Plain has been confirmed.

A new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy revealed the discovery, which relied on data obtained with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

The discovery of the tunnel-like feature has been called a significant milestone toward understanding the Moon’s various geological components more fully. It also offers a potential shelter area that could be used by astronauts during future crewed missions.

Lorenzo Bruzzone, a professor at the University of Trento, said the existence of such underground features had long been suspected, although the team’s discovery is the first confirmation that they exist.

“These caves have been theorized for over 50 years,” Bruzzone said in a statement, “but it is the first time ever that we have demonstrated their existence.”

Data originally obtained in 2010 by the Miniature Radio-Frequency (Mini-RF) instrument aboard the LRO, which included radar reflections from a pit discovered in the Mare Tranquilitatis, were reexamined by the research team.

“Thanks to the analysis of the data, we were able to create a model of a portion of the conduit,” said Leonardo Carrer, a researcher at the University of Trento involved with the new findings.

“The most likely explanation for our observations is an empty lava tube,” Carrer said.

Given the demanding environment on the surface of the Moon, where temperatures can reach as much as 127°C on its illuminated side while dropping to frigid lows nearing -173°C on the unilluminated side, lava tube caves could be ideal locations for astronauts to use as shelters on the Moon.

In addition to being ideal environments for subsurface shelters, such an underground tunnel-like feature could also provide a degree of shielding from cosmic and solar radiation that bombards the lunar surface, which can be up to 150 times more powerful there than on Earth.

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NASA spots unexpected X-shaped structures in Earth’s upper atmosphere — and scientists are struggling to explain them

A NASA satellite has spotted unexpected X- and C-shaped structures in Earth’s ionosphere, the layer of electrified gas in the planet’s atmosphere that allows radio signals to travel over long distances.

The ionosphere is an electrified region of Earth’s atmosphere that exists because radiation from the sun strikes the atmosphere. Its density increases during the day as its molecules become electrically charged. That’s because sunlight causes electrons to break off of atoms and molecules, creating plasma that enables radio signals to travel over long distances. The ionosphere’s density then falls at night — and that’s where GOLD comes in.

NASA’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission is a geostationary satellite that has been measuring densities and temperatures in Earth’s ionosphere since its launch in October 2018. From its geostationary orbit above the western hemisphere, GOLD was recently studying two dense crests of particles in the ionosphere, located north and south of the equator. As night falls, low-density bubbles appear within these crests that can interfere with radio and GPS signals. However, it’s not just the wax and wane of sunshine that affects the ionosphere — the atmospheric layer is also sensitive to solar storms and huge volcanic eruptions, after which the crests can merge to form an X shape.

In its new observations, GOLD found some of these familiar X shapes in the ionosphere — even though there weren’t any kinds of solar or volcanic disturbances to create them.

Related: Oops! US Space Force may have accidentally punched a hole in the upper atmosphere

“Earlier reports of merging were only during geomagnetically disturbed conditions,” Fazlul Laskar, a research scientist at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), said in a statement. Laskar is the lead author of a paper published in April in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics that described these unexpected observations. 

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Astronauts stranded in space due to multiple issues with Boeing’s Starliner — and the window for a return flight is closing

Two NASA astronauts who rode to orbit on Boeing’s Starliner are currently stranded in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after engineers discovered numerous issues with the Boeing spacecraft. Teams on the ground are now racing to assess Starliner’s status.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were originally scheduled to return to Earth on June 13 after a week on the ISS, but their stay has been extended for a third time due to the ongoing issues.  The astronauts will now return home no sooner than June 26th, according to NASA. 

After years of delays, Boeing’s Starliner capsule successfully blasted off on its inaugural crewed flight from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:52 a.m. EDT on June 5. But during the 25-hour flight, engineers discovered five separate helium leaks to the spacecraft’s thruster system.

Now, to give engineers time to troubleshoot the faults, NASA has announced it will push back the perilous return flight, extending the crew’s stay on the space station to at least three weeks. 

“We’ve learned that our helium system is not performing as designed,” Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, said at a news conference on June 18. “Albeit manageable, it’s still not working like we designed it. So we’ve got to go figure that out.”

The return module of the Starliner spacecraft is currently docked to the ISS’s Harmony module as NASA and Boeing engineers assess the  vital hardware issues aboard the vessel, including five helium leaks to the system that pressurizes the spacecraft’s propulsion system, and five thruster failures to its reaction-control system. 

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THIS NASA-FUNDED PULSED PLASMA PROPULSION SYSTEM COULD CARRY HUMANS TO MARS IN JUST TWO MONTHS

A groundbreaking new pulsed plasma propulsion system could soon enable faster and safer crewed missions to planets like Mars, according to a leading developer of novel technologies aimed at advancing the next stages of human space exploration.

Scottsdale, Arizona-based space technology developer Howe Industries recently announced that its Pulsed Plasma Rocket (PPR) could represent a game-changer in advanced propulsion for space travel, allowing crewed missions to significantly reduce the travel time required to reach Mars.

According to current timelines, NASA aims to send the first crewed missions to Mars within the next two decades using habitat-like spacecraft paired with hybrid propulsion capabilities that combine chemical and electrical forms of propulsion to enable such long-duration missions.

Enter Howe Industries and the PPR’s unique combination of high thrust and specific impulse energies. The technology is an outgrowth of the Pulsed Fission Fusion (PuFF) concept, which employs a modified z-pinch device to compress a fission-fusion target within a liquid lithium sheath. The resulting thrust is produced as combustion propagates and expands against a magnetic nozzle through a process known as deflagration, which involves electrical discharges that create strong magnetic fields and produce high plasma densities and temperatures.

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Recommended reading…

Get it HERE.

“In his short 37 years, John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons embodied at least several different roles in one tormented but glorious life.
By day, Parsons’ unorthodox genius created a solid rocket fuel that helped the Allies win World War II and NASA send spacecraft to the moon. Co-founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Corporation, a lunar crater was named after Parsons.
By night, Parsons called himself The Antichrist when he performed Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic rituals to create a new sort of human being that would finally destroy Christianity.
In a Pasadena mansion, the dark, handsome Parsons hosted soirees for the emerging literature of science fiction, visited by writers such as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and none other than L. Ron Hubbard, who later founded the Church of Scientology. With Hubbard playing his “Scribe,” Parsons enacted dark “Babalon” rituals to help foment a new occult age. Jack Parsons died suddenly in a huge, mysterious explosion that even today cannot be definitively explained. Was it murder? Suicide? Or just an accident?
Feral House’s paperback edition adds new photographs and an Afterword about Parsons’ “Black Pilgrimage.” One of the inspirations for hit television series, “Strange Angels.””