April 1, 2012 Recent research in volcanology has concentrated on improving the predictability of major eruption events with the primary aim of providing sufficient warning to enable evacuation of personnel from the danger zone. A breakthrough in understanding the underlying mechanism of eruption events has recently emerged from research teams…
11.1 Light Visible light ranges from red through yellow and green to blue and violet. Newton was the first to discover that white light is a mixture of all the colors. White light can be split into its component colors by diffraction through a prism, which ‘bends’ each color by…
Mar 30, 2012 Astrophysicists are beginning to acknowledge the role that electricity plays in space. The Cassini-Huygens mission (now called Cassini-Equinox) was launched from Cape Canaveral on October 15, 1997. Its primary mission is the exploration of the Saturnian system, including Saturn’s atmosphere, its rings, its magnetosphere and a number…
Mar 29, 2012 What drives star formation in various nebulae? Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum compiled an extensive catalog of nebulae before his death in 1960. A Study of Diffuse Southern H-alpha Nebulae comprises 85 images that reveal intense activity within a variety of objects and structures embedded in them: extreme ultraviolet and X-ray…
March 28, 2012 Are the bright crater rims and striations on Vesta the mark of discharge “vents”? Are asteroids and comets close cousins in the Solar System’s family? Comets are usually called “dirty snowballs” in the scientific press, although missions like Giotto and Deep Impact observed them to be blackened,…
Mar 27, 2012 Could an ocean of liquid water exist on Europa? According to a recent press release, “Sending a submarine to the bottom of the ocean on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is the most exciting potential mission in planetary science…” Is it a forlorn hope? Europa is the fourth…
A NEW PARADIGM OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT – THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE (A VIEW FROM THE CAYMAN ISLANDS) by Bishop Nicholas Sykes In their book The Electric Universe by Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott (pub by Mikamar Publishing), the authors state: “The electric universe is a hypothesis, a new way of interpreting…
Mar 26, 2012 A new mission to map the gravity field of the Moon. On September 10, 2011 NASA launched the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) satellites on a mission to the Moon. GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B are nearly identical spacecraft, except that B is designed to follow A around…
Mar 23, 2012 Mercury reveals the violence of planetary genesis. Mercury’s story is probably a complicated tale of extremes. The planet’s surface is heavily scarred, with steep-walled canyons, scarps that rise up several kilometers, and craters that penetrate the crust for several kilometers below the mean elevation. The difference in…
Mar 22, 2012 The telescope that was once thought to be canceled has escaped mothballs and is on track for launch. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), formerly The Next Generation Telescope, is scheduled to be launched sometime in 2018. According to a report in Aviation Week & Space Technology,…
