When We’re Right, We’re Really, Really Right…
Once again, NASA has no “mystery” we haven’t already predicted … and explained
Nasa’s Stardust probe reentering Earth’s atmosphere
By Mike Bara
© 2006 The Enterprise Mission
Sharp readers of this site, as well as the standard space science web
sites (space.com, BBC online, etc.) were recently treated to yet another
example of just how far NASA’s models of the solar system and planetary
formation have strayed from the existing data.
While we’ve all kept watch, waiting patiently for NASA to admit what it really found in studying its Deep Impact Comet Mission close-in spectral data from last Summer – now far too many months inexplicably delayed! – we’ve just been given a hint as to what new data was returned from the less visibly spectacular (but far more scientifically decisive) Stardust Comet Sample Return Mission of a few weeks ago.
Stardust flew to within 147 miles (237 kilometers) of comet Wild 2 on Jan. 2, 2004. While passing through the comet’s coma, it collected samples of the Wild 2’s surface materials that were being vented from internal pockets into space. Two years later, looping back to Earth just as intended – the Stardust “mother ship” released a capsule, containing the collected Wild 2 samples, for a ballistic landing in the barren Utah deserts just before dawn on Jan. 15, 2006 (below). The landing was successful, delivering Stardust’s priceless “first-time pieces of a comet” back to eagerly waiting planetary scientists – including Stardust Principle Investigator, Donald Brownlee.
So far, so good.
But NASA’s model of the solar system argues that comets are actually “dirty snowballs” -- eternally frozen, primordial accretions of unchanged ice and light dust, formed billions of years ago in the ice-cold outer regions of the solar system -- in the never-before-seen realm (until telescopes became large and powerful enough to image some of the bigger objects, in the mid-1990’s), extending from Neptune’s orbit (at about 3 billion miles from the Sun) … out to about 7 billion miles -- called the “Kuiper Belt” (below).
By mainstream astronomy’s model, such Kuiper Belt comets should consist only of “light, icy materials,” since there could be no heavy, high-temperature elements or mineral compounds remaining that far out; they would have all condensed (so the NASA models predict) in the hot, primordial inner solar system long ago …forming the inner solar system’s planets.
This theory is flatly at odds now with a less well-known (but to this point, far more viable!) alternative solar system “model.”
This alternative, the so-called “Exploded Planet Hypothesis” -- which explains the asteroid belt in the “Titus-Bode orbit,” between Mars and Jupiter, as the remnants of a former inner solar system world that somehow “blew up” well after the solar system formed -- has been around for more than a century. More recently, Dr. Tom Van Flandern, former head of the celestial mechanics branch of the US Naval Observatory, has elegantly advocated for the Theory … and added crucial new details.
Van Flandern’s additional work argues that all comets and asteroids have the same ultimate origins: several exploded former members of the solar system! His model implicitly and specifically predicts that most cometary fragments will be found to be made up of the same materials as the inner “terrestrial planets,” and that “Titus-Bode” asteroids (those orbiting between Mars and Jupiter) will be as well.
Our own Mars Tidal Model agrees with these predictions, and considers them a key test of our own now well-verified Hypothesis re Mars existence as a one-time satellite of one of these former inner solar system worlds (Planet V).
So it is from these two starkly opposing viewpoints -- NASA’s model-driven press releases, and the Van Flandern/Hoagland data-driven papers, that we ask our readers to consider these just-announced new NASA Stardust findings. According to the Space.com article on the initial Stardust analysis results, presented this week at NASA’S annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston:
"… Researchers studying samples of Comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt
2") embedded in Stardust's gel-filled collector found that the minerals
formed under extremely high temperatures – such as those near a star –
and not in the frigid cold expected at the Solar System's edge, where
most short-term comets originate."
Translation: more key predictions from NASA's primordial "dirty snowball" model are turning out to be … flat wrong.
Van Flandern's Model -- that comets and asteroids originate from parent planetary bodies, which long-ago exploded as fully-formed members of the ancient solar system, which in turn would have inevitably sprayed high-temperature materials in all directions -- once again comes out on top. The high-heat signature surprisingly found in the captured Stardust grains (and fully one quarter of them, at that -- below!) is indicative of either formation under the intense pressure of planetary condensation and formation, or, a subsequent explosive event -- or both.
The article goes on to provide yet another clue that NASA is on the wrong track:
"… Astronomers aren't sure whether the minerals found in Stardust's comet samples formed near the Sun or around another star, though isotope scans are expected to determine that for sure in upcoming tests, Brownlee said. Olivine, a mix of iron and magnesium that appears green on some Earth beaches, is one of the several surprising compounds found in the Wild 2 samples, he added."
The presence of Olivine is only surprising if you still buy into NASA's increasingly wrong paradigm about “primordial comet formation” at this late date. But, it is inherently predictable in Van Flandern's Model; and specifically predicted in Hoagland's Tidal Paper -- since Olivine is the primary constituent of planetary mantles and would therefore be expected to be highly abundant in cometary fragments and asteroids … if they are indeed pieces of former “blown-up worlds.”
The Mars Tidal Model
also explains Mars’ otherwise inexplicable surface abundance of Olivine
(which is destroyed rapidly in the presence of liquid water – which, from
NASA’s
Rover data, was once apparently wide-spread on the surface of the
ancient Mars) as being from the late “fallout” remnants of Van Flandern’s
exploded “Planet V” … which rained hot mantle fragments down all over
Mars (orbiting, as it was, as a close-in satellite of Planet V …) immediately
after that parent planet’s catastrophic break-up 65 million years ago
….
"… But if Stardust's comet samples are found to be local to the
Solar System [they will be – MB] and not from some distant star, they'd
suggest a sort of transportation system to fling particles formed near
the Sun out past the orbit of Pluto and into the comet realm, researchers
said."
A "transportation system?" Like maybe … pieces of a planet violently exploding in the orbit between Mars and Jupiter?
In a BBC online article on the same findings, NASA researchers go to painfully tortured logic to explain this possible “transportation system.”
“… If the high-temperature minerals formed at the centre of our solar nebula, the molten droplets could have been blasted out to the cold outer region by powerful magnetized jet called the X-wind."
"It's perhaps indicative that the X-wind model is a good one," Caroline Smith, meteorite curator at the Natural History Museum in London, told the BBC News website. “But it means that these bursts must have carried the minerals much further distances than has previously been suggested ….”
In other words, Smith is willing to suggest that this “X-wind” might be much more powerful than it is (or was assumed to be in their planetary models) -- just to add one more “patch” to a solar system model that is already full of “rapidly yawning holes.”
Rather than just admit that the latest Stardust findings (coming in the wake of last year’s equally unexpected Deep Impact results) have essentially put the final torpedo in the “the dirty snowball model,” and that the Kuiper Belt clearly now could also have originated from even earlier exploded worlds … NASA-affiliated scientists obviously prefer (as does much of mainstream science these days) to “stretch the facts” once more, in an increasingly desperate (if not transparent) effort to cover their obviously broken paradigm ….
Again, the simplest explanation for this startling new Stardust data is that … Van Flandern’s “catastrophic” solar system model is correct!
That most of the comets and asteroids we see formed in the hot, inner solar system … and were flung into long and short-term orbits by an unimaginably catastrophic planetary Event less than a hundred million years ago.
But, in addition now, that Stardust strongly supports the idea that other “cometary objects” also originated even earlier … in the outer solar system – creating the mysterious “Kuiper Belt” of (until recently) unseen, distant icy objects orbiting the Sun in (mostly) neatly circular paths – the remaining fragments resulting from equally catastrophic planet-destroying events … in the distant dawning ages of the outer solar system!
In Tom Van Flandern’s solar system, “planets” don’t seem to be very stable objects … in the long term.
The other night, on the national network radio program, “Coast to Coast AM,” Hoagland ventured a crucial, coming test for the Stardust samples – which will clearly “tell the tale” between these two opposing models. Hoagland noted that when Brownlee’s key isotope analyses are carried out on individual grains captured in the Stardust aerogel (below), they too will be found to be “incredibly anomalous” ... reinforcing a much younger age of “only” a few hundred million years for some of Wild 2’s grains. This, of course, will be totally at odds with NASA’s well-known predicted isotopic age for this comet (and all others)... “~4.5 billion years” ….
That’s when the real fun will begin.
NASA can’t afford to admit any of this catastrophic scenario or the increasingly supporting evidence, for several reasons we’ve discussed previously here -- so they will continue to bend the facts and stretch credulity in order preserve a Model that obviously isn’t working any more. The close-up spectral results from Deep Impact (if they ever are released …), will likely confirm that comets are, in fact, made up of high-temperature elements and minerals, rather than light “snowball stuff.”
It will be interesting to see how NASA spins that one
when it ultimately comes out.
"It's a really exciting mystery story," Brownlee said of
the new Stardust findings. "So stay tuned."
Hmm … isn’t that our line?
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