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In my day work I am no stranger to government bureaucracies and “programs” manipulating information about their activities until it suits them to do otherwise. The WISE mission is no different. In March of this year David Shiga wrote an obviously informed article revealing early results of the WISE mission (below). Six weeks into WISE’s [...] Here’s the full press release about WISE mission finding dark comets.
WISE spies a Comet With its Powerful Infrared Eye, NASA\Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Feb 11, 2010 Officially named “P/2010 B2 (WISE),” but known simply as WISE, the comet is a dusty mass of ice more than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) in diameter. It probably formed around the same time as our solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago. Comet WISE started out in the cold, dark reaches of our solar system, but after a long history of getting knocked around by the gravitational forces of Jupiter, it settled into an orbit much closer to the sun. Right now, the comet is heading away from the sun and is about 175 million kilometers (109 million miles) from Earth. “Comets are ancient reservoirs of water. They are one of the few places besides Earth in the inner solar system where water is known to exist,” said Amy Mainzer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Mainzer is the principal investigator of NEOWISE, a project to find and catalog new asteroids and comets spotted by WISE (the acronym combines WISE with NEO, the shorthand for near-Earth object). “With WISE, we have a powerful tool to find new comets and learn more about the population as a whole. Water is necessary for life as we know it, and comets can tell us more about how much there is in our solar system.” Continue reading The February 11 JPL Press Release on dark, dead comets and the WISE mission
Now visible comet from WISE in infrared In an earlier post I noted that last month NASA had mentioned WISE finding dark and dead comets for the first time (at least as recorded on the Internet). I thought it kind of odd that well into a mission the agency begins speaking [...] I have been interested for some time whether the WISE mission now underway is able to confirm or refute, in part, the widely dismissed theories of Bill Napier and the British NEO catastrophists. In particular, that the solar system is host to dangerous dark bodies as well as the better known and more easily spotted bright comets [...] |
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