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Doomsday Delayed | thunderbolts.info

Sep 26, 2011 Comet Elenin, despite fear mongers and media hype, has vanished. Leonid Elenin discovered C/2010 X1 (subsequently named after him) on December 10, 2010. The comet reached perihelion on September 11, 2011 but does not seem to have survived its encounter with the Suns electromagnetic fields. Since the comets initial discovery, a litany of doom prophecies has flooded the internet. According to one report, over 12,000 websites Latest image from the SOHO satellite. No sign of Comet Elenin. Credit: NASA/ESA have appeared with warnings of impending disaster or some kind of world-changing spiritual event taking place either at perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) or on September 23. Both dates have come and gone, while our globe rolls on without any effects. If those who wish to use small comets as their theoretical tools of destruction were to investigate their structure and behavior, another way of interpreting what they are would bring an end to such speculations. The first question to ask is: what is a comet? The second question is: what effect can they have on Earth? The commonly accepted view of comets is that they are the remains of the original nebular cloud out of which our Solar System condensed. Standard theory states that after the Sun, planets, moons, and planetesimals formed, a vast cloud of frozen water, dust, and gas known as the Oort Cloud was left in a halo around the Sun at a distance of about 50,000 astronomical units (AU). In comparison, Pluto is approximately 39 AU from the Sun. An AU is almost 150 million kilometers, or the mean radius of Earths orbit. As the theory goes, matter in the Oort Cloud has also condensed, but into icy balls rather than rocky bodies. The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of a comet is: a celestial body that appears as a fuzzy head usually surrounding a bright nucleus, that has a usually highly eccentric orbit, that consists primarily of ice and dust, and that often develops one or more long tails when near the Sun. This conglomeration is often referred to as a dirty snowball in consensus circles.

The Giotto and Deep Impact space probes told a different story, however. When Giotto made its close approach to Halleys comet in 1986, it sent back images that revealed the comet to be blackened and scorched. Indeed, ESA scientists announced that it was the blackest object ever discovered, even blacker than the soot-colored moon Phoebe. Other comets have definitively falsified the dirty snowball hypothesis. When Shoemaker-Levy 9 exploded after passing near Jupiters magnetosphere, no volatile compounds were found, leaving astronomers mystified. When Deep Space 1, the first spacecraft with an ion propulsion drive, flew past comet Borrelly, the comet appeared more like an asteroid, possessing a dry, hard surface: no traces of ice or snowy fields. Comets experience a steadily increasing voltage and current density in the solar wind as they race toward the Sun. This causes them to acquire plasma sheaths as they move along, otherwise known as comas. Some cometary comas have been estimated to be more than a million kilometers in diameter. Eventually, the dark discharge mode of the coma switches to the arc mode, producing cathode jets and the characteristic comet dust and ion tails. Close-up images of comet nuclei show bright spots on the black nucleus, which may be explained as the arc touchdown locations Unexpected X-rays have been detected coming from the comets plasma sheath. The energy required to generate X-rays is supplied by the comets electrical discharge. Comet Hyakutake is a good example. Comets are small. Most of them have a nucleus no more than 16 kilometers in diameter. They carry a negative charge with respect to the Sun, so they begin to discharge violently when they approach the inner Solar System. However, their mass is low and their electric fields are correspondingly weak when compared to Earth. Mainstream viewpoints must come to realize that asteroids and comets are not completely different from one another. The Stardust mission to comet Wild 2 gathered samples from its coma, returning material to Earth that resembled meteoric dust. Not what was expected from a slushy mudball. Comets do not initiate earthquakes, tsunamis, or volcanic eruptions on our planet, especially when they are millions of kilometers away. If they get close enough to penetrate Earths plasmasphere, they most likely will blow up, just like Shoemaker-Levy 9 did. Stephen Smith

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SURVEYS IN GEOPHYSICS
Volume 18, Number 1, 39-55, DOI: 10.1023/A:1006562314431

The Collision of Comet ShoemakerLevy 9 with Jupiter David H. Levy

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Estimation of the Nucleus Size of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 under the Assumption of Its Step-by-Step Disintegration M. D. Zamarashkina
Journal Article

Abstract
The spectacular impact of D/Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in July 1994 was observed all over the world and from space, leading to many new and exciting clues to the physics of the Jovian atmosphere. However, what do we know of the impactor? There were only 16 months to study D/Shoemaker-Levy 9 between its discovery and destruction. D/Shoemaker-Levy 9 was designated as a comet at time of discovery. Then, due to the apparent absence of volatiles usually present in comets it was repeatedly discussed whether D/Shoemaker-Levy 9 was a comet or an asteroid. Although its true nature can still not be named unambigeously, a cometary origin is indicated from the observational evidence. The results of the dust analysis are consistent with D/Shoemaker-Levy 9 being a typical comet and so far this is not contradicted by any observation.

Dust Environment Modelling of Comet

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Frequently Asked Questions History of NASA's involvement

SOLAR ELECTRIC (ION) PROPULSION

Click here to see a time lapse video (4.4 MB Quicktime movie) of the DS1 Ion Thruster Compatibility Test taped on February 15, 1998. (Or you can get a smaller version : 2.5 MB). This testing was carried out on the DS1 spacecraft in the Solar Thermal Vacuum Chamber at JPL. Increasing the engine throttle level without increasing the available power caused the engine recycling in the video. The engine provides about 10 times the specific impulse (ratio of thrust to propellant used) of chemical propulsion. DS1 is the first spacecraft to use ion propulsion as the primary propulsion system. It is one of the 12 advanced technologies that was validated by DS1 during flight.

Hear DS1's radio signals!

Rocket engines work by pushing propellant away from the spacecraft. The action of the propellant leaving the engine causes a reaction that pushes the spacecraft in the opposite direction. This is what causes a balloon to rush around as the air is allowed to escape; the air pushes on the balloon as it leaves. An ion engine uses this same principle, but the great innovation is in how efficiently this happens. The gas xenon (which is like helium or neon, but heavier) flows into the ion engine, where it is given an electrical charge. Charged atoms are called ions. As soon as the xenon atoms become xenon ions, they can be pushed around by an electrical voltage. A pair of grids in the ion engine, electrified to almost 1300 volts, accelerates the ions to very high speed and shoots them out of the engine. As the ions race away from the engine, they push back on

the spacecraft, propelling it in the opposite direction. [The electricity for this remarkable system can be provided by solar arrays, as on Deep Space 1 and Dawn, or by a nuclear power system, as on Project Prometheus. The principle of operation of the ion engine is the same.] The xenon ions travel at about 40 kilometers/second (90,000 miles/hour). This is about 10 times faster than the exhaust from conventional rocket engines, so the xenon gives about 10 times as much of a push to the spacecraft as chemical propellants do. That means that it takes only one tenth as much propellant for an ion engine to work as it does for a chemical propulsion system. To accomplish some of the more ambitious and exciting missions in the solar system, we simply cannot build and launch spacecraft large enough to carry the chemical propellants that would be needed for the mission. Ion propulsion is one of the ways to get around this problem. Now the ion engines use only a very small amount of xenon at a time. That means that the thrust is very very low. If you rest a piece of paper on your hand, the paper pushes on your hand about as hard as the ion engine pushes on the spacecraft! It may take 4 days or more just to use up 1 kilogram (about 2 pounds) of xenon. Unlike chemical engines, which can be operated for minutes, or in extreme cases, for an hour or so, ion engines can be operated for years. The effect of the gentle thrust slowly builds up, eventually attaining speeds far beyond the reach of conventional propellants. Deep Space 1, using less than 74 kg (163 pounds) of xenon, accelerated by about 4.3 kilometers/second (9600 miles/hour). This is greater than any spacecraft has ever been able to change its speed. (DS1 could have achieved still higher velocity, but mission controllers had objectives other than just going faster and faster, so they did not operate it to attain the maximum speed possible.) It thrusted for 678 days, far far longer than any propulsion system had ever been operated. [Dawn will surpass both of these records, and later missions using ion propulsion will do even more.] Solar Electric Propulsion, Frequently Asked Questions Solar Concentrator Arrays Autonomous Navigation Miniature Integrated Camera and lmaging Spectrometer Ion and Electron Spectrometer Small Deep Space Transponder Ka-Band Solid State Amplifier