Beyond Nature

Were the Amityville hauntings cynical media manipulation? Is levitation possible? Has Earth been visited by UFOs from other realms? All these questions, and more, are considered in 100 Strangest Mysteries. Paranormal investigator Matt Lamy documents in detail the numerous phenomena and events which can be termed 'mysterious' and cannot be dismissed as mere hysteria or wild imaginings.

Divided into themed sections, the book includes:

The Beast of Bodmin ? whether it is an escaped exotic pet, a feral cat or something more sinister, it certainly causes concern for inhabitants of its local area

Area 51 ? conspiracy theorists believe it is a centre for the U.S. government's investigations into UFO activity, whilst others consider it to be 'only' a military air base

Ley lines and other energy fields ? are they sacred sites going back thousands of years or modern New Age notions?

The Holy Grail ? dismissed by organized religion, thought by some to have been a chalice brought to Britain by Joseph, many consider it to be nothing more than a romantic Arthurian legend

# Publisher: Metro Books; 2007 edition edition (2007)
# ISBN-10: 0760791929
# ISBN-13: 978-0760791929

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In 1996 the controversial discovery of what appeared to be Martian fossils in a meteorite from Antarctica ignited a furor in the scientific community.

The idea that a rock billions of years old was flung into space with traces of life aboard was intoxicating, fueling thoughts of panspermia -- the idea that all life on Earth could have originated on Mars or some other alien planet.


Twelve years on, scientists still debate whether the tiny structures are Martian or not, or even fossils. But now a new study has shown it's possible for traces of life to survive a punishing interplanetary journey.

Frances Westall of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France and a group of researchers attached a 2-centimeter-thick rock to the heat shield of a Foton M3 space capsule.

Nestled between the shield and rock was a layer of the hearty bacteria Chroococcidiopsis, commonly found in the harshest deserts on Earth.

When the capsule hit Earth's atmosphere, the rock was heated to at least 3,056 degrees Fahrenheit (1,680 degrees Centigrade). Most of it burned away, leaving only 8 millimeters of material behind. What was left was a gooey, melted white crust of quartz.

The rock's original structure -- along with visible microfossils -- was preserved at the core.


"This is a great positive result in searching for traces of extra-terrestrial life on meteorites," Westall said. "If ever Martians fossils land on Earth, we should be able to see them."

The desert-dwelling organisms were not so lucky, however.

Westall said the screws that held the rock to the heat shield loosened during re-entry, allowing temperatures between the shield and the rock to climb to between 570 and 930 degrees Fahrenheit (300 and 500 degrees Centigrade).

"[The bacteria] were carbonized," she said, "so it's a negative result for the idea of panspermia, but we'll have to run the experiment again."

"This certainly does not disprove the idea of panspermia," David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute said.


For life on Mars to make it to Earth, it would have to survive a perilous interplanetary crossing. Scientists have calculated that the first stage -- launching off the surface with debris created by a meteorite impact -- is survivable.

Little is known about the long journey through the vacuum of space, but microbes living inside rock could be protected enough to make the trip.

Then comes re-entry. If life were to survive the heat of rocketing through Earth's atmosphere at 12-15 kilometers per second (33,000 mph), it would still have to live through the impact. At this point, no one knows if it can.

"This is a piece in the puzzle of the origin of life, and the distribution of life in the solar system," Kring said of the team's research. "If life did originate on Earth and was transferred elsewhere in the solar system, it would be interesting to everyone to know that, and vice versa -- if life began on Mars and simply propagated better on Earth, that would be interesting, too."

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Have you ever read any of Asimov's novels?? (The Robot series, The Robots and Aliens) . Ever wondered if there is any possibility in the near future that a person can actually get to another planet and if not investigate a case like Elijah, can at least explore the place and can one day share a meal with our counterparts! Is this possible?? Is there any life beyond the Planet Earth?? Is there a safe neighborhood out in the universe except Earth?? I feel that these questions are quite common , the very mention of the Alien and ET raises the eyebrows.

Imagine an Alien or lemme call it the 'ET' stepping down a Flying Saucer or UFO(Just as in the film ET) and walking straight to you..!!!! This very imagination is quite amazing, electrifying, terrifying or adventurous may be .. isn't it?? I do find myself lost in these thoughts sometimes when Iam alone starring the Night Sky , by the way sky looks quite beautiful! I wonder how an encounter with the Alien turns out to be like.. Would he/she look just as we do? Do they possess the same technology or are they any advanced?? Are they friendly or will they harm us( Just like any Alien that has so far been portrayed in the films)?? Its just an unquenchable thirst of we humans that has been keeping us busy over centuries trying to find out the existence of an outer world.

These are the kinds of questions Ken Nealson struggles with. A geo-biologist at the University of Southern California, Nealson is heavily involved in devising strategies for searching for extraterrestrial life. And his number one goal is to free himself and his colleagues from the confines of their own preconceptions about life.

"It seems to me the worst people to look for life are biologists," Nealson, also a senior scientist at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says. "Because theyre so darned sure of what life is that if it happened to be different, theyd miss it." Nealson admits this point of view isnt very popular with his colleagues. "Oh, they love me," he laughs. "At least I'm a biologist saying it, so they cant just claim I'm some mad physicist whos trying to take their funding away."

As a cautionary tale, Nealson points to the only previous mission to look for life on another planet. In 1976 two Viking landers arrived on the Red Planet, each outfitted with a miniature biological laboratory. Scoops of Martian soil were fed into a series of experiments, where they were exposed to a puff of humidity, or a drop of water, or a nutrient broth. If any microbes were present, the Viking biologists hoped, the instruments would detect their metabolic processes.

But the experiments didn't discover microbes, and Nealson says thats because they were based on the characteristics of Earthly life. Thats something he wants to avoid on future missions: "Id like to be one of the chorus of voices saying, Dont do this again."

But that doesn't mean Nealson wants to avoid Mars far from it. If anything, Mars has become even more alluring since the Mars Global Surveyor probe found signs that liquid water has recently flowed on the planets surface and may still exist underground.

More than anything, Nealson wants to send a new life-detection mission to the Red Planet. "If I get one thing done before I retire," Nealson says, "it would be to have a mission that went to Mars, because its the one place we probably can go in my lifetime that would do a serious attempt at what I would call non-Earth-centric life detection."

If you call that living

Even our understanding of terrestrial life is changing. Recently, scientists discovered a thriving community of microbes deep in a hot spring in Idaho. These microbes, ancient relatives of bacteria called Archea, make energy by combining hydrogen from rocks with carbon dioxide, and exist completely apart from the Sun. And yet, they may be as numerous as living things on Earths surface, an entirely independent biosphere within the crust of our planet.

And some researchers have speculated that the same kind of life may exist in the crusts of other planets, provided there is enough geologic activity to supply the necessary hydrogen. But designing a space mission with probes to look for such life, many hundreds of feet down, is too ambitious in the near term. Even so, the find reinforces a watchword for life-hunters: Expect the unexpected.[more...]

Robots rules of order

There's another pitfall for life-hunters:The desire to find what they're after. In 1996 NASA scientists claimed to have found evidence for fossil microbes inside a meteorite from Mars. The claim was extremely controversial, and since then most researchers have come to believe the features in the Martian meteorite can be explained by non-biologic processes. Nealson says the NASA team was seduced by their own data.This wasn't a bunch of amateurs; these were good people. Anybody can be fooled by their data; Ive been fooled by mine in the past." But the seduction, Nealson notes, was understandable.

"Almost everything they found was consistent with life," he says. "And when you find enough things that are consistent with life, you start feeling that you've found life. But theres a big difference between five or six things being consistent with life and five or six things needing life to explain their existence. That to me is the big difference: Is there anything there that absolutely couldn't be there if there wasn't life?"[more...]

Europa ocean cruise

Planetary scientist Chris Chyba of the SETI Institute in Palo Alto, California is also anxious to see the search for life on Mars resume. But he’s also focused on another alluring target -- Jupiter's moon Europa. Images from the Galileo spacecraft, with other data, have shown that there is probably an ocean of liquid water beneath Europa’s icy crust. It’s not an easy place to explore: Europa is some 400 million miles from Earth, and it lies deep within Jupiter’s powerful radiation belts, which pose a hazard to any spacecraft.

But planners have envisioned a number of possible missions, including orbiters and landers, to explore Europa. Some have proposed an ambitious mission to melt through the ice and deploy a "cryobot" in the ocean to hunt for life. But Chyba says, "That kind of mission is extremely far in the future. Maybe it will be this century; I hope so. I think it's a very distant mission."
"You probably don't have to fly a cryobot to, in effect, access the ocean," Chyba says. "What you've got to do is go to a spot where it looks as though liquid water from the subsurface has reached the surface. And we can already identify areas like that on the surface of Europa."

Be like Earth

When it comes to life on other solar systems, the statistics seem promising.Four decades ago, Chyba's colleague Frank Drake authored a now-famous equation that judged the likelihood of extraterrestrial civilizations, or any kind of life, based on the number of habitable planets thought to be orbiting other stars. Back then, that number was pure conjecture. But now, after discovering several dozen extrasolar planets, astronomers are on the verge of learning whether other solar systems like ours are scarce or plentiful."

My prejudice is that we're going to discover that our solar system is neither rare nor typical," Chyba says. "But it doesn't really matter what I think is going to happen. We're actually going to know. Probably this decade, we're going to know."That's because of the upcoming Kepler mission, which will search for Earth-like planets around 100,000 stars beginning in 2006. "We're about to have catalogs of other solar systems, the way we have catalogs of stars [today]," Chyba says.

Whether any of these other solar systems are home to living things is something scientists hope to answer without leaving home. With powerful telescopes, perhaps including space-based arrays of instruments, it might be possible to detect the presence of atmospheric gases typical of life.

"I think it's going to prove very difficult to do in a way that seems convincing," Chyba said. "That doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to do it."[more...]

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MAN had been searching for a companion since decades.. i mean a companion from outer world.. from the blank dark space..

there had been various incidents when people complained that they had sighted an UFO....
in simple terms vehicle of aliens..(life from other planet).. did those people really see UFO's...
who knows..??
but i can say one thing few became popular n rich...
Directors cashed upon people belief n became rich...
movies like ET,Independence day,Star wars n many more.. r based on the same concept..
k lets come to the point..
about extra terrestrial life..
Few people believe n few dont .....
but man has his own fears so we have many missions to space..
one of them is.....

One of Darwin's telescopes

DARWIN MISSION

Darwin will be a flotilla of four or five free-flying spacecraft that will search for Earth-like planets around other stars and analyse their atmospheres for the chemical signature of life.

In addition the flotilla will be able to carry out high-resolution imaging using aperture synthesis, to provide pictures of celestial objects with unprecedented detail.

Looking for extrasolar planets, that is, planets orbiting around stars, is very hard. Even for nearby stars, it is like trying to see the difference between the feeble light from a candle next to a lighthouse from a point 1000 kilometres away.

At optical wavelengths, a star outshines an Earth-like planet by a thousand million to one. Partly to overcome this difficulty, Darwin will observe in the mid-infrared. At these wavelengths, the star-planet contrast drops to a million to one, making detection a little easier.


The science objectives of DARWIN are:

• to detect and analyse Earth-like worlds
• to detect atmospheres on these planets and to search for gases that can indicate life
• to solve the technological challenges of far infrared interferometric imaging in space

Darwin is an infrared (6 - 30 microns wavelength) nulling interferometer. It will reduce the intensity of the host star, so the faint reflected light from planets can be detected. DARWIN will detect gases in the atmospheres terrestrial exoplanets. The earth's spectrumis shown opposite has easily identifiable lines of water, carbon dioxide, oxygen and ozone

Looking for life

Another key reason for observing in the infrared is because life on Earth leaves its mark at these wavelengths. On Earth, biological activity produces gases that mingle with our atmosphere. For example, plants give out oxygen and animals expel carbon dioxide and methane.

These gases, and others, such as water, leave their fingerprints by absorbing certain wavelengths of infrared light. Darwin will split the light from an extrasolar planet into its constituent wavelengths, using a device called a spectrometer. This will show the drop in light caused by the presence of certain gases in the atmosphere, allowing them to be identified. If they are the same as those produced by life on Earth, rather than by non-biological processes, Darwin will have found evidence for life on another world.

Why does the mission have to be in space?

The mission has to be in space for two reasons. Firstly, on Earth, the atmosphere blocks the mid-infrared wavelengths of light that Darwin is designed to observe.

At room temperature, the telescopes would themselves emit infrared radiation, swamping their own observations. It would be like using a conventional telescope to perform optical astronomy with a bank of floodlights pointing into the telescope.

However, in space it is so cold that the telescope can be designed to be just 40 K (-233 °C) whilst the actual detector can be reduced in temperature further to just 8 K (-265 °C). This all but stops the telescope radiating its own infrared signal and allows it to search for the faint light of distant planets.

How will Darwin find planets?

There are two overwhelming challenges when trying to take images of planets around other stars. Firstly, the planet will appear to be very close to its parent star. Secondly, the star will outshine the planet by a factor of a million or even a billion.

The first condition requires that Darwin possess superb resolving power. This is the technical term for a telescope's ability to discern closely spaced celestial objects. The larger the telescope, the better its resolving power.

To see planets around nearby stars would require a telescope of roughly 30 metres in size and this is way beyond the current limits of technology. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is just 2.3 metres and even the planned Next Generation Space Telescope (JWST) will be, at most, 6.5 metres. The largest telescopes on Earth are 10 metres in diameter.

To overcome this limitation, Darwin will use a technique known as interferometry. Pioneered during the 1950s by astronomers in Cambridge, United Kingdom, originally using radio telescopes, the technique uses a number of smaller telescopes and combines their individual signals to mimic a much larger telescope.

The technique can also be applied to optical and infrared telescopes and will be used by Darwin. Six separate space telescopes will combine their individual signals to produce the final, high-resolution image.

The second problem means that Darwin must cut out the blinding light from the central star. In 1978, Ronald Bracewell, a physicist and electrical engineer interested in telescopes, pointed out that an interferometer can do this too if the signals from some of the telescopes are delayed slightly. By precisely adjusting this delay, the central bright object is 'cancelled' out, allowing the faint, nearby planet to stand out. Working like this, the instrument is known as a nulling interferometer.

Technologies:

Darwin is a highly complex optical
system containing a range of advanced
optical, infrared, cryogenic and photonics
technologies. The next article provides an
overview of the mission science and
technical challenges

Nulling Interferometry adds a 180 degree phase shift in one of the light paths of the interferometer. By placing the image of the star in the moddle of the destructive fringe, or null, the faint reflected light from nearby planets to the star can be

Launch:

Each of the four telescopes will have a diameter of around 3.5m in diameter based on the design used for the Herschel mission. The small flotila will be launched on 2 Soyuz-Fregat rockets.

Because the telescopes will be used to detect infrared light, they must be shielded from the Sun's rays. If not, sunlight would heat the telescope, causing it to emit its own infrared radiation, blinding its view of the distant planets. To prevent this, each telescope is equipped with a large sunshield.

During launch, the sunshields are wrapped around their telescopes to save space. Once Darwin is in orbit, the shields are deployed like unfurling an umbrella. Although, Darwin will face away from the Sun, it must also tilt up and down by an angle of 45 degrees, to see all of its target stars, whilst keeping the telescope's tube in the shade, requiring a large sunshield with a diameter of 7.4 metres.

A platform will sit behind the sunshield, consisting of a communications antenna, various receivers to detect the motion of the spacecraft and a small propulsion system. Below this, constantly facing the Sun, will be a solar array to generate power.

Journey

Darwin's launch date is to be defined in the context of ESA's Cosmic Vision scientific programme. For the launch, ESA will use two launches with Soyuz-Fregat rockets, probably from ESA's Spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana.

Instead of an orbit around the Earth, Darwin will be placed far away, beyond the Moon. At a distance of 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, in the opposite direction from the Sun, Darwin will operate from a special location known as Lagrangian Point L2.


History

The idea for this mission was proposed in 1993. Darwin's goals were to detect Earth-like planets circling nearby stars and to set constraints on the possibility of the existence of life as we know it on these planets.

Since then, the goals have been expanded to include the capability to provide high-resolution images, at least ten to one hundred times more detailed than the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a joint ESA/NASA mission due for launch around 2013.

Since the mid-1990s, ESA has been working on a feasible design. Scientists and engineers have redesigned the Darwin flotilla and have found ingenious ways to reduce the demanding technological requirements of the various spacecraft. ESA continued to investigate whether there was any way to achieve the same scientific results using just four free-flying telescopes instead of eight.


Partnerships

NASA is also considering missions similar to Darwin. They have a programme called the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and is the subject of on-going studies. TPF consists of two separate missions, consisting of a single spacecraft which could only study a few of the most nearby stars. The second mission, with a performance similar to Darwin, with a launch foreseen some years after the single spacecraft mission.

Given the ambitious nature of both projects, NASA and ESA may collaborate on the final mission, building a joint Darwin/Terrestrial Planet Finder, which they will launch and operate together. Other countries, such as Russia and Japan, have also expressed an interest in contributing to the mission.

Despite some great efforts put into this article some errors might have crept in so i request the readers to kindly report them as a comment below.

Your Suggestions will be greatly entertained.

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