NewScientist.com news service: Saturn's 'flying saucer' moons built of ring material by Maggie McKee.
December 6, 2007
| Two of Saturn's small moons look eerily like flying saucers, new observations by the Cassini spacecraft reveal. |
Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US, says she was looking forward to getting high-resolution images of the moons. "I very much suspected that their shapes might tell us something about their origins," she told New Scientist. "But I never anticipated something that might look like a flying saucer."
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Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Transcript George Noory Interview October 28, 2004.
Steven Greer:
Before a few weeks ago, I was pretty certain UFOs did not exist as bona fide extraterrestrials and thought people who came forward were 'touched'." [chuckles] Now he doesn't take it so lightly. It's very interesting because of the project that he has now gotten intelligence on, so this man is a career aerospace guy, like my uncle was. And what he says is (I'll just share this with you), he says, "A part of me is deathly afraid to come forward with this information, but I feel it is my patriotic duty to do so. I have spent a great deal of my professional career with Lockheed Martin, including an extended period at the facility in Marietta, Georgia. Much of my work is classified and I categorically will not divulge my identity publicly at this time. I am too concerned for the safety of my family and those of my colleagues." Which is understandable of course. [continuing to read] "As you may know, Lockheed Martin has been involved in multiple stages of the Cassini mission to Saturn. Images from the craft are processed and analyzed at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, which is where my main contacts are located. To get right to the point, some of these images have revealed the presence of not one, but several large "craft" of non-terrestrial origin. The sketch has been directly observed by" [the people he works with. I don't want to name them] "The angles present on the "craft" are such that would not generally occur in nature and therefore it is clear they are not asteroids or other debris caught in the gravitational pull of the planet...." Listen to the description - it's fascinating! The objects are "ridged saucers, classic flying saucer shapes with several spoked ridges radiating from the center to create a near prismatic shape. Seen from above, they have a shape somewhat like a spider's orb web. What I refer to as spokes do not appear to be separate structures, but are formed from the skin of the craft: the description is as if it is like a bat's wing. If you can imagine the skin of a bat covering the fingers that give structure to the wings...
But at any rate, the fact that, of course, he stumbled across this fairly new -- he wasn't someone who was involved in this sort of thing until very recently. But it was interesting he picked up on the fact that it was not unexpected that they would encounter it, which of course, is what I would expect having now, many many different witnesses from various agencies and corporations who have corroborated encounters with these objects, not only in near-Earth orbit, but also near the moon, Mars, and some of the outer planets during reconnaissance and space probes and what have you.
Link
Company/Contractors:
Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=774
Company/Contractors:
CICLOPS (Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.)
NASA Scientists Challenge Security Rules
The new security clearance requirement, which involves interviews of neighbors and checks into the distant background activities of scientists, many of whom have worked at JPL and Goddard for as long as thirty years, is puzzling because both locations have little or no involvement in secret or national security research. Indeed, by law, NASA's activities and the research its scientists engage in are required to be publicly available.
"Almost nobody at NASA does classified work," says Robert Nelson, a veteran scientist at JPL who heads up the photo analysis unit on the Cassini-Huygens space probe project exploring Saturn and its moons. "I think this is really all about NASA director [Michael] Griffin putting a security wrap around us."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070910/lindorff
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