Posts tagged Van Allen
NASA-CU Boulder mission discovers particle accelerator in heart of Van Allen radiation
Jul 26th
Using data from a NASA satellite, a team of scientists led by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and involving the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered a massive particle accelerator in the heart of one of the harshest regions of near-Earth space, a region of super-energetic, charged particles surrounding the globe known as the Van Allen radiation belts.
The new results from NASA’s Van Allen Probes mission show the acceleration energy is in the belts themselves. Local bumps of energy kick particles inside the belts to ever-faster speeds, much like a well-timed push on a moving swing. Knowing the location of the acceleration within the radiation belts will help scientists improve predictions of space weather, which can be hazardous to satellites near Earth. The results were published July 25 in the journal Science.
“Until the 1990s, we thought the Van Allen belts were pretty well-behaved and changed slowly,” says Geoff Reeves, lead author on the paper and a radiation belt scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. “With more and more measurements, however, we realized how quickly and unpredictably the radiation belts change. They are basically never in equilibrium, but in a constant state of change.”
In order for scientists to understand such changes better, the twin Van Allen Probes fly straight through this intense area of space. One of the top priorities for the mission, launched last August, is to understand how particles in the belts are accelerated to ultra-high energies.
“We see case after case where the very high energy electrons appear suddenly right in the heart of the outer belt,” said CU-Boulder Professor Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and a study co-author. “But now we can prove where the electrons originate from and we can see the waves — and the lower energy ‘seed’ particles — from which the relativistic electrons grow. We can essentially peer into the inner workings of our local cosmic accelerator with unprecedented clarity.”
By taking simultaneous measurements with advanced technology instruments, the Van Allen Probes were able to distinguish between two broad possibilities on what accelerates the particles to such amazing speeds. The possibilities are radial acceleration or local acceleration. In radial acceleration, particles are transported perpendicular to the magnetic fields that surround Earth, from areas of low magnetic strength far from Earth to areas of high magnetic strength closer to Earth.
Physics dictates particle speeds in this scenario will increase as the magnetic field strength increases. The speed of the particles would increase as they move toward Earth, much the way a rock rolling down a hill gathers speed due to gravity. The local acceleration theory proposes the particles gain energy from a local energy source, similar to the way warm ocean water can fuel a hurricane above it.
Reeves and his team found they could distinguish between these two theories when they observed a rapid energy increase in the radiation belts Oct. 9, 2012. The observations did not show an intensification in particle energy starting at high altitude and moving gradually toward Earth, as would be expected in a radial acceleration scenario. Instead, the data showed an increase in energy that started right in the middle of the radiation belts and gradually spread both inward and outward, implying a local acceleration source. The research shows this local energy comes from electromagnetic waves coursing through the belts, tapping energy from other particles residing in the same region of space.
“These new results go a long way toward answering the questions of where and how particles are accelerated to high energy,” said Mona Kessel, Van Allen Probes program scientist in Washington. “One mission goal has been substantially addressed.”
The challenge for scientists now is to determine which waves are at work, according to the science team. The Van Allen Probes, which are designed to measure and distinguish between many types of electromagnetic waves, will tackle this task, too.
Baker said the new findings would not have been possible without the Relativistic Electric Proton Telescope, or REPT, developed by a team at CU-Boulder’s LASP and which is riding on the Van Allen Probes. CU-Boulder will receive more than $18 million from NASA over the Van Allen Probes mission lifetime for REPT and an electronics package known as the Digital Fields Board, said Baker, who led the LASP team that developed REPT.
“I think we are now getting a crash course in true radiation belt physics,” said Baker. “While before we were nibbling at the edges or looking through a cloudy screen, things are incredibly clear now. With our beautiful new sensors, we can see almost every ‘thumbprint’ of every large solar storm that has impressed itself on the Earth’s radiation belts.”
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., built and operates the twin Van Allen Probes for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The Van Allen Probes are the second mission in NASA’s Living With a Star program, managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The program explores aspects of the connected sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society.
For more information about the Van Allen Probes visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/vanallenprobes. For more information on LASP visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/.
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Did the Harpe weapon cause the recent earth quakes????
Apr 24th
Planet Earth the Latest Weapon of War
By Rosalie Bertell
The Women’s Press, London,
Review by Moyra Bremner. First published in Caduceus Magazine, issue 51,
ALL THINGS ARE CONNECTED
Rosalie Bertell’s new book, “Planet Earth the Latest weapon of War”, reveals the unbelievable truth in the new generation of super-weapons.
Important books are rare – very rare. “Planet Earth the Latest Weapon of War” is one such rarity. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring it deserves to be read by everyone who cares a jot about their future. For it reveals that, behind carefully spin doctored names like ‘the Star Wars project’, the military is now testing radically new weapons which so profoundly imperil the earth, and all life on it, that to deploy them in the name of security is like suggesting that becoming a suicide-bomber increases life expectancy.
—– As a distinguished American scientist, world expert on radiation, and winner of major international awards for science, Dr Bertell is no scaremonger. Yet her cool, incisive, fact-packed, prose not only reveals weapons worthy of science fiction, but shows that testing them may be costing thousands of innocent civilian lives – in peacetime.
—– She exposes how the military have, for decades, been secretly conducting experiments, including high-level nuclear explosions, which may disrupt the vital layers of the atmosphere which protect us from the sun’s lethal radiation. She says these experiments are often conducted without even discussing with non-military experts the hazards of damaging these life-preserving earth-veils. And she believes that such experiments may already have accelerated global warming and contributed to earthquakes and freak weather conditions.
—– The story unfolds gently. She tells us that, for four years, a Russian thermonuclear bomb a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima bomb circled above our heads. And that a single rocket launched by the US military merely carried enough plutonium to cause lung cancer in 20 million people – had it exploded like some of its non-loaded predecessors.
Radiation belt
—– In July 1962 NASA announced that high altitude nuclear tests had created a new radiation belt 750 miles deep, girdling the earth. This damage and pollution was compounded by ‘me too’ experiments by the USSR. Dr Bertell says it was 10 years before American scientists realised that it would be hundreds of years before the vital earth-shielding Van Allen belts of the earth’s atmosphere would recover from such onslaughts.
—– However, the repercussions may not be limited to the atmosphere itself. She says that, after one nuclear experiment, which created new electromagnetic belts in the atmosphere, the caribou mysteriously failed to migrate for the first time in 3000 years. A warning perhaps of how the migration of animals, fish and birds may be affected by disturbances to electromagnetic fields – and of the potential impact on man. For, without the caribou, many Inuit people starved to death. Moreover, the nuclear radiation was not confined to the upper atmosphere: caribou and people who survived were dangerously contaminated with caesium 137, and cancer, lung disease and infant mortality soared.
—– Despite opposition from the International Union of Astronomers, the US military even put 350,000,000 copper needles into orbit. An experiment which Dr Bertell says some scientist believed may have upset the balance of the planetary magnetic field, causing the massive 8.5 Alaskan earthquake and losing Chile part of its coast. Yet she shows that such experiments are small beer compared with what is being done today – and is to come.
HAARP – Ionosphere modification
—– For example, she describes HAARP (America’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Programme) a multimillion pound ‘civilian’ installation, hidden away in Alaska, ostensibly intended to ‘alter the performance of communications and surveillance systems’. Seemingly innocent enough, until she explains that this grid of 180 transmission towers is funded by the military and is part of the ‘Star Wars’ defence network. HAARP, and its linked brother projects are, she says, known to the military as ‘ionosphere modification facilities’. For, according to the proposal for its installation, HAARP is intended to trigger and control natural processes in the ionosphere in ways ‘that could be potentially exploited for department of Defence Purposes’. In other words the ionosphere, which shelters the earth, will be used as the barrel of the gun.
—–Dr Bertell suggests that so great is the power of such transmitters that even living near them could be dangerous. She quotes a US federal Environmental Impact statement which says that HAARP can ‘raise the internal body temperature of nearby people …(and) detonate aerial munitions, scramble aircraft communications and flight controls’. Even slight increases in body temperature can alter functioning of brain and body and, as she points out, even a small rise in electromagnetic radiation may cause an increase in cataracts and leukaemia and alter brain and body chemistry, blood pressure and heart rates. But such direct harm is the mere tip of the iceberg.
—– In one type of experiment these transmission towers will, Dr Bertell reveals, combine to emit a giant beam, of such power that, ‘in a burst lasting more than a few minutes – it will slice through the ionosphere like a microwave knife’ producing a long incision in this vital layer of the atmosphere. However, the main aim of HAARP is, she explains, to heat sections of the ionosphere until they bulge to form a curved ‘lens’ which will ‘reflect’ HAARP’s massive energy beams back to earth to destroy selected targets – presumably without leaving even a trace of what caused the devastation.
—– The layers of our atmosphere are so little understood that no one can possibly know the impact of cutting the ionosphere open, or of making it bulge like a lens. Moreover, she points out that scientists have warned that the energy from HAARP may combine with a natural wave frequency with results which are ‘quite disproportionate to the level of input’ – including disrupting the harmony between ‘earth life forms….and….earth’s life support systems’.
—– The rings round Saturn are thought to have been caused by a comparable interaction between energy waves. So, the possibility that HAARP, and its confreres, might trigger catastrophic changes to this planet cannot be ruled out. As Dr Bertell explains, everything is connected, ‘everything in our universe is in dynamic equilibrium and this interference (from HAARP) may destabilise a system that has established and maintained its own cycle for millions of years’ – protecting life on earth.
ELF pulsed into the earth
—– Nor is that all. Dr Bertell says that both HAARP and installations in Russia – on which America has, remarkably, collaborated – can also create pulsed, extremely low frequency (ELF) waves which have been directed deep into the earth itself, potentially disrupting delicately poised tectonic plates of the earth’s crust, such as those of California’s San Andreas fault. Given the little understood interplay between tectonic plates, volcano’s and the earth’s molten core, to call this playing with fire would be an absurd understatement.
—– Nor, it seems are these the only military installations threatening earth’s viability. Dr Bertell tells us that HAARP is just one of a growing chain of astonishingly powerful, and potentially interactive, military installations, using varied types of electromagnetic fields or wavelengths, each with a different ability to affect the earth or its atmosphere. For example, an installation in Alaska will have a magnetic field more than 60,000 times greater than the earth itself.
—– To anyone who knows the impact of magnetic fields on the human body the potential risks of such an installation are obvious. Equally, as Dr Bertell points out, the earth’s magnetic field is both produced by electric currents in the earth’s liquid core and interacts with the Van Allen belts of the earth’s atmosphere in ways not yet understood.
—– With typical restraint, she chooses not to guesstimate the effect that a magnetic field 60,000 times greater than the earth’s will have on the earth’s core or the atmosphere. Yet she believes that military tests may already have disturbed earth equilibrium. In addition to showing how earlier military tests have massively contributed to ozone depletion and global warming Dr Bertell suggests that some freak weather conditions and ‘natural’ disasters may have been directly caused by testing installations such as HAARP.
Links to earthquakes and freak weather
—– For example, in 1977 a freak storm which devastated a small town in Wisconsin and destroyed 350 hectares of forest, followed hot on the heels of a government ELF wave experiment. While The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist reported that an ELF wave transmitter lay right in the middle of another storm which brought down 150 – 200 times more rain than normal. These links are more than purely circumstantial, for she says that weather modification is on the US air force agenda, and in 1992 the Russians told the Wall Street Journal they could already achieve it. And the Wisconsin storm offers what looks very much like direct evidence.
—– The question is, does anyone have the wisdom to control weather wisely, and unselfishly? And do they even begin to understand the potential for unexpected side-affects from all these experiments. As she points out, it is since the inception of Star Wars experiments that El Nino has changed its cycle and become far more severe with devastating effects.
—– Equally, a Soviet experiment with the ionosphere directly preceded an earthquake in China which killed 650,000 people. While in America ELF – type waves were detected immediately before a San Francisco earthquake in 1989, and unnatural and unexplained low frequency waves were detected before earthquakes in Japan and California in 1989, and before an earthquake in Los Angeles in 1994. We can only wonder whether such ELF waves preceded the recent earthquakes in El Salvador and India this year, and whether the carnage has been caused by ‘security experiments’ by one of the ‘great powers’.
—– What is certain, as Dr Bertell shows, is that, globally, the number of earthquakes a year has more than doubled since the inception of military experiments which affect the earth and its atmosphere. Even this could, of course, be mere coincidence but another fact suggests something unusual is going on. Inexplicably, an earthquake in Bolivia in 1994 originated 600km below the earth’s surface – 24 times deeper than normal.
—– However, even if no such disasters can be laid at the door of the world’s military, weapons which interfere with the atmosphere violate the 1976 Environment Modification Convention. Yet, she tells us that in January 1991, despite America having signed that convention, the White House waived the requirement for actions by the Pentagon to be assessed for environmental impact. However, America and Russia are not alone in possessing such weapons. Her revelations of 30 years of military innovations show that Britain, Germany and NATO have all been involved in military developments which show a cavalier disregard for life on earth.
—– Dr Bertell is perhaps one of the few people in the world who could write this book. As leader of medical commissions to both Bhopal and Chernobyl she is skilled in unearthing facts from beneath mountains of dis-information – accurately scooping the world’s media, on the truth about depleted uranium weapons, by more than a year. As a nun dedicated to serving in the world she does not shrink from the unpopularity accorded a messenger. And her standing as a scientist, personal integrity, and evidence of meticulous research, challenge any yearning to disbelieve her.
—– A long-standing opponent of nuclear weapons, she sees today’s military research as a ‘cancer of the body politic’ consuming human, financial, and natural resources which are desperately needed elsewhere. ‘I would liken society’s dependence on the military to a family in which one partner is addicted to something and claims a large proportion of money for feeding the addiction’. As she points out, the billions annexed by defence projects create the very deprivation which eventually fosters war. Moreover, she says military research sequesters many top scientists, ‘This “brain drain” from the civilian economy may be depriving us of those who could resolve the most serious survival problems now facing the biosphere’.
—– This is not a comfortable, or easy, book and needs to be chewed slowly, in small helpings. Yet it is well worth chewing and her overall message is one of hope. She says we need to redefine the militaristic word ‘security’ to mean ‘the protection and responsible stewardship of the Earth’ – and redirect former military expenditure towards conflict resolution, social justice and sustainable living. A change which, she believes, can be achieved through active citizenship, global co-operation, information exchange between caring people and organisations, and the kind of peaceful pressure which, in 1996, led to the International Court of Justice declaring the use of nuclear weapons unlawful.
—– She concludes:
—– ‘I hope this book has given readers some inspiration as to how the might become involved in helping this peaceful planet evolve to its full potential. Despite years of abuse, it is still an amazing and beautiful creation. It deserves our best efforts. Enjoy it, love it, and save it’.
—– There she is wrong. It is not the planet which may die: it is us. It is ourselves we must love enough to cherish the miraculous web of life which radiates from the earth’s core to the farthest limits of our universe.
* * * * *
Bertell Reveals Many New Weapons of Mass Destruction
by Larry Ross, February 28, 2005
The book is: “Planet Earth the Latest Weapons of War” by Rosalie Bertell, a distinguished and world-famous scientist. She is a winner of major international awards for science. As a Catholic Nun she has dedicated her life to her continuous work for humanity.
What she reveals is unbelievably stunning – almost stupefying. Even I did not want to believe it at first, and I’ve been fighting against a global nuclear doomsday for over 50 years. But her credentials are impressive and impeccable.
She reveals how “the military is testing radically new weapons which imperil the earth and all life on it. Such as HAARP, which heats sections of the ionosphere until they bulge to form a curved ‘lens’ which will ‘reflect’ HAARP’s massive energy beams back to earth to destroy selected targets. She thinks ‘HAARP may destabilize a system that has established its own cycle for millions of years’ – protecting life on earth.
Or ELF, which ‘creates pulsed, extremely low frequency waves which have been directed deep into the earth itself, potentially disrupting delicately poised tectonic plates of the earths crust’ Off the Coast of Indonesia, tectonic plates in the Indian Ocean shifted to cause the Boxing Day Tsunami, killing over 250,000 people in 2004.
Dr Bertell tells us that HAARP and ELF are some of ‘growing chain of astonishingly powerful, and potentially interactive, military installations, using varied types of electromagnetic fields or wavelengths, each with a different ability to affect the earth or its atmosphere’.
Did the Pentagon test HAARP on tectonic plates off Indonesia, thereby causing the Boxing Day Tsunami? I don’t know, but I think there should be a scientific investigation of the causes, with a HARRP test as one of the possibilities. If the Pentagon has nothing to hide, they should welcome such an opportunity.
A few facts: A danger is: ‘A HAARP installation in Alaska will have a magnetic field more than 60,000 times greater than the earth itself’. A potential result of tests is: …’Globally, the number of earthquakes a year has more than doubled since the inception of military experiments which affect the earth or its atmosphere’
Conclusion; the amount of sheer power available to the Bush Administration, from their superpower nuclear arsenal, their other WMD, and now HAARP, ELF and other devices, is mind-boggling. Adding up all the risks, from nuclear weapons and their potential usage, to the new weapons, it is likely that due to “accident, miscalculation, act of madness, or faulty policy decision” a terminal global disaster will occur.
Everything has been put in place, including thousands of nuclear missiles on alert status, for a terminal disaster to occur. There are huge resources in terms of people, money, machines and corporate organizations – the biggest ever –devoted to increasing the preparations to unleash what can quickly become a global disaster.
The most important factor of all is the human factor. The Bush Administration is the most militaristic and dangerous in history – unleashing wars, such as that on Iraq, based on lies as justification, and creating pre-emptive war doctrines that sanction the use of nuclear weapons. They are hostile to advice, even from conservative sources, and proclaim the ‘truth’ as they decide it to be. They claim a vision of an American Empire dominating the world, and a vision of a God-proclaimed nuclear Armageddon in case things go wrong. They think the gamble is worth it.
What we see in America today is an insane system. It is a military/industrial juggernaut, in the grip of mad hubristic doctrines, run by a power-crazed psychopathic but a superficially sane Administration. They are dedicated, function effectively and sanely to accomplish their objectives. They are willing to take any risk, and then deny there is any risk.
They have committed many crimes so far. But like past war criminals, will always claim such crimes are not crimes, but justified steps to achieve their objectives. They are unlikely to turn back or learn any lessons. They define the truth as they decide it to be. They greatly increase both the danger of a nuclear catastrophe, and the system which makes it increasingly likely.
To Buy:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0704344289/infoline0f-21/026-0864107-0138030
