I'm not going to go as deep or as far as Richard Hoagland has and does in his book, Dark Mission: The Secret History Of NASA", but I do want to raise some questions. Hoagland is a former NASA consultant and CBS News advisor who now runs an independent NASA watchdog and research group (Enterprise Mission). Is SOHO more than about pretty pictures or are you familiar with SOHO at all?
SOHO stands for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory satellite. Remember?:-)
When it was launched in 1995, it was billed as a project to provide us with the most detailed data of the nature of the solar wind. Why soalr winds? The sensitive mass spectrometer aboard SOHO can make measurements of the trace constituents such as isotopes of silicon, sulfur, calcium,shromium, iron and nickel in the solar wind. They also detected isotopes of neon and argon which had not been detected by earlier satellites, but had been observed from the moon twenty years before during the Apollo lunar landings.
And?
The question is can we get advanced notice of building sun spots, when the face of the sun starts to acquire a bad case of acne that potentially poisons our planet? Before coronal mass ejections (CME's) occur, can we know that? Can we control the sun? Good luck! And why are we so concerned about sun spots? Can you say our present security and future life on earth? Let me explain.
There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and embodies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his rising.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Our present security could evaporate in a future 2012 (or sooner) X sun spot explosion as recent 2004-05 have warned us. We rely upon satellites to guide our missles, be our eyes from above, and provide us with instant information. Almost ALL military and defense satellites are sun-sensitive. By knowing when the next outburst is to come, what could we do? Most people have not a clue as to how many satellites we have out there and how important they are to our daily lives. What would we do without SIRIUS?
The best information I could find indicates that 25,000 man-made objects: 8681 currently in orbit, and over 16,000 objects in a state of decay. Russia leads the list in decayed objects (with a debris count close to 10,000) and comes in a close second (3897) to the United States (4018) for currently orbiting objects. Another NASA secret.
But SOHO was just the first entry into the field of trying to figure out how dangerous solar flares could be. And with the LOW SUN SPOT CYCLE in 2005 being 30-50% more than normal, a HIGH SUNSPOT CYCLE in 2012 by the same 30-50% greater could greatly change ALL of life here on earth.
Three years after SOHO was launched, TRACE (Transition Region and Corona Explorer) was launched. It was-is a NASA space telescope designed to investigate the connections between fine-scale magnetic fields and the associated plasma structures on the Sun by providing high resolution images and observation of the solar photosphere and transition region to the corona. Why is that so important?
Duh!
The angels all were singing out of tune,
And hoarse with having little else to do,
Excepting to wind up the sun and moon,
Or curb a runaway young star or two,
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
In 2002 RHESSI was launched to provide X-ray images of solar flares.
In 2003 SORCE was launched to explore solar effects on earth.
In 2006 STEREO was launched (two satellites-ie. stereo!) to study CME's.
Coincidently, NASA's STEREO satellite captured the first images ever of a collision between a solar hurricane, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and a comet. The collision caused the complete detachment of the comet's plasma tail. You can get some great graphics if you'll just Google STEREO.
If we won't get serious about the catastrophic events to protect our planet in 2012- and before, maybe the military consequences (if we don't) will awaken us to our planetary stewarship responsibilities. But, the question remains, what does NASA know that they're not saying? Or, am I just being suspicious and conspiratorial in attitude? ernie@lrchouston.com.