In one of humankind’s most impressive feats of space exploration, Tuesday, Dec. 24 saw a heavily armored NASA spacecraft — no bigger than a small car — become the closest human-made object to the sun in history. It also saw humanity’s closest-ever approach to a star and the fastest-ever human-made object break its speed record.

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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2024/12/24/nasa-spacecraft-touches-sun-in-defining-moment-for-humankind/

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The head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), according to a memo seen by Reuters, instructed the space agency to work with other parts of the U.S. government to devise a plan by the end of 2026 for setting what it called a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC).

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We’re just hours away from what could be the first moon landing by an American spacecraft in 50 years, a success that would kickstart the nation’s hope to eventually establish a long-term presence on the moon as part of its Artemis program.

Odysseus (nicknamed “Odie”), a 14-foot-tall (4.3 meters) lander built and operated by Houston company Intuitive Machines, will attempt to land close to the moon’s south pole today at 6:24 p.m. EST (2330 GMT).

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The Falcon Heavy, composed of three liquid-fueled rocket cores strapped together, roared off its launch pad from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in a spectacular liftoff carried live on a SpaceXwebcast.

The launch followed more than two weeks of false starts and delays attributed to poor weather and unspecified technical issues, leading ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar before proceeding with Thursday’s flight.

It came two weeks after China’s own robot spaceplane, known as the Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon,” was launched on its third mission to orbit since 2020, adding a new twist to the growing U.S.-Sino rivalry in space.

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Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-militarys-secretive-spaceplane-launched-possible-higher-orbit-mission-2023-12-29/

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Using data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, researchers from NorthWest Research Associates, or NWRA, identified small signals in the upper layers of the solar atmosphere, the corona, that can help identify which regions on the Sun are more likely to produce solar flares—energetic bursts of light and particles released from the Sun.

They found that above the regions about to flare, the corona produced small-scale flashes—like small sparklers before the big fireworks.

This information could eventually help improve predictions of flares and space weather storms—the disrupted conditions in space caused by the Sun’s activity. Space weather can affect Earth in many ways: producing auroras, endangering astronauts, disrupting radio communications, and even causing large electrical blackouts.

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Source: https://phys.org/news/2023-01-sun-scientists-solar-flares.html

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NASA teams proceeded to fuel the 322-foot Space Launch System rocket with liquid hydrogen and oxygen at 3:50 p.m. ET — just over nine hours ahead of liftoff. The Artemis I launch was scheduled to start at 1:04 a.m. ET Wednesday, giving NASA a two-hour window to send the rocket into orbit, but technical issues delayed the launch time.

After no constraints were reported and all elements were polled a “go,” the new moon rocket launched at 1:47 a.m. ET.

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Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/11/15/nasa-artemis-launch-moon-rocket-florida/10707740002/

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Scientists may have found evidence that some type of life possibly exists on Venus, according to a new study.

A study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy reports the first detection of phosphine, which is a possible sign of life, in Venus’ atmosphere.

Axios reports that traces of a gas in the planet’s clouds could signal that some form of life may exist.

According to the study, researchers found the gas, which can be produced by some microbes that live in animal intestines on Earth, using two different telescopes. The gas was detected using the ALMA in Chile in 2019 and by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in 2017.

Scientists involved in the study haven’t determined that the presence of phosphine means there is proof of life on the planet. But according to Axios, the researchers haven’t been able to find another reason for why the gas exists on the planet.

“So far we’ve done everything we can, which is go through all the things that it isn’t. We’ve thought of every possible mechanism, plausible or implausible, that could make phosphine and we cannot come up with any,” Clara Sousa-Silva, an author of the study and researcher at MIT, told Axios.

In order to prove life exists on Venus, scientists will have to use other observatories and missions to confirm the findings.

“This is a very provocative discovery, and I think you’ll see more and more papers in the next couple years building on this as a piece of a story,” James Garvin, a planetary scientist at NASA who is not involved with the study, told Axios.

Scientists believe that Venus had oceans of liquid water like Earth millions of years ago. They theorize that a runaway greenhouse effect turned Venus into the inhospitable world it is today, with a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, Axios reports.

The temperate cloud layer of the planet ranges between 30°F to 200°F, which means life could possibly survive in the mid-latitudes.

“Detecting weird, anomalous chemistry we can’t readily explain is in itself a compelling reason — amongst many other existing compelling reasons — to go to Venus to study it,” Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist who is not affiliated with the study, told Axios.

Source: https://www.newsmax.com/scitech/venus-space-planets-life/2020/09/14/id/986808/

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A massive cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert is arriving along the U.S. Gulf Coast this week after traveling across the Atlantic Ocean. The phenomenon happens every year – but the 2020 version is especially large and imposing, experts said.

The dust cloud is “quite large” this year, said Marshall Shepherd, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, in an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered. “I think that’s why it’s garnering so much attention.”

That attention has included some experts who are calling it the “Godzilla dust cloud” due to its unusual size.

There are signs that the cloud is living up to the hype. Michael Lowry, an atmospheric scientist at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the cloud shattered the previous record for dust across the tropical Atlantic, as measured by the MODIS satellite.

As of Thursday morning, the cloud was stretching from the western Caribbean, over Belize and the Yucatán Peninsula, and through most of the central and western Gulf of Mexico, blanketing a huge area with its haze.

After reaching the U.S. shore in Texas and other states on the Gulf of Mexico, the dust cloud is expected to shift toward the northeast, moving across the Southeastern U.S.

“I think we’ll get it mainly over the weekend,” Shepherd said, discussing the dust cloud’s likely arrival in Georgia.

The dust sharply reduced visibility when it hit Puerto Rico this week, with its haze completely masking mountains in El Yunque National Forest in northeastern Puerto Rico.

The technical name for the phenomenon is the “Saharan Air Layer,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“This layer can travel and impact locations thousands of miles away from its African origins,” the agency says, “which is one reason why NOAA uses the lofty perspective of its satellites to track it.”

As the dust crosses the Atlantic, “it usually occupies a 2- to 2.5-mile-thick layer of the atmosphere with its base starting about 1 mile above the surface,” NOAA hurricane researcher Jason Dunion said.

As the dust moved across Louisiana on Thursday, images from the ground showed it had turned the sky a milky color with not a trace of blue.

“Typically, you lose the blue sky for more hazy, milky sky,” Shepherd said. “You tend to see more vivid sunsets and sunrises because of the scattering properties of the dust interacting with the sunlight.

“So those are sort of the optical effects. But I think people that suffer from allergies or perhaps have some kind of allergy to dust or particulate matter, they actually might not find it so amusing. They may have some health issues.”

Experts also noted that the dust could add to challenges faced by people infected with the coronavirus, complicating the respiratory ailments they face.

The dust is already affecting air quality on the U.S. mainland, with the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow monitoring map showing the southern rim of Gulf states draped in warning colors of yellow and orange.

By Thursday morning, Lake Charles, La., was reporting “the highest air quality index value in the country,” at 114, as NPR member station WWNO reported.

In addition to causing dramatic sunsets, the Saharan dust cloud also serves at least two positive purposes: It tends to hamper the development of hurricanes, due to its warm, dry air, according to NOAA.

The dust also “plays an important ecological role, such as fertilizing soils in the Amazon and building beaches in the Caribbean,” NASA’s Earth Observatory said.

Each year, the NASA unit said, winds in North Africa loft about 800 million metric tons of desert dust into the air, often scattering the dust thousands of miles away.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/25/883555736/saharan-dust-cloud-arrives-at-the-u-s-gulf-coast-bringing-the-haze

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First the good news.  NASA predicts the large asteroid they’ve been watching will miss the earth.

On the other hand, the locust plague in East Africa is being described in Biblical terms.   Billions of locusts have swarmed crops in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, and observers are worried that it is spreading to neighboring countries.  This is the worst locust outbreak since the 1950s, so it’s not as if this phenomenon is unique in all of history.  But the headlines are full of panic.  This time last year stories were being written about skies that were blackened by enormous swarms of locusts in Saudi Arabia, even in Mecca.  Still, there are concerns that the locusts may continue to multiply into a full-blown plague.  Aerial spraying may be the only solution, and that raises concerns about soil contamination.  But never fear, the UN is on the case. (sarcasm)

In other apocalyptic news, the coronavirus is not under control.  Desperate measures are underway in China, things that could never happen in any nation not under fascistic communist control.  There are reports of people being dragged from their homes and interned in camps where they’re sure to contract the disease whether they had it in the first place or not.

One headline reported that eight planes had been “locked down” at Heathrow Airport in London.  In fact, one flight was held for twenty-five minutes while health officials arrived to determine whether one passenger, isolated in the back of the plane, actually had contracted the virus.  The other seven flights (described in the headline as “locked down”) simply had to wait.  We don’t know how big the coronavirus will become.  The headlines would lead us to believe that the world is facing an imminent pandemic.  A Harvard Health professor is warning that “if this becomes a pandemic,” up to seventy percent of the world’s population will become infected.

Yes, and if the global warming projections had panned out, we’d all be dead by now.

A “Bible scholar,” quoted on one of the world’s preeminent Internet blogs is saying that the outbreak of the locust plague, combined with the continued spread of the coronavirus satisfies prophecies of end-time events and that the Second Coming is imminent.  And then I saw his picture.

These events might well serve as warnings as to what to expect.  But regardless of what the “Bible scholar” says, the scenario we see today is not complete.  There is no “king of the south” at present, or for that matter a “king of the North.”  There is no ten-nation or ten king power in the heart of Europe controlling the activities of individuals all over the civilized world, “that no man might buy or sell” without the Mark of the Beast.

There have been events in history (like the Spanish flu in the early 1900s) that killed tens of millions but didn’t portend the end of the age.   We know that fortunes are being made with dire predictions, just as they’ve been made with the “global warming” nonsense.  In Jesus’ prophecy of end-time circumstances in Matthew 24, He says, “See that you be not troubled, for the end is not yet.”

The media is making merchandise of us all.  Their record of deception, particularly in recent years is undeniable.  They’ve kept us on the edge of our seats for three years, pumping out manufactured bunk around the clock.  It’s reached the point where you can barely believe anything you read, and everything has to be verified by multiple sources before you react.  We’re not going to cry “wolf” every time the media sets out to create a panic.  If we did, we wouldn’t have any more credibility than they do.

So regardless of the suddenly famous “Bible scholar” or the Harvard Health professor’s dire predictions, we intend to rest on the Sabbath tomorrow and give thanks for our many blessings and the fabulous creation that God has given us to enjoy.

Mark

P.S. Mr. Terry Gooch is at home and recovering from surgery. We’d appreciate continued prayers on his behalf.

Source: http://www.intercontinentalcog.org/fridayupdates.php

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