Rough Notes:

Rilles through Crater De Gasparis. Credit: ESA SMART-1/Space-X, Space Exploration Institute

Nov 21, 2007
Back to the Moon

China and Japan have placed satellites in lunar orbit, with India and the United States to follow. Will new data confirm the Electric Universe hypothesis?

On September 14, 2007, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE) on a multi-year lunar orbit mission. Otherwise known as Kaguya, a nickname from Japanese folktales, the SELENE spacecraft is designed to provide data for future landing sites and to analyze the surface.

Upon lunar orbit insertion, Kaguya released two sub-satellites, Okina and Ouna. One of the remotes will act as a relay for the main equatorial imaging system and the other as an additional radar platform in polar orbit.

As long ago as 1974, electrical engineer and researcher, Ralph Juergens identified many problems with the standard interpretations of lunar topography. Juergens focused on two major structural features on the Moon and described the inadequacies in the accepted theories of their formation. A previous Thunderbolts Picture of the Day discussed the bright rays of Tycho Crater (and other craters) and proposed that they are not the mark of meteoric impact ejecta but are the sign of a plasma discharge.

The plasma arcs excavated the crater, but first they drew electrons from halfway around the Moon to form the initial "leader stroke" into space. That explains why the bright rays converging on Tycho do not point to the crater's center. The powerful "return stroke" that traveled back along the conductive pathway and formed the crater had moved on in that brief instant.

Another set of features identified by Juergens as electrical phenomena is the "sinuous rilles" that wend their way through the lunar landscape. Because the Moon exhibits very little geological activity, Juergens thought that the rilles might have formed in a catastrophic event that left its forensic evidence behind. The Moon has no atmosphere, so its surface is similar to a vacuum-sealed and freeze-dried environment, perfectly preserving any remains like fossilized imprints.

Using his specific insights, Juergens knew that the rilles, in particular, could not have been created by the collapse of lava tubes or by liquid flowing across the surface. When a lava tube collapses, the roof caves in and leaves heaps of debris clumped on the floor. Such debris is missing from the rilles.

Flowing liquids erode the sidewalls of canyons and gullies in certain ways and create deltas of sand and mud downstream. There are no outflow channels or deltas associated with lunar rilles. Coupled with the fact that the rilles travel uphill and downhill without regard for the steepness of the terrain, Juergens concluded that they were electric discharge trackways:

"The electric field between anode and cathode must build to an intensity great enough to 'pull' electrons from the cathode by sheer force - tearing electrons from non-conducting lunar crustal materials and in numbers sufficient to trigger an interplanetary discharge.... In a flash, the tiny breakdown point becomes a breakdown path propagating itself outward from the starting point, turning this way and that as the intense field at its tip probes for weaknesses in the rock strata."

As more information has come in from various telescopes around the world and from space-borne systems, the same features seen on the Moon have been discovered on the moons of other planets and on the planets, themselves. Since Juergens' day, there have been Venus probes, Mars rovers, a Saturn orbiter, a mission on its way to Pluto and several more voyages of exploration into space. They have provided the Electric Universe hypothesis with an embarrassment of riches while causing the conventional theorists to invent new "corrections" for the standard theories of solar system evolution.

The cameras onboard Kaguya are of a resolution much greater than anything previously launched, so they will be providing a more detailed map to explore. The spacecraft also contains gamma ray detectors, charged particle detectors, radar scanners, IR detectors and HDTV optical imagers. In the next few months, we predict that new images and telemetry will help to confirm the theories of an early EU proponent, Ralph Juergens, who has lent inspiration to new generations of investigators.

By Stephen Smith

 


The Moon's magnetic field. Credit: Mark A. Wieczorek.

 

Lunar Charge Distribution
Apr 19, 2010

Recent lunar missions have uncovered new information that changes the way we look at the Moon.

The Moon is a "dead body," according to modern theories of the Solar System; it long ago exhausted any remnant heat that it retained from its birth. It has no intrinsic magnetic field and it does not radiate, except to reflect the light that it receives from the Sun. But could electrical forces have recently shaped the lunar surface?

The discovery of water ice at the south pole buried beneath the walls of sun-shaded craters was one of the more important new finds of the past few years. Latent magnetic fields were detected by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in the 1990s. Evidence from that experiment points to a variable strength magnetic field imprinted on the Moon, and magnetism is a result of electric currents.

Recently, scientists from NASA's Lunar Science Institute’s Dynamic Response of the Environment at the Moon (DREAM) project announced the discovery of electric charge in some of the polar craters. According to William Farrell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center: "....in addition to the wicked cold, explorers and robots at the bottoms of polar lunar craters may have to contend with a complex electrical environment as well, which can affect surface chemistry, static discharge, and dust cling.”

It is thought that the solar wind might be what charges up the craters to many hundreds of volts. Computer simulations led the researchers to believe that the solar wind acts like winds on Earth. Depending on temperature, winds flow into cold valleys. On the Moon, the solar wind flows down onto cold crater floors.

As their theory states, electrons, having less mass, flow into a lunar crater before the heavy ions, forming a negative charge. The heavy ions move into the crater at a lower pressure then the electrons, causing the interior walls and floor to become negatively charged. Charge separation is greatest along the crater rim closest to the solar wind flow.

The article suggests that "....the heavy ions have the greatest difficulty getting to the surface. Compared to the electrons, they act like a tractor-trailer struggling to follow a motorcycle; they just can’t make as sharp a turn over the mountain top as the electrons." Planetary scientists relate electric current flow with kinetic illustrations once again.

Between May 1966 and January 1968, NASA launched the Surveyor spacecraft, which soft-landed on the lunar surface. Surveyor 7 made one of the mission's most intriguing discoveries when its onboard camera detected a faint glow in the lunar night, hovering over the horizon.

In 1998, the Lunar Prospector detected a surprisingly high voltage change as it passed through Earth's magnetotail. The magnetotail is part of a plasma sheath that envelops our planet. The Moon passes through it once a month during full moon phase. The electric differential was found to occur during that passage.

The Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that is trapped inside a cometary plasma tail that stretches well beyond the Moon's orbit. The Earth's magnetospheric tail points away from the Sun due to the high-speed ions streaming along with the solar wind. The movement of the Moon through the ionized plasma affects the materials in the lunar regolith. Electrons accumulate and produce a negative charge on the ultra-fine dust particles, causing them to repel each other and drift off the surface. The levitating dust and the faint glow on the lunar horizon are most likely because the Moon has no atmosphere at all, so the electric charges have greater impetus.

Charge differential between the day and night side of the Moon might generate an ion “wind” flowing from the negatively charged night side into the more positively charged sunlit side. The negative charge on the bright surface during daylight is moderated by the photoelectric phenomenon, while it tends to build up in the darkness, forming static electricity. The charge variation between the two hemispheres has been measured at more than 1000 volts.

Electric Universe pioneer Ralph Juergens explained the structure of Tycho Crater on the Moon in electrical terms:

"The visual evidence suggests that triggering electrons for the Tycho discharge were assembled by means of an atmospheric-breakdown process that drew them from numerous distant points in all directions and hauled them over the surface to a common collection point. On the far side of the Moon are several more long-rayed craters, presumably marking sites where much the same thing happened; these, too, are located in highland terrain."

Earth's cometary plasma cocoon changes shape and power as electric currents from the Sun bombard our planet. It is sometimes described as a “flag waving” because of somewhat regular oscillations in the field. This means that the Moon does not simply pass through the magnetotail once and briefly, but that electric charges will brush the surface several times during each monthly encounter.

Stephen Smith