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Showing posts from September, 2017

Oldest Lunar Calendars

https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/oldest-lunar-calendars/ Source:   By NASA Solar System Exploration Research. Excerpt: The Oldest Lunar Calendars and Earliest Constellations have been identified in cave art found in France and Germany. The astronomer-priests of these late Upper Paleolithic Cultures understood mathematical sets, and the interplay between the moon annual cycle, ecliptic, solstice and seasonal changes on earth. The First (Lunar) Calendar ...The archaeological record’s earliest data that speaks to human awareness of the stars and ‘heavens’ dates to the Aurignacian Culture of Europe, c.32,000 B.C. Between 1964 and the early 1990s, Alexander Marshack published breakthrough research that documented the mathematical and astronomical knowledge in the Late Upper Paleolithic Cultures of Europe. Marshack deciphered sets of marks carved into animal bones, and occasionally on the walls of caves, as records of the lunar cycle. These marks are sets of crescents or lines. Artisans

Cassini’s “Grand Finale” Will Be a Blaze of Glory

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cassinis-ldquo-grand-finale-rdquo-will-be-a-blaze-of-glory/ Source:   By Lee Billings, Scientific American For Investigation:  6.1, 8.2 Excerpt: The Cassini orbiter will burn out, but its legacy won’t fade away. ...For NASA’s Cassini orbiter—its fuel dwindling after 13 years exploring Saturn, along with the planet’s sprawling rings and dozens of icy moons—the end will come Friday at 7:55 A.M. Eastern time. That’s when mission planners project radio communications will be lost with the two-ton, bus-size spacecraft as it plunges into the giant planet’s turbulent atmosphere at more than 122,000 kilometers per hour. ...“We are concluding the longest, deepest, most comprehensive scientific exploration of a remote planetary system ever undertaken, a system so alien it might as well have been orbiting another star in another galaxy,” says Carolyn Porco, the planetary scientist who leads Cassini’s imaging team. “And we have been profoundly succe