Francis Ridge |
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Francis Ridge |
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Report by The Lunascan Project (Francis Ridge) & VGL (Lan Fleming)
abstract
| The Lunascan Project began in August of 1995 as a lunar imaging effort, to bring a fresh new approach to lunar imaging in general and to search for possible evidence of ETI. The technique used to image the moon was conceived in the late 70's and also involved the discovery of objects between the Earth and the moon, referred to by the author as "fastwalkers". After 15 years of pondering a revolutionary system made available by video technology, the author set out in August of 1995 to study and document these objects, and to investigate the claims of several authors. Within a year The Lunascan Project logged its first mystery, ULO-092196. |
Brief
A little more than a year after the project started, the Lunascan Project tracked an unknown object near the moon for about 20 seconds. Suffice it say that at no time during any of the 40 two-hour-long (or more) sessions had we observed or videotaped anything like this object. It was tracked for about 20 seconds right near the SE limb of the moon and in space. An EZC computer check showed no planets or anything else that would be large enough or bright enough to be detected with the bright lunar limb washing it out. Our immediate concern was a dangerously close asteroid which might be able to strike the Earth, if not the moon. If our calculations were right the object was about 2 miles in diameter. On October 1st I reported the tracking to David Williams, of NSSDC (National Space & Science Data Center) in Greenbelt, Maryland. He requested that I contact Steve Pravdo, Jet Propulsion Lab's task master for the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program. Within a day or so a quick email response from the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking informed me that ULO-092196 was not an asteroid. That left us with an unidentified object near the moon.
Full Report
On Saturday, September 21, 1996, we were conducting routine scans of the 10-day-old moon lunar surface with the 16 Newtonian mounted on the new Scope Transport Unit (STU). The scope was equipped with a 400-line GBC 400 CCD camera. The Moon was under HPS Mode (High-Power Scanning) at 400 power, putting the surface at less than 600 miles. The scope/camera system had been in manual control to the limb, had then used the Earth's rotation to slowly scan to the terminator. Once in the darkness of the lunar night the system was manually pulled back to the limb for another scan, each slice slightly different.
At the BOS (Beginning Of Session, 7:00 PM) the numbers for auto track had been routinely punched into the DOB Driver II computer. However, since the auto-track mode causes short L-shaped jerky movements during taping, the computer is placed in Pan which is manual. Within less than a half hour, as team members watched the outside monitor, they noticed in the blackness of space to the right of the Moon, a very brief bright speck. Due to deterioration of the weather the session was terminated at 10:00 PM and the datatapes hurriedly rewound.
At 00h26m CUT (time documented by radio signal from WWV at Fort Collins, Colorado), the HPS unit panned across the object which had suddenly entered the field of view. It wasn't there on the previous scan less than a minute before. At first glance it appeared somewhat like a satellite of the planet Jupiter under low power telescopic observation. In fact, the object was about that size. However, we were running at 400 power. No star, let alone any moon of Jupiter, had ever survived the glare of the lunar limb. And although we had not imaged the moon during an occultation, we had not acquired any images of a planet, but photos abound where others have, and very successfully. Not once during the last year and 23 other sessions had this "monster" scope (a veritable "light bucket") picked up anything that close to the edge of the moon. Immediately after the session the facility's main computer was booted up and EZ Cosmos was loaded. The status screen read the current date and time. The exact time of the incident was punched in so that the event time was re-computed and the sky chart was placed onscreen. By placing the cursor near the SE limb of the moon and zooming in on that sky sector to see if there was a bright star or planet nearby that could account for the object, it was determined that nothing conspicuous was anywhere near the moon. Before the end of the hour a frame-grabbed image had been placed on The Lunascan Project web site, one of over 400 images made in that brief period. By Monday afternoon a complete report was filed. Later on, Lan Fleming solarized one of the images and emailed it to us as an attachment.
The following is what we were able to determine from the session data:
Trajectories could be envisioned that could make such an object appear stationary relative to the moon for 20 seconds to an Earth-based observer, but the data now appears to be more in favor of an object in lunar orbit. A maximum speed of about 3400 mph for something in lunar orbit translates into an angular velocity as viewed from Earth of .0002 degrees per second. In the 20 second time span in which the object was in view, that would produce an angular displacement relative to the moon of only .004 degrees, or about 6% of the .06 degree FOV. But this is only for objects orbiting near the surface of the moon. The speed decreases rapidly with altitude, which would make the motion increasingly difficult to detect. As for non-orbiting meteoroids, trajectories could again be envisioned that would hide the true motion of the object in the lunar reference frame from an Earth-based observer. But the set of possible paths that would do this is going to be larger for a slow-moving orbiter than for a faster-moving non-orbiter. This seems to favor the interpretation of the object as being a lunar orbiter. It is also unlikely that astronomers would miss a 2-mile long asteroid that got this close to Earth!
Francis Ridge:
The lack of apparent motion relative to the moon could be most easily explained by an orbiter. While the low altitude orbital speed at the moon is such that an object would move a maximum distance of 5% of the telescope FOV in the 20-second observation time, there are two points in a lunar orbit at which the object would appear to be motionless relative to the moon as observed from Earth: the point in the orbit where the object is moving directly toward the Earth and the point where it is moving directly away. The two points would be close to the positions where the object was farthest from the moon's limb and are the only places where the object would likely be seen at all. Assuming the object was at the apparent 45-mile altitude above the moon in the video image and had a two-hour orbital period, there would only be a period of 11 minutes between when the object emerged from behind the moon and when it moved across the moon's disk where it would be lost in the direct moon light. Within that 11-minute time span, the object might be visible for only a few seconds at its farthest distance from the moon's limb before it became lost in the bright moonlight diffused though the Earth's atmosphere close to the limb. (The image that Francis has on his web site shows this atmospheric haze around the moon.) Such an object might therefore appear suddenly and disappear just as suddenly after the 20-second period that Mr. Ridge observed the object. That would make an object orbiting the moon a more likely explanation than an asteroid traveling straight toward Earth. The only problem with the orbiter hypothesis is that the chances of the moon capturing an asteroid seem to be close to nil. It's low gravitation would make captures rare, and the orbit would quickly degrade due to the the gravitational anomalies associated with mascons. The estimate I've heard is that any orbiting object will either escape the moon or impact it within about a year.
Fleming continues:
I wrote: there are two points in a lunar orbit at which the object would appear to be motionless relative to the moon as observed from Earth: the point in the orbit where the object is moving directly toward the Earth and the point where it is moving directly away. The two points would be close to the positions where the object was farthest from the moon's limb and are the only places where the object would likely be seen at all. I should have qualified that a bit. This would only apply for an object in a lunar orbit if the orbital plane were perpendicular to the the plane of the telescope field of view. If the orbital plane were instead parallel to the FOV plane, the object would appear to be circling the moon at more-or-less constant altitude and speed. The orbital plane would probably be somewhere between the two extremes. However, most asteroids travel in the ecliptic plane, so if one happened to get captured by the moon, its orbital plane would be in the ecliptic. Since the ecliptic is very nearly perpendicular to the plane of a telescope FOV, the orbiting object would appear nearly motionless from Earth at its maximum distance from the moon's limb. A second possibility might be some tank on some probe venting for some reason. The resulting gas cloud could be visible from Earth before it disappeared after a matter of seconds. And, in fact, the report reminds me the cloud people saw when Apollo 13's tank gave way -- a spot of light that was gone again in seconds. (That one was easily visible to the naked eye, I think I remember ... but it was 100,000 miles away, not 250,000 miles.)
Francis Ridge:
Due to some image blur for the total image, the object's calculated diameter was based on half of the measured image, which was originally 4 mm. The FOV was determined by measuring the monitor screen width and comparing that with a known object in an overhead view, which was Copernicus, a 93 km or 58 mile- wide crater in Section 31. It has been over five years since we tracked ULO-092196 and we have not seen it since. In the winter of 2001, a new search for anomalies in the data tapes was made using an Aperture Video Correction device . This search included the first 24 sessions, which included the subject session, #24. Nothing similar was ever detected in any of the time-documented tapes, except for the event of September 21, 1996. There are sixteen sessions that followed that have not been reviewed to date.
Of pure coincidence, there was an article by Mark Rodeghier (IUR, July/August 1995) where it was discussed that an object passing near the Earth was a candidate for an "alien probe". The entire paper, located on the Lunascan Project web site is entitled Alien Probe Detected In Solar System?. Rodeghier's paper is based upon the discovery of a roughly 10-meter object in an orbit around the sun that passed by the Earth in December 1991 and was discovered by the Spacewatch telescope at Kitt Peak Observatory a month earlier. The object was given the name 1991 VG and was later observed in April 1992 by a larger telescope, also at Kitt Peak As an FI for the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, I get a copy of the IUR, but it arrives months behind the release date. So this article came to my attention AFTER we tracked ULO-092196.
Also of interest, and maybe less coincidence, a strange object that moves like a comet but looks like an asteroid was spotted in space by an Air Force telescope using a special camera. The object, with a diameter of 5 to 10 miles, may be an unusual asteroid or a dead comet stripped of all volatile material, NASA officials said on Wednesday (Sept 4). This is a misfit in the grand scheme of things," Eleanor Helm, principal investigator of the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. Scientists said nothing like it has been seen before. The object, dubbed 1996 PW, was spotted in data taken from an August 9 observation atop Mount Haleakala on Maui, Hawaii. A special camera attached to the telescope automatically surveys the skies for objects, asteroids and comets, which could pose a hazard to Earth. Asteroids are rocky bodies that mainly orbit in the "asteroid belt" between Jupiter and Mars. Comets generally have volatile material streaming off. No comet-like gas emissions were observed from 1996 PW, even during its closest approach to the sun, supporting the argument that the object is an asteroid. Our source, Steve Pravdo, (project task manager for the asteroid tracking program) said the estimated orbit period is about 5,000 years and stretched out to between the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. Most of the orbits of the asteroids are on the order of three-five years, sometimes as high as fifty years. The comet-like motion was spotted by scientist Garth Williams while processing the data with a computer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA.
We're probably going to be hearing more and more about these things as our imaging systems get better. The Lunascan Project welcomes any comments and/or criticisms.
The video, "ULO-092196 & The Lunascan Project: 2001" covers both detailed papers and is available for a $24 donation, which includes Priority Mail shipping in the U.S. An added bonus is the actual video footage from the Tycho of August 1996. See address below. A CD showing the stunning digitized video images of "ULO-092196" is also available for $10.
Francis Ridge
Coordinator,
The Lunascan Project
Updated, January 17, 2002
