Want to give your girlfriend a diamond? Do you really want to impress her? If you can figure out how to travel 50 light years, there is the biggest diamond in the galaxy waiting for you. Don't worry, she will be impressed. Never mind those 1 or 2 carat pieces of junk, this one is 10 billion trillion trillion carats. It was discovered in 2004 by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and is known as BPM 37093 and is the biggest diamond anywhere (that we know about). The famous jeweler, Ronald Winston who is the CEO of Harry Winston Inc., was asked to state the value of the gem. He said, in essence, that if it were to go on the market it might destroy the value of diamonds, because there is so much of it. So how do scientists believe that this diamond formed? They think that it is the center of a White Dwarf star and that it crystallized. It is believed that after a star uses up all of its fuel, carbon is left that is coated with hydrogen and helium gas. If this is true, then diamonds might be a very common commodity in this universe of ours and once we achieve true space travel, that is the ability to fly anywhere we want in a reasonable amount of time, diamonds may become worthless. From everything that I have read, it seems that they should be worthless now, because they can be created in a lab and they are so perfect that you can't tell the difference. The market is being kept up artificially by the big diamond concerns.

NASA has been considering sending humans to an asteroid. They have been trying to work out a mission for at least a couple of years now. It would take some skill if a landing is to be attempted and the question is whether anything of value could be learned by taking this risk, that would make it worth it? It seems that some at NASA feel the since we are going to put people back on the Moon and send manned missions to Mars, that we should also examine the asteroids. The new Orion spacecraft, the one that is going to do all this, is said to be able to go below low Earth orbit. One of the goals of the Near Earth Object Program is to be able to divert an asteroid that may threaten the Earth. Perhaps this is really the main reason for attempting to send people to asteroids. It is to see if they can land, plant explosives or devices that will divert an asteroid from hitting Earth and the one true way to test this is by doing it. It is hoped that by 2020 over 90% of all asteroids will be charted. Too bad it can't be 100%.

Noctilucent Clouds
Photo Source: NASA

Did anyone see the photos of the strange clouds that were taken by NASA. The photos were taken by a NASA satellite of noctilucent clouds. These clouds are brightly lit at night and form high in the Earth's atmosphere. They are usually visible between May and September in the northern hemisphere. How do they form, why do they appear on a regular basis and why are they beginning to appear at lower altitudes? Unfortunately none of this is known at the moment. The clouds are known as PMCs or Polar Mesospheric Clouds. At least one scientist believes that these clouds have appeared because of global changes in our atmosphere and may be an early warning sign of harsher changes to come. "The PMCs are changing and that means the atmosphere is changing", said one scientist.

Scientists were astounded to find a perfect hexagon shape in the clouds of Saturn. The shape circles the entire north pole of Saturn. The Cassini mission imaged the clouds. The cloud formation was actually known about over 26 years ago when Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft took photos of the odd shapes. This makes me wonder why we are just hearing about it now and also what else they know that they are not telling us? Anyway, an atmospheric expert stated, "This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," Look at what we have found out lately. There is a double helix shape in our galaxy and now there is a hexagon shape on Saturn. What are the odds of this happening naturally? This cloud hexagon is about 15,000 miles across. It is so big that about 4 Earths could fit into it. NASA first thought that the hexagon was a shallow cloud feature, but now suspects that it penetrates deeply into the atmosphere.

In line with this strange stuff, NASA is going to open a department to study strange cosmic phenomena. I think that this is a great idea, there is plenty of strange stuff to go around. One of the main questions that I have to ask is, what is going to be considered strange? Will they consider studying ufo sightings for example? Probably not. It seems that what they are going to study will be things like dark energy, the cosmic microwaves, black holes and such. The new office will be located in Goddard's Beyond Einstein Program Office. A committee will decide which missions have priority and should go first. NASA says, The Beyond Einstein Program is designed to provide key information to help answer fundamental questions about the origin and evolution of the universe. The Beyond Einstein spacecraft will build on such current NASA missions as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

The Phoenix Mars Lander is headed for its landing at the arctic circle of Mars. Again Cydonia has been ignored. I can't help but wonder why the Cydonia area is being ignored? Are we afraid that we might find something that would indicate that there was once intelligent life there, or could this be known already? I am not saying that is the case for certain, I am only saying that this area seems to be one of the most interesting on Mars. I do understand that the search for water is on and that is probably why the Phoenix is headed to the pole, but there are also other issues that need to be addressed, such as why the photo of the great face on Mars was a photo of 256 shades of gray but only contained 16, thus leaving out most of the photo data and distorting what we saw. I hope that NASA is not hiding anything from us.

The two Voyager spacecraft are heading into interstellar space. They have been traveling for over 30 years. Will an alien race ever play the golden records that the probes contain, they were designed to tell other races about ourselves and our location? Was it even a wise thing to do? The chances of this ever happening are so minute, when you think of the size of the universe and the size of the craft, that more than likely they will sail on forever without ever being noticed. In one way it is a shame, so much work went into them, but they did accomplish most of their missions when they sent back data and photos of objects in our solar system. I guess we can say that they earned their rest.