Text File

Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,sci.astro,sci.space,alt.alien.visitors From: sheaffer@netcom.com (Robert Sheaffer) Subject: STS-48 and "SDI": Oberg vs. Hoagland Message-ID: <1992Dec2.061212.8716@netcom.com> Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest) Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1992 06:12:12 GMT Lines: 271

I am posting the following file that I received from James Oberg, a well-known writer on the space program. He is discussing the same videotaped footage from NASA's STS-48 mission that has been endlessly showen as a supposed "UFO." Richard Hoagland, a major promoter of the "Face On Mars," claims that NASA cameras accidentally caught a secret "star wars test". Here is Oberg's rebuttal.

James Oberg, Rt 2 Box 350, Dickinson, TX 77539 Re: Did STS-48 view a "Star Wars" test?

The STS-48 mission was the 43rd shuttle launch, the 13th flight of OV-103 Discovery, with the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS). The crew was John Creighton, Ken Reightler, Jim Buchli, Mark Brown, and Sam Gemar. It was launched from KSC Pad A at 2311GMT Sep 12, 1991 (twilight),landed at EAFB on Sep 18, 0738GMT (night), duration 5d08h27m. The orbit was inclined 57 degrees to the equator at an altitude of about 570 km, second only to the 616 km altitude of the Hubble deploy mission a year and a half earlier. Due to radar experiments with the deployed UARS satellite, I was present in the control room for two planning shifts (my job was as "Guidance and Procedures Officer" for actions related to orbital rendezvous, such as the planned checkout of the radar which had shown performance anomalies on several earlier missions).

I have reviewed the videotape by Richard Hoagland alleging that the notorious STS-48 videotape shows a "Star Wars" weapons test against a target drone with astounding propulsion. In my judgment, the facts, analysis, and conclusions presented by Mr. Hoagland are entirely wrong.

Is the object really very far away? Hoagland's argument depends on proving that the object is at or beyond the physical horizon, "1713 miles away". Proving this depends on optical analysis of the image and of its motion. All of Hoagland's analysis is invalid.

First, Hoagland alleges that the videotape shows the object suddenly appearing at the edge of the Earth, as if it had popped up from behind the horizon. But a more cautious viewing of the tape shows this is not accurate.

The object does NOT rise from "behind the horizon". It appears (arguably, it becomes sunlit) at a point below the physical horizon, just slightly below, to be sure, but measurably below the edge of the Earth (the "limb").

It has been suggested (Dipietro) that the object's sudden appearance is due to sunrise. This is plausible. I suggest a variation on this, that the object became visible when it moved up out of the shuttle's shadow just after sunrise. Since the video was taken near sunrise, the shuttle's shadow was pointing back nearly parallel to Earth's horizon, and the ground was still dark (bright ground reflection later lights up debris even if they are in the shuttle's sun shadow). This would require that it be close to the shuttle. The proximity to the horizon line would be coincidental.

Note that the bright light in upper left is some sort of camera anomaly and is not an electronic horizon marker as alleged by Hoagland. There is no such thing as an electronic horizon marker. Is the object behind the atmosphere? Hoagland argues that analysis of the imagery shows the object is physically behind the atmosphere. But I disagree. It is NOT seen through the atmosphere:

First, consider the brightening effect. Computer analysis is shown which alleges that the brightening of the object while below the airglow layer is analogous to the brightening of stars setting behind the airglow layer. This allegedly implies that the object, like the stars, is behind the airglow layer.

This argumentation is false because it posits the wrong causation mechanism for brightening ("passage of the light through atmosphere"). This should be obvious since at the airglow altitude (40-60 miles) the atmosphere is already extremely thin and the lapse rate (the drop in pressure per rise in altitude) is already much reduced over the value at lower altitudes (that is, crossing the "airglow boundary" does NOT significantly change the atmospheric density the light ray is passing through). If density WERE the true cause of brightening, the effect would markedly peak at a lower altitude (as soon as the beam rose above total obscuration), then drop rapidly as atmospheric density dropped, and show NO NOTICEABLE CHANGE in dimunition rate as it crossed the airglow layer because the density of traversed air wouldn't change much either at that region.

The actual connection for the object's brightening is the absolute brightness of the airglow layer in the background. The object is brighter when it is against a bright background, just as stars are brighter. This is not an effect of a light ray transiting the airglow region and somehow being strengthened. Instead, I believe it is an effect on the camera optics of the summing, pixel by pixel, of all brightness within the field of view. A bright object with a dark background will not throw as many photons on the individual pixels of the camera as would a bright object with a half-bright background. The camera's vidicon system will respond to light in the background by brightening the small point-source objects observed in that region, either lying behind or crossing in front of that background. Repeat: crossing in front of that airglow.

This is confirmed by other checks. Observers can note that other drifting point-source objects, clearly starting well below the horizon line, also brighten as they traverse the airglow region. NOTE: Hoagland's argument that the dimming beyond the airglow disproves NASA's contention that the object is nearby and sunlit, since as it gradually rose "higher into the sunlight" it should brighten, not dim, is false. Once in full sunlight, no further brightening occurs. Sunrise only lasts as long as it takes for the sun (0.5 degrees wide) to rise above the horizon, at the orbital angular rate of 4 degrees per minute (that is, 360 degrees in a 90-minute orbit), which comes to just 7-8 seconds, which anybody should have been able to figure out. Of course this is different from ground rates, which depends for the sun's angular motion on earth's rotation rate (4 minutes per degree, 16 times slower than spaceship orbital rate). This argument reveals Hoagland's unfamiliarity with basic orbital flight conditions and implications.

Notice that no mention is made by Hoagland of the clear absence of expected refractive effects of being behind the atmosphere. As is known by anybody who's watched sunset/moonset at a flat horizon, the atmosphere creates significant distortion in the bottom .2-.4 degrees of the image. The lowest layers demonstrate a vertical compression of 2:1 or greater. This is also shown on pictures of "moonset" from orbit. If the STS-48 object were really travelling nearly parallel to the horizon but somewhere behind the atmosphere, this would be visible by analyzing its flight path. As it rose its line of travel would markedly change as atmospheric refractive effects disappeared. This does not happen, which strongly suggests that the object is NOT behind the atmosphere.

Since the arguments for great range to the object all fail, the conclusions based on angular motion converted to physical motion also fail.

What is the "flare" in the camera that precedes the change in motion of all the objects? I believe the flare in the lower left camera FOV is an RCS jet firing, not per Hoagland an electromagnetic pulse effect. There are several reasons: it does not look like any known electromagnetic video interference; it looks just like previously seen RCS flares; and the Hoagland counterargument about an alleged need for pointing changing is not valid.

First, while it is true that EMI can affect electrical equipment, such pulses would not lie in any localized region of a television screen but would blitz the whole image. Anybody whose TV has ever been blitzed by lightning knows that the effect does not confine itself to the corner nearest the lightning. Also, far more sensitive electronic equipment aboard the shuttle, including computers which were counting the pulses of individual cosmic rays striking their circuits, were not affected by the event (otherwise, the entire television transmission would have been knocked out). So Hoagland's explanation is magical and unrealistic.

Second, the optical appearance of RCS jet firings is well known and familiar to experienced observers, and they look just like the flash in question. These have been observed and videotaped on every shuttle mission, from the crew cabin, from payload bay and RMS cameras, and from cameras on nearby free-flying satellites, and from ground optical tracking cameras as well.

Third, Hoagland's argument that the line of travel of stars down to the horizon should have been kinked by the jet firing is plain ignorant. During attitude hold coast periods, the shuttle autopilot maintains a "deadband" of several degrees, slowly drifting back and forth and, when the attitude exceeds the deadband limit, a jet is pulsed to nudge (NOT "shove") the spaceship back toward the center of the deadband. The angular rates induced by these 80-msec pulses are as follows:

ROLL .07 deg/sec PITCH .10 deg/sec YAW .05 deg/sec

Note that the star motion would have changed direction ONLY IF the orbiter's pointing attitude was shifted to the right or left. If shifted up or down, only a slight change in star motion rate would occur (this appears to be the way the jet plume is actually directed) but so would horizon motion, so it would have to measured as absolute screen position. If shifted in or out, no change at all would be observable. This is all based on pure geometric considerations overlooked by Hoagland.

After ten seconds, even in the worst case (pitch motion inducing pure crossways angular motion), the star track would only have diverged a single degree from the former straight line. This is visually undetectable on the images shown by Hoagland.

So the fact that he sees no change in the star motion tracks does not disprove that the pulse was an RCS jet.

Video Encryption: Hoagland alleges that since STS-48, all external STS video has been encrypted and will be viewed only after NASA review and approval. I have checked with a NASA Public Affairs official, and have personally verified, that things (as usual) are not quite what Richard Hoagland alleges. On STS-42, the second flight after STS-48 (the STS-44 DoD mission went between them), the International Microgravity Laboratory (Spacelab) science group requested that medical video imagery from the cardiological studies (sonogram images) be treated as privileged medical information, as all previous audio conversations with doctors had been. NASA discovered that having to continuously reconfigure the White Sands TDRSS site and the TDRSS satellites back and forth for encrypted video transmission was a laborous process. Rather than spend all that time, it was decided to go into encrypted mode continuously and decrypt the raw video at NASA Goddard for immediate release over the "NASA Select" circuit. Normally, when there was shuttle video, the White Sands to Goddard raw video link had been unencrypted, and the Goddard relay to "NASA Select" required no further processing; but when medically-privileged video was to be transmitted (a new innovation on STS-42, planned for years), complex encryption processes had to be initiated on the shuttle, on the TDRS satellites, at White Sands, and at Goddard. The procedure for constant encryption was implemented to avoid the cost of many switchovers between modes. But the NASA Select video from Goddard was to continue to be decrypted except for the medical transmissions, which were to be openly announced on the audio feed, just not piped into a million homes and schools nationwide. Since then, the NASA Select video (originating at NASA Goddard, and containing other sources of video, too) has continued to be transmitted as before, with the only change that the White Sands to Goddard link (which viewers could previously observe when it was active) is now encrypted. There is no hint from air-to-ground conversations that anything other than the new (and long scheduled) medical video imagery is being interrupted. And although it is encrypted, the White Sands raw feed can be observed to tell if there is a video signal or not on the feed, so I am told.

Conclusion: The standing explanation, that the objects are near the shuttle, are sunlit, and are affected by the plume field of an RCS jet firing, remains valid.

P.S. Hoagland made a number of other factually erroneous comments about live planetary image transmissions. He says that all previously NASA planetary probes transmitted live imagery. Actually, only fly-by probes did that, particularly the fly-by probes which had slow transmission rates which took many minutes to build up each image. Probes orbiting other planets (Venus and Mars, for example), do not (and I believe, never HAVE) transmitted live imagery, since they are frequently occulted by the planet's mass. Each orbit's imagery is stored and dumped over a short portion of each orbit, and the imagery data is initially decoded over the next hours and days. Live coverage of the actual image transmission would usually be blank, but for a few minutes every few hours would show images flipping across the screen at a very fast rate, if there was enough computer power to decode them in this "real time" speed. There is no practical reason why computers have to be built so powerful to keep up with the high- speed dump rate for a few minutes, then rest idle for the next several hours. Outside of avoiding whines about censorship, there's no reason to do so. --

Robert Sheaffer - Scepticus Maximus - sheaffer@netcom.com

Past Chairman, The Bay Area Skeptics - for whom I speak only when authorized!

"Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial."

- Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: 126)