Picked up by the space agency’s researchers, the team was left rather bemused at the find that shows clear signs of advanced civilisation.
We’re talking construction and buildings buried 100 foot below the surface, which, given the unique location, definitely rang alarm bells back at NASA headquarters.
The image was captured by a team of scientists on board a NASA Gulstream III research jet, which had been travelling over Greenland observing its ice sheet. In doing this, the radar picked up the unexpected find.
The ice sheet where Camp Century is buried (NASA)
No, it is not a secret alien base. Instead, the find is actually known to humanity. It is just that it has sat dormant for almost 60 years.
The site is in fact a once-top secret abandoned Cold War military base, built into the ice by the United States government.
Dubbed Camp Century, it is known as a ‘city under the ice’ dating back to 1959.
“We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who helped lead the project.
“We didn’t know what it was at first.”
The construction stage of Camp Century (NASA)
What was Camp Century?
Camp Century formed part of Project Iceworm; a top secret programme established by the US Army to crate a network of nuclear missile launch sites underneath the Greenland ice sheet that could survive being hit first in a nuclear strike.
To disguise the project Camp Century was the fake cover project to disguise the real intentions, which was a nuclear site three times the size of Denmark.
Running from 1959, a total of 21 tunnels totalling 9,800 feet in length were dug in to the ice, with the entire project powered by a nuclear reactor. With 600 missiles to be positioned underneath the ice ready to be fired in the case of a Soviet Union attack, the arsenal was so big it could have destroyed 80 percent of targets in the USSR and Eastern Europe, should the worst have happened.
The main entrance to Camp Century (Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
The project was soon abandoned, though, when in the 1960s it was realised that the ice sheet was not as stable as thought, meaning it could not facilitate the project as set out.
As a result, the site was abandoned in 1967, leaving behind nuclear waste that remains a hazardous concern to this day.
Camp Century today
Given how nature works, a mixture of snow and ice has covered the site in 30 metres of frozen stuff, leaving Camp Century buried deep underground.
“In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they’ve never been seen before,” said Chad Greene, also a cryospheric scientist at JPL.
Laying foundations in the living and working quarters of Camp Century (US Army/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Comparing the new radar map of Camp Century with historical maps of the base’s planned layout, the parallel structures appear to align with the tunnels built to house an array of facilities. Attention has now turned to when Camp Century could be re-exposed due to climate change; bringing with it environmental and biological hazards due to the nuclear waste left behind.
“Without detailed knowledge of ice thickness, it is impossible to know how the ice sheets will respond to rapidly warming oceans and atmospheres, greatly limiting our ability to project rates of sea level rise,” Gardner said.
Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images / NASA
Topics: NASA, World News, Weird, Technology, Space
Tom Earnshaw
NASA could find tiny aliens hidden under Mars’ surface as scientist says ‘we should be looking there’
It’s one place we ‘should be looking’, according to one NASA scientist
A new NASA study hints that alien life may be closer to home than we thought.
For decades, Mars has been the subject of scientific study when it comes to finding extraterrestrials.
It’s also been the focus for many in Hollywood, with countless TV shows and films produced hypothesising the existence of other life forms on the planet closest to Earth.
Putting Mars Attacks! and Pierce Brosnan’s head on a dog’s body aside, though, and it seems like we’re heading back in a direction where little green men could be a real thing.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on the Red Planet as we speak (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
The big difference, in reality, is that they are likely to not be green, and will in fact be very, very small.
A new study by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at NASA has looked in to whether we should be once again actively investigating if there is life on Mars.
And according to the paper’s lead author, Aditya Khuller, the answer is 100 percent yes. Just not on its surface.
He says: “If we’re trying to find life anywhere in the universe today, Martian ice exposures are probably one of the most accessible places we should be looking.”
Mars has for some time known to be home to water, and ot’s believed to once have been full of the stuff.
On the planet, it manifests itself in to ice, of which there are two kinds: frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide.
The white edges here are thought to be home to dusty frozen ice, which could unlock the secrets of life elsewhere in the universe (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of ArizonaFull)
For their paper, published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, Khuller and colleagues looked at water ice, large amounts of which formed from snow mixed with dust that fell on the surface during a series of Martian ice ages in the past million years.
That ancient snow has since solidified into ice, still peppered with specks of dust – dust that is dark in colour and can absorb more sunlight.
The theory here is that this could potentially warm up the ice, causing it to melt up to a few feet below the surface.
From that, ancient life in the form of microbes could be surviving, and maybe even thriving, under the frozen water ice on Mars’ surface, where photosynthesis could be happening.
Pools of water similar to those that could be on Mars exist on Earth and are full of life, from fungi to algae and microscopic cyanobacteria.
Maybe Bowie was right after all (Getty Stock Images)
The concept of whether ice can actually melt on the Martian surface remains up for debate, due to a terrible thin and dry atmosphere that is not like Earth’s.
But, critically, the atmospheric effects that make melting difficult on the Martian surface wouldn’t apply below the surface of a dusty snowpack or glacier.
Co-author Phil Christensen, of Arizona State University in Tempe, said that ice melting from within is ‘a common phenomenon on Earth’.
He said: “Dense snow and ice can melt from the inside out, letting in sunlight that warms it like a greenhouse, rather than melting from the top down.”
The team now hope to re-create the dusty ice from Mars in a lab to study it under similar conditions to what you would find up on the Red Planet.
Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images / NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
Tom Earnshaw
NASA helicopter captures eerie wreckage on surface of Mars
NASA’s ‘Ingenuity Helicopter’ completed a total of 72 flights on the surface of the red planet
A NASA helicopter which flew dozens of missions on Mars once photographed an ‘otherworldly’ looking sight of some spacecraft debris amidst the red sand.
Of course it’s going to be otherworldly, the images were literally taken on another world, but perhaps as a species we’re going to have to get more accustomed to the idea of seeing the presence of life on grounds other than that which we walk upon.
Right now, we can only send technology to other worlds, but we’re just 121 years on from working out how to develop flying machines so think where we might be by the end of this century.
As part of the Mars 2020 mission, NASA sent up their Perseverance Rover and underneath it was carried the Ingenuity Helicopter, which was planned to make five flights over the red planet.
In the end, the helicopter completed 72 flights, and also became the first aircraft to successfully complete a powered, controlled flight on another world.
Perhaps one day people, and not just our machines, will make it here (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The helicopter was meant to go to places which the rover couldn’t safely reach and take a series of images so we could look upon this other world, and in 2022, snapped a spectacular view.
Wreckage of a spacecraft, laying in the sands of Mars and slightly reddened by the contact, a collection of objects manufactured on another world that may now lie forever upon the near-silent surface of the red planet.
Ian Clark, an engineer who worked on Perseverance’s parachute system, told The New York Times: “There’s definitely a sci-fi element to it. It exudes otherworldly, doesn’t it?
“They say a picture’s worth 1,000 words, but it’s also worth an infinite amount of engineering understanding.”
If you’re thinking this is the work of aliens, then I’m sorry to say it isn’t, these shattered remains strewn upon red sand are man-made.
While it may look ‘otherworldly’ and right out of science fiction, this debris isn’t actually evidence that aliens live among us or have been getting as close to us as the surface of Mars.
Beautiful, isn’t it? (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
If we’re finding spaceship debris on another planet then it’s because we put it there, and what the NASA helicopter found was part of the landing equipment used to bring Ingenuity down to the surface of Mars along with the Perseverance Rover.
When it comes to space humans are dreadful litterbugs, the orbit of our planet is clogged full of debris we’ve sent up there and now no longer need.
Now it seems like we’re also going to be clogging up other worlds with our leavings too.
Perhaps one day we’ll make it to Mars and be able to clean all this up, or maybe we’ll leave this debris where it lies as a point in the history of human space travel.
According to the Natural History Museum, there are about 2,000 active satellites orbiting Earth but around 3,000 more ‘dead’ satellites which we don’t use still floating up there.
There are also thousands more pieces of debris floating around our planet which pose a danger to spacecraft and our future hopes of space travel.
Featured Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Topics: Space, Science, Technology, NASA
Joe Harker
Earth has lost a ‘second moon’ that now won’t be seen again until 2055
It’s not the last time Earth will say hello to the space rock
Earth has said a temporary goodbye to its ‘second moon’ – but it’s not forever, with the cosmic object set to return in the relatively near future.
First spotted by NASA, the second moon or ‘mini moon’ was noticed in August this year, with the belief being that it was a broken off piece of the actual Moon that orbits the Earth.
Just 10 metres wide and as long as a bus, and technically an asteroid, the object – dubbed 2024 PT5 – is thought to be a piece of moon broken off from the main body in an asteroid collision.
“Given the similarity between asteroid 2024 PT5’s motion and that of our planet’s, scientists at NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies suspect that the object could be a large chunk of rock ejected from the Moon’s surface after an asteroid impact long ago,” Josh Handal, program analyst for NASA, explained.
The ‘second moon’ began orbiting Earth on 29 September, roughly 3,200,000 kilometres from the Earth.
Humanity’s Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System, known nicely as ATLAS, spotted the object as per its job which is to detect objects in space that could endanger life on Earth.
With no risk posed to Earth as a result of the mini moon, attention turned to its origins – and when it might return now that its finally on its way away from the planet.
The mini moon is thought to be a fragment of the actual Moon, smashed off during an asteroid collision a long time ago (Getty Stock Images)
NASA believes it has come from the Arjuna asteroid belt, created as a result of an asteroid collision with the Moon ‘long ago’.
“According to the latest data available from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Horizons System, the temporary capture will start at 15.54EDT on 29 September and end at 11.43EDT on 25 November,” Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a mini-moon expert from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, told Space.com.
Yes, as of yesterday, the second moon is on its way into the solar system.
But it will return. In more than 30 years time, though, in 2055. It might feel like a long time away but it’s an incredibly short period in universe terms.
Chances of it permanently orbiting Earth are slim given how fast it is moving.
It simply can’t be stopped in its tracks to stay within the planet’s gravitational pull.
The mini moon while orbiting the Sun (NASA)
Those who wanted to catch a glimpse of it or will try again in 31 years aren’t going to have much luck with standard equipment, with more advanced kit needed.
Marcos explained “The object is too small and dim for typical amateur telescopes and binoculars.
“However, the object is well within the brightness range of typical telescopes used by professional astronomers.
“A telescope with a diameter of at least 30 inches plus a CCD or CMOS detector is needed to observe this object; a 30-inch telescope and a human eye behind it will not be enough.”
Featured Image Credit: NASA/Getty Stock Images
Topics: World News, Space, Technology, NASA, Science
Tom Earnshaw
NASA find asteroid worth £8,000,000,000,000,000,000 that could make everyone on Earth a billionaire
£8 quintillion is a whole lot of money
A humungous asteroid worth £8,000,000,000,000,000,000 has taken the attention of NASA, with the deep space object having the potential to make everybody on Earth a billionaire.
At more than 220 kilometres across, the huge chunk of rock is worth roughly £8 quintillion. Which is obviously an absolutely insane amount of money.
It’s because the object is full of incredibly useful materials that, back on Earth, could help humanity in all kinds of ways.
We’re talking platinum and palladium, which are essential to the production of cars and electronic goods.
Now US space agency NASA has used Elon Musk’s SpaceX to probe the asteroid, which is called 16 Psyche after being first discovered back in 1852 by Italian astronomer, Annibale de Gasparis.
Using SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, it sent its Psyche spacecraft in the direction of the asteroid back in October 2023.
It is now well on its way, having travelled a year through space.
The Psyche spacecraft will not reach 16 Psyche until August 2029, with it 391 million kilometres from Earth. And even then, it is only orbiting, rather than landing.
CGI of the Psyche spacecraft on its eventual approach (NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU)
But in doing this, the hope is that it will be able to fully understand what the asteroid is made of, with it thought to be made up of somewhere between 30 percent and 60 percent of metal.
With the asteroid worth a reported £8,000,000,000,000,000,000, and the human population sitting at around 8.025 billion people, every person could get the equivalent of just under £1 billion each.
If we’re talking specifics, it would be around £996,884,735 per person.
Obviously, it’s highly unlikely that is how the wealth of the asteroid would be distributed.
The asteroid is metal rich (NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU)
Instead, it would probably ruin the world economy after sending the free market in to free fall due to the added overnight value to international markets.
For NASA, the focus is not money. Instead, they believe the asteroid will help them gain a greater understanding of the universe and its properties, as well as planetary cores.
Some scientists have hypothesised that the asteroid is the exposed core of something that is called a planetesimal; an early planetary building block that was stripped of its outer layers by violent collisions.
A model of the 16 Psyche asteroid (CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)
Others believe it could be the result of a geological process known as ‘ferro-volcanism’, a type of eruption that involves the eruption of liquid metal.
Whatever it is, we’re not likely to get the final scientific findings from the Psyche spacecraft until the early 2030s.
