[meteorite-list] Home, Home on La Grange!
MexicoDoug
mexicodoug at aim.com
Thu Jun 30 02:30:46 EDT 2011
Hi Sterling and thanks for the reply! I am sorry I can't respond as
much as I wish now (some emergencies came up), but please let me
summarize:
Anaxagoras and the anti-Earth concept: Completely disagree that
Anaxagoras was mixed up buying into that. As you also say, it was
Pythagoras' students who looked for the geometrical balancing of
things. Anaxagoras was not a believer in perfection and balance which
spawned the Anti-Earth concept. Aristotle was and blackballed him and
he was eventually kicked out Dodge for his heresy against the harmonic
order of things.
Anaxagoras was Greece's foremost meteoriticist and was incorrectly
believed at the time to have predicted the fall of an iron meteorite
which was widely witnessed 2500 years ago. It is clear he studied the
iron, but the part about him predicting the fall is highly likely to
have been misunderstood by the masses - the prediction was more likely
that space rocks could fall. One fell and that led to the
misattribution of prediction vs. theory, since the press was as crazy
then as it is today.
Anaxagoras' pupil, Diogenes of Apollonia explicitly defined what we now
call meteoroids, and today we have diogenites since some kind modern
folks recognized this. However, Anaxagoras' work was basically lost and
it is more than my gut feeling that it was actually he who formed
Diogenes' beliefs on the subject. In today's terms, Anaxagoras would
likely have been the first author on the paper. Anaxagoras went on to
hypothesize that the Sun was made from iron. This was based on the
flames produced by the meteorite that was witnessed. It's difficult to
say for sure who's idea was what but I tend to believe we are less
willing to give them credit for ideas than was the actuality. That is
another thing about meteorites that hasn't changed in three millennia.
OK, Kordylewski Clouds - Yes I was referring to the same concept but
not by name. I hope my fellow Poles will forgive me. I avoided the name
since it is surrounded by some debate as you noted and I just wasn't up
to that debate since the point is not to worry about what is visible or
not since the tones we are after are invisible from here anyway (and
the clouds are documented visible from earth with the naked eye under
Vesta naked eye opposition visibility conditions - sometimes). The
point I'm after is not what we can or cannot see. This is a region we
simply have a deficit of information and is very useful to staging
missions or even colonizing as I suspect you remember the hubbub a
while back, from the new title you gave the post. For the benefit of
those others interest in this thread, this is the chorus of the L5 song
(the interesting part), named after most likely destinations of a
Lagrangian mission to collect space rocks La Grangian / libration
points 4 & 5 = L4 & L5, not to be confused with the ordinary
chondrites) --
(The L5 song, by Higgins and Gehm)
Home, home on Lagrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
They are referring to the fact that no energy is required to park in
the Lagrangian points, and the escape velocity is very minimal. Most
importantly :-), they are basically the equivalent of desert blowouts
in space and ripe for meteorxxx hunting.
Best wishes
Doug
OK, meeting the goal of answering your post and now returning to
lurking status as promised.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
To: Richard Kowalski <damoclid at yahoo.com>; MexicoDoug
<mexicodoug at aim.com>; meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
Sent: Wed, Jun 29, 2011 12:59 am
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Home, Home on La Grange!
Doug,
I believe Anaxagoras was referring to the Anti-Earth,
a body thought possible (in either a geocentric or a
heliocentric system) that was always behind the Sun
from the viewpoint of Earth, hence "never seen by us."
It's an idea that doesn't go away (like it should):
http://files.ncas.org/condon/text/appndx-e.htm
But it was Pythogoras, the first to call the earth "round"
and not the center of the universe, a word he invented,
BTW: "cosmos" or universe. And he had that Theorem
thingee, too. Yes, the Anti-Earth was his idea... So, he
missed one.
But, when I read your post, Doug, I thought you meant
the Kordylewski clouds --- "large concentrations of dust
that may exist at the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points of the
Earth-Moon system."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kordylewski_cloud
"The existence of a photometrically confirmable
concentration of dust at the libration points was
predicted by Professor J. Witkowski in 1951.
The clouds were first seen by Kordylewski in
1956. Between 6 March and 6 April, 1961 he
succeeded in photographing two bright patches
near the L5 libration point. During the observation
time the patches hardly appeared to move relative
to L5...
In 1967, J. Wesley Simpson made observations
of the clouds using the Kuiper Airborne Observatory.
The existence of the Kordylewski clouds is still
under dispute. The Japanese Hiten space probe,
which passed through the libration points to detect
trapped dust particles, did not find an obvious
increase in dust levels above the density in
surrounding space..."
The Kordylewski clouds are a very faint phenomenon,
comparable to the brightness of the Gegenschein and,
as the Lagrangian points are unstable, they may be a
random and transient phenomenon. They are reported
to have an angular diameter of up to 6 degrees and to
orbit the Lagrangian points in elipses, when seen. L5
clouds seem to be observed more than L4 coulds.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Lagrange_points_Earth_vs_Moon.jpg
Grrrr! No dust!
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v224/n5219/abs/224571a0.html
Anyone got Sky and Telescope, 22, 63 (1961)? There
are Kordylewski's photos in there.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=4&sqi=2&ved=0CDEQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fspaceflight.esa.int%2Fstrategy%2Fpages%2FHome__Events__Why_the_moon__Posters__P12_Laufer.cfm&rct=j&q=kordylewski%20sky%20%26%20telescope&ei=XJ8KTsSgGI2qsALIosGjAQ&usg=AFQjCNFOB0d25_NmBxPsAyX99MoNzDyWpg&sig2=98jwIRBEppaJQdNioVXWdw&cad=rja
More Moons of the Earth:
http://library.thinkquest.org/25401/data/discovery/text/hyp.html?tql-iframe#moon
"In October 1956, Kordylewski saw, for the first time, a
fairly bright patch in one of the two positions. It was not small,
subtending an angle of 2° (i.e. about 4 times larger than the
Moon itself). It also was very faint, only about half as bright as the
notoriously difficult Gegenschein (counterglow - a bright patch
in the zodiacal light, directly opposite to the Sun). In March
and April 1961, Kordylewski succeeded in photographing two
clouds near the expected positions. They seem to vary in
extent, but that may be due to changing illumination. J. Roach
detected these cloud satellites in 1975 with the OSO (Orbiting
Solar Observatory) 6 spacecraft. In 1990, they were again
photographed, this time by the Polish astronomer Winiarski, who
found that they were a few degrees in apparent diameter, that
they "wandered" up to 10° away from the "trojan" point, and that
they were somewhat redder than the zodiacal light."
Photometry didn't find any clouds:
http://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/124326.pdf
Kordylewski clouds at the Earth-Sun Lagrangian points?
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=6228
and
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/04/10/1224231/STEREO-Spacecraft-To-Explore-Earths-L4-and-L5
Lots of "things" at Lagrangian Points...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrangian_points
The Clouds of Kordylewski? I think they come and go...
Sterling K. Webb
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------
----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Kowalski"
<damoclid at yahoo.com>
To: "MexicoDoug" <mexicodoug at aim.com>;
<meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 9:59 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] trips to the Moon (Moon bases
andmeteoriterecovery)
Doug, I think you missed a key word in my post, "... known ...".
Cheers
--
Richard Kowalski
Full Moon Photography
IMCA #1081
----- Original Message -----
From: MexicoDoug <mexicodoug at aim.com>
To: damoclid at yahoo.com; meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
Cc:
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 4:30 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] trips to the Moon (Moon bases and
meteoriterecovery)
Richard K says:
"There are no known Earth Trojans."
Hi Richard,
Come on ol' friend, even 2500 years ago Anaxagoras deduced:
"Under the stars are the Sun and Moon, and also certain bodies which
revolve with them, but are invisible to us."
and we've observed enough meteorites to vindicate him!
The "invisible" he was talking about refers to them being too small to
have enough light to reflect to be seen. What is the median threshold
resolution we are talking about nowadays (in mass or diameter) at that
distance?
Perhaps the points are not a pocket full of horses, but Chincoteague
Ponies, some used, would be a coupe. Regardless, towing an asteroid
back to earth wasn't what I had in mind at all. Look, we've even sent
Stardust to play tennis with comets, in hope of getting some micron
sized particles, while ignoring the voluminous information guaranteed
to be on the shelves of these libration libraries, not in mass, but in
rubble and dust, a page at a time and conveniently located.
Best wishes
Doug
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Kowalski <damoclid at yahoo.com>
To: meteorite list <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tue, Jun 28, 2011 5:59 pm
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] trips to the Moon (Moon bases and
meteoriterecovery)
________________________________
From: MexicoDoug <mexicodoug at aim.com>
To: etmeteorites at hotmail.com; Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 2:35 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] trips to the Moon (Moon bases and
meteoriterecovery)
You want to go the the nearer Lagrangian Points in plain space between
the Earth
and Moon. That is where the most fascinating stuff is to be found,
written in
unaltered stone the genesis of the Moon and plenty more debris to keep
scientists and collectors busy and overworked for the nex 10,000 years!
There are no known Earth Trojans.
--
Richard Kowalski
Full Moon Photography
IMCA #1081
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