Another big story this past week, picked up by Robert, William, and Gary. See for example www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/serendipitous-juno-spacecraft-detectio… …which led both Robert and Gary to think in terms of Mars as a former comet, aka Velikovsky. It also raises ideas outlined by Donald Wesley Patten, the American author of several books in which Mars played a prominent role. However, the research at the link had nothing like this in mind. Mars is a dusty planet – and bone dry. Just as the Sahara Desert is capable of generating huge dust storms that seed South American rain forest and leave a reddish dust on cars and buildings in Europe on occasion, the idea is that Mars loses dust – not to a different place on Mars, but to outer space, as a result of its thin atmosphere.
The discovery is said to explain the dust congregating in what is the zodiacal lights. Or at least some of it. It concerns the journeys of the Juno space ship. This travelled as far out as the asteroid belt and is now orbiting Jupiter – hence the Juno appellation. A very ambitious project. It has now produced some exciting new findings, deduced by the research team by recording hits of dust particles against the space shield of Juno. They leave a tell tale mark, and presumably, a ping. The discovery of dust in what is a circular orbit is what stood out. Mars is said to have a nearly circular orbit and the connection was made. The origin of the zodiacal dust that triggers the zodiacal lights is all part and parcel of the Clube and Napier theory of a disintegrating comet disgorging lots of dust and rocks back in the day – particularly during the third millennium BC. The new findings do not rule out Clube and Napier, who posit a much enhanced amount of dust in their theory that has since dissapated to a great degree. It was the pyramidal shape of the zodiacal lights that caught their fancy, and the role pyramids and ziggurats had in early cultures. In fact, prior to this new research it was more or less consensus theory that the dust was created by comets and asteroids. Not necessarily by the Clube and Napier comet of course but the frequency of comets disintegrating as they rounded the sun. It seemed quite reasonable to think all this dust left a mark along the plane of the ecliptic. Now we have another source for that dust, and a process that may be more significant in the modern world, seeing as how cometary dust has dissipated and spread around near space and is not congregating in thick streams at the moment. Dust disgorged by Mars could well be the current source of the zodiacal dust and lights, keeping it a feature of the night sky. Very observant and diligent research as one might see when reading the article – even the abstract.
Gary sent in a link to the same story at https://news.sky.com/story/news-we-think-weve-solved-the-mystery-of-zodi… … where we are told the zodiacal lights have intrigued humans for generations. It is even described by the prophet Mohammed in the Koran, it is thought, among others such as Giovanni Cassini in 1683.