Black Knight satellite

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Pigeon
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Black Knight satellite

Post by Pigeon » Thu Apr 11, 2013 5:06 pm

“Our home is Epsilon Boötis, which is a double star. We live on the sixth planet of seven—check that, the sixth of seven—counting outwards from the sun, which is the larger of the two stars. Our sixth planet has one moon. Our fourth planet has three. Our first and third planet each have one. Our probe is in the orbit of your moon.”–signal translation originating from ‘The Black Knight’ Satellite, Time Magazine April 9, 1973

In 1953, four years before the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik I, an object of unknown origin was sighted by Dr Lincoln La Paz of the University of New Mexico orbiting the earth. As more reports of sightings trickled in from around the world, the U.S. Department of Defense appointed distinguished astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh(best known for his discovery of the dwarf ‘planet’ of Pluto in 1930) to run a search for the mystery object. The blip became known as “Black Knight”.The Pentagon never formally released the results of Dr Tombaugh’s study. No more was heard about the object until December, 1957, when Dr Luis Corralos of the Communications Ministry in Venezuela photographed it. The first modern satellites, Sputnik I & 2, had been launched just a few months earlier. Dr Corralos was taking pictures of the second of these modern marvels as it passed over Caracas, and his photos caught the unknown object shadowing the Russian craft.

“Black Knight” was observed once again in 1960, this time by one of the stations that formed the Northern American Air Defense System. The object was in a polar orbit, something that neither the Americans or Soviets were capable of at the time. Several times larger and heavier than anything capable of being launched with 1960, rockets, it shouldn’t have been there, but it was. The observance sent panic through the U.S. military. Not only did the intelligence agencies have no idea that the USSR had launched a new satellite, nothing in their reports on Soviet space activity suggested they had the capacity to place an object into a polar orbit, or to launch something that was estimated to be in excess of 15 tons. The military scientists were horrified, since they were at least four years away from achieving polar orbits and getting payloads that large into space.

Similar waves of shock and anxiety were spreading through the Soviet ranks. They had not launched the satellite and knew they were years away from being able to accomplish such a feat, they also knew that the Americans could not do it either. No one knew where it came from, but it was definitely there.

Three years later Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper was launched into space on his 22 orbit mission in the Faith 7 capsule. On his final orbit, he reported seeing a glowing green shape ahead of his capsule, and heading in his direction. The Muchea tracking station, in Australia, which Cooper reported this to was also able to pick it up on radar traveling in an east-to-west orbit. This event was reported by NBC, but reporters were forbidden to ask Cooper about the event on his landing. The official explanation is that an electrical malfunction in the capsule had caused high levels of carbon dioxide, which induced hallucinations.

If this weren’t enough, Ham radio operators worldwide had been receiving messages from Black Knight. Perhaps the strangest phenomenon associated with the Black Knight was the Long Delay Echo (LDE). The effect observed was that radio or television signals sent into space bounce back seconds (or even days) later, as if recorded and retransmitted by a satellite. First indentified over 30 years earlier by Norwegian geophysicist Carl Stormer and a Dutch collaborator Balthasar van der Pol, the duo discovered that short wave radio messages were followed by mysterious echoes that were picked up at indiscriminate intervals after the original transmissions. Indeed, the delays were so long that they could not be readily attributed to atmospheric quirks, magnetic storms or other natural phenomena. To this day, scientists have been unable to solve the mystery of the echoes.

Scottish Astronomer and science writer Duncan Lunan, in a paper presented to the British Interplanetary Society in 1973, noticed a correspondence between the LDE effect and the periodic appearances of Black Knight. To go further, he claimed that these “echoes” carried messages and star map which he had decoded and the transmission corresponded to a star chart which would have been plotted from Earth 13,000 years ago, and focused on the star system of Epsilon Boötes. Lunan theorized the messages may have been relayed to earth by a robot spacecraft from a highly advanced civilization far beyond the solar system. More astonishing, Lunan added, the automatic vehicle may have been circling the moon for thousands of years, waiting patiently for earthlings to acquire the necessary know-how to contact it.

In 1960 Radio Astronomer Ronald Bracewell of Stanford University speculated on life elsewhere in the galaxy. An article published in Nature offered the theory that an advanced civilization might not necessarily use long-range radio signals to communicate with other intelligent beings. Such signals would be considerably weakened over interstellar distances. Instead, Bracewell said, those far-off beings might employ robot space probes as their message bearers. Sent to a promising nearby star, such a vehicle could swing into an orbit around it at approximately the right distance to encounter a planet with life-supporting temperatures. If it picked up telltale radio signals, the probe might then bounce them back to advertise its presence, thereby producing an effect like the echoes of the 1920s. Finally, as its first message, the robot might transmit a picture of the area of the heavens from which it came.

Link

That translation sounds 'really' earthly.

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Re: Black Knight satellite

Post by Pigeon » Thu Apr 11, 2013 5:30 pm

“Black Knight” was observed once again in 1960, this time by one of the stations that formed the Northern American Air Defense System. The object was in a polar orbit, something that neither the Americans or Soviets were capable of at the time.
No polar orbit in 1960? Discoverer 2 was in polar orbit in 1959.

Discoverer 2 was a cylindrical satellite designed to gather spacecraft engineering data and to attempt ejection of an instrument package from orbit for recovery on Earth. The spacecraft was launched into a 239 km x 346 km polar orbit by a Thor-Agena A booster. The spacecraft was three-axis stabilized and was commanded from Earth. After 17 orbits, on 14 April 1959, a reentry vehicle was ejected. The reentry vehicle separated into two sections, one consisting of the protection equipment, retrorocket and main structure and the other the reentry capsule. It was planned that the capsule would reenter over the vicinity of Hawaii for recovery, but a timer malfunction caused premature capsule ejection and reentry over the north polar region. The capsule was never recovered. The main instrumentation payload remained in orbit and carried out vehicular performance and communications tests.

The spacecraft was 1.5 m in diameter, 5.85 m long and had a mass after second stage separation, including propellants, of roughly 3800 kg. The mass excluding propellants was 743 kg, which included 111 kg for the instrumentation payload and 88 kg for the reentry vehicle. The capsule section of the reentry vehicle was 84 cm in diameter and 69 cm long and held a parachute, test life-support systems, cosmic-ray film packs to determine the intensity and composition of cosmic radiation (presumably as a test for storage of future photographic film), and a tracking beacon.

The capsule was designed to be recovered by a specially equipped aircraft during parachute descent, but was also designed to float to permit recovery from the ocean. The main spacecraft contained a telemetry transmitter and a tracking beacon. The telemetry could transmit over 100 measurements of the spacecraft performance, including 28 environmental, 34 guidance and control, 18 second stage performance, 15 communications, and 9 reentry capsule parameters. Electrical power for all nstruments was provided by NiCd batteries. Orientation was provided by a cold mitrogen gas jet-stream system, a scanner for pitch ttitude, and an inertial reference package for yaw and roll data.

The Discoverer 2 mission successfully gathered data on propulsion, communications, orbital performance, and stabilization. All equipment functioned as programmed except the timing device. Telemetry functioned until April 14, 1959, and the main tracking beacon functioned until April 21, 1959. Discoverer 2 was the first satellite to be stabilized in orbit in all three axes, to be maneuvered on command from the earth, to separate a reentry vehicle on command, and to send its reentry vehicle back to earth.

NASA link


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Re: Black Knight satellite

Post by Pigeon » Thu Apr 11, 2013 5:44 pm

Epsilon Boötis, also known as Izar or Pulcherrima, is a close triple star popular with amateur astronomers and the most prominent binary star in Boötes.

The system is 210 light-years away.

The primary is a yellow- or orange-hued magnitude 2.5 giant star, the secondary is a magnitude 4.6 blue-hued main-sequence star, and the tertiary is a magnitude 12.0 star.

The primary and secondary stars are separated by 2.9 arcseconds at an angle of 341 degrees; the primary's spectral class is K0 and it has a luminosity of 200 L☉. The primary and tertiary stars are separated by 175.5 arcseconds at an angle of 256 degrees. To the naked eye, Izar has a magnitude of 2.37.


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Re: Black Knight satellite

Post by Pigeon » Thu Apr 11, 2013 5:58 pm

Monday, Mar. 07, 1960
Time Magazine

Three weeks ago, headlines announced that the U.S. had detected a mysterious "dark" satellite wheeling overhead on a regular orbit. There was nervous speculation that it might be a surveillance satellite launched by the Russians, and it brought the uneasy sensation that the U.S. did not know what was going on over its own head. But last week the Department of Defense proudly announced that the satellite had been identified. It was a space derelict, the remains of an Air Force Discoverer satellite that had gone astray. The dark satellite was the first object to demonstrate the effectiveness of the U.S.'s new watch on space. And the three-week time lag in identification was proof that the system still lacks full coordination and that some bugs still have to be ironed out.

First Sighting. The most important component of the space watch went into operation about six months ago with the construction of "Dark Fence," a kind of radar trip wire stretching across the width of the U.S. Designed by the Naval Research Laboratory to keep track of satellites whose radios are silent, it is a notable improvement on other radars, which have difficulty finding a small satellite unless they know where to look. Big, 50-kw. transmitters were established at Gila River, near Phoenix, Ariz, and Jordan Lake, Ala., spraying radio waves upward in the shape of open fans. Some 250 miles on either side, receiving stations pick up signals that bounce off any object passing through the fans. By a kind of triangulation, the operators can make rough estimates of the object's speed, distance and course.

On Jan. 31 Dark Fence detected two passes of what seemed to be an unknown space object. After detecting several passes during the following days, Captain W. E. Berg, commanding officer of Dark Fence, decided that something was circling overhead on a roughly polar orbit. He raced to the Pentagon and in person reported the menacing stranger to Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke. Within minutes the news was communicated to President Eisenhower and marked top secret.

In the confusion, there was a delay before anyone took the step necessary to positively identify the strange satellite: informing the Air Force's newly established surveillance center in Bedford, Mass. It is the surveillance center's job to take all observations on satellites from all friendly observing centers, both optical and electronic, feed them into computers to produce figures that will identify each satellite, describe its orbit and predict its behavior. Says one top official, explaining the cold facts of the space age: "The only way of knowing that a new satellite has appeared is by keeping track of the old ones."

It took two weeks for Dark Fence's scientists to check back through their taped observations, and to discover that the mysterious satellite had first showed up on Aug. 15. The Air Force surveillance center also checked its records to provide a list of everything else that was circling in the sky, and its computers worked out a detailed description of the new object's behavior. The evidence from both Air Force and Navy pointed to Discoverer V, fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif, on Aug. 13.

Discoverer V reentry prediction in newspaper - 1959

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Re: Black Knight satellite

Post by Pigeon » Thu Apr 11, 2013 6:14 pm

The Discoverer 5 spacecraft consisted of a main satellite body and a separable reentry vehicle containing a recovery capsule. It was designed to test launching techniques, propulsion, communications, orbital performance, engineering, and recovery echniques. The spacecraft was successfully put into a near-polar 193 x 353 km orbit by the Thor-Agena A booster. A day after launch, on 14 August 1959, the reentry vehicle was separated from the main body and the capsule released over the Pacific Ocean for descent to Earth. However no signals were received from the capsule, presumably due to a telemetry sequencing problem, and it was not recovered.

The spacecraft was a cylindrical Agena A upper stage 1.5 m in diameter, 5.85 m long with a mass including propellants of roughly 3850 kg. The mass excluding propellants was 780 kg, which included 140 kg for the reentry vehicle. The capsule section (a.k.a. bucket) of the reentry vehicle was 84 cm in diameter and 69 cm long and held a parachute, a black and white film canister, and a tracking beacon. The capsule was designed to be recovered by a specially equipped aircraft during parachute descent, but was also designed to float to permit recovery from the ocean.

The Discoverer program was managed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force. The primary goal of the program was to develop a film-return photographic surveillance satellite to assess how rapidly the Soviet Union was producing long-range bombers and ballistic missiles and where they were being deployed, and to take photos over the Sino-Soviet bloc to replace the the U2 spyplanes. It was part of the secret Corona program which was also used to produce maps and charts for the Department of Defense and other US government mapping programs. The goal of the program was not revealed to the public at the time, it was presented as a program to orbit large satellites to test satellite subsystems and investigate the communication and environmental aspects of placing humans in space, including carrying biological packages for return to Earth from orbit. In all, 38 Discoverer satellites were launched by February 1962, although the satellite reconnaissance program continued until 1972 as the Corona project. The program documents were declassified in 1995.


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Re: Black Knight satellite

Post by Pigeon » Thu Apr 11, 2013 6:18 pm

Sounds like a typical cover up. Let'em call it UFOs and spend their time looking for aliens, not military hardware.

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Re: Black Knight satellite

Post by Pigeon » Thu Apr 11, 2013 6:30 pm

Check this material from this site transmissionsmedia.com

Notice that two of the dates seems to be edited in and read as 1954. On the right, the date that looks like it was printed on the news page appears to be 1964.

Nice job killing creditability.

Image

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Re: Black Knight satellite

Post by Royal » Fri Apr 12, 2013 12:44 am

This story is way better than what's happening in Korea. Real or not.

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Re: Black Knight satellite

Post by Royal » Fri Apr 12, 2013 12:52 am

Notice that two of the dates seems to be edited in and read as 1954. On the right, the date that looks like it was printed on the news page appears to be 1964.
Quality is poor. A lot on ink missing in those documents.

Definite brain food for tonight. This rabbit hole is getting matrixy.

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Re: Black Knight satellite

Post by Pigeon » Fri Apr 12, 2013 2:21 am

The 1964 of the year looks pretty clear. Real scammer but easy to see through.

Given the cover up of a US recon project I have to think it was the US satellites if something was seen. That so called translation of a signal has to be BS. The term 'check that', yeah ETs alright.

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