Why I Left NASA: A Curiosity of Spirit

I would recommend everyone read the NASA PDF. Gives good tech analysis of the systems and describes the failsafes for restart / charge / broadcast procedures.

LINK

It doesn't mention FL comms tho..

Here's another about the FLASH anomoly.

LINK

Quite an interesting story.

[edit on 30/3/2010 by UKWO1Phot]

reply to post by Beamish


the issue is, the religions of the world do not have a non-ET view, for the most part. some believe them to be only involved with our planet in the last days, for evil purposes. some believe them to be the gods mentioned in the biblical texts, for good or evil. some believe them to be other creations of God or the gods. so to say this is a christian or religious problem, effecting their view of God and man, is a misnomer. it hasn't been true, generally-speaking, for hundreds of years, so why would it be true now ? the real issue is WHO or WHAT and HOW they fit into prophecies regarding the end of the current human dispensation on the planet.

as i mentioned before, yeshua even describes himself as an extra-terrestrial, strictly-speaking, when he says "I am not of this world." so the argument is likely to be, which ones are good, which ones are bad, which ones are indifferent, and how do you tell the difference. i'm afraid the ufo community and the new age movement have been looking in the wrong current places for support of their data, whilst simultaneously referring to the places where written and artifact evidences can be found, as fairy tales and falsehoods. the german higher critics of the enlightenment, got ya by the nads. they threw out the baby with the bath water.

i shouted BS after this thread start...im shouting it louder now.

just feels to me like hes playing the entire ATS like fools.

i dont come here for short stories or literary exercises.

hope the MODS are watching this thread carefully

reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan


yep, sent it to you in u2u since the mods would probably not want to spend all day editing it out of posts.

[edit on 30-3-2010 by undo]

reply to post by Silicis n Volvo

Ninety-seven flags? People still excitedly speculating on what it would mean if he's right?

Lord, what fools these mortals be.

i dont get the hostility towards mr mask.....

he is right...when claims are maid...theories put forward...it is the person making those claims who needs substantial evidence to prove his claims correct.

its not up to everyone else to prove his claims wrong.

to take someones story like this as gospel truth the way many people are just shows weak, naive minds.

its simple to accept wot someone says as truth...it takes stronger minds to doubt and to request proof before committing to belief.

i just think...everyone who is questioning this story is right to do so....everyone who is taking it as truth...is taking the easy option just because they are hoping for a climatic ending with evidence to prove it.

i want that climatic ending too!!! but im not going to follow that path blindly.

someone already posted a link to this but i felt it more appropriate to beat astroengineer to it and let u know exactly what your all holding out for.


PART 3!!!

If the radio wasn’t using the UHF antenna, then it was most likely using the HGA to reach earth directly. This idea had a few powerful arguments in favor of it. The bandwidth possible with the high gain antenna was much less than that via the UHF antenna, and we knew the data being sent was also much less. Also, the dual transmissions could be explained as a safeguard, a redundancy. Packet loss from one transmission (via HGA or UHF) could be filled in with the reduced resolution portions from the second HGA transmission. But then we realized something that perhaps was most compelling from the human point of view. Humans are impatient beings, and sending the second transmission with thumbnails either before or somehow coincident with the primary HGA signal would allow more time for decisions to be made in planning nextersol. But if that was the case, who was receiving those images and experiment data? My colleague was sure no one he worked with was benefiting from it. We tried to prove the case of a second HGA broadcast. The first thing we did was try to compute the bandwidth this radio would be using, given what we knew about the data it would be sending. Crude calculations showed it would need to handle about 25 kbps. This was an important number because it was 50% faster than what the rovers could do with their HGA, and less than 50% of what it could do through the UHF to Odyssey. It seemed unlikely they were primarily using a slower radio for the HGA, and only secondarily using this faster one.

Next we looked at power levels. HGA transmission draws quite a bit of current, and power levels for the rovers are closely monitored; a beam of sunlight can’t hit a panel nor a wheel disturb a single grain of Martian soil without it being recorded as fluctuations in the rover’s power. Admittedly hyperbole, but surely we might be able to estimate the power this mystery radio was drawing by looking at power logs across the rover’s life. My colleague had access to enough material that night to show that whatever current the additional transmission was requiring was minimal, within the margin of error, far below the levels of either UHF or HGA (or even LGA). It seemed to be a frequently used, medium bandwidth, ultra low power radio. This seemed impossible, the power effectively determines the transmission distance, and at this power level, the radio would have effectively not been broadcasting.

We were about ready to go back to scratch and assume this was not broadcasting anything at all, perhaps it was performing some other minor function, perhaps it was obscure hardware image processing hardware for generating parity blocks used to add robustness to the images generated by the ICER library and triggered for some peculiar reason via the telecom code just as transmission is occurring. But we didn’t abandon our radio hypothesis just yet, couldn’t abandon our gut feeling that this was really a radio and that the most practical reason for it being there was to get a limited but useful set of sol data to ground before or in lieu of the full set.

It was roughly 4 A.M. when we gave up for the night. My colleague decided not to bring any of this up at SOWG. He and I would regroup the next day after work and with clearer heads see what we thought, and what we thought we could do about it.

Between breaks at work he used his access to follow up on our line of reasoning. If it was a radio and if it was transmitting, DSN had to be involved. He saw nothing to suggest that was the case. If it was a radio and it was transmitting, one would expect something to be receiving. How could he find who was receiving? Finding the receiving radio or signal directly would be almost impossible, but he realized he might be able to find evidence of what was received.

He knew what the code had been doing to Spirit’s images, so on earth he recreated the function calls to ICER and applied the same transformations on about 100 Spirit images randomly picked from across recent months. If he could find any of these recreated thumbnails on any computers he had access to, he had almost assuredly proven there had been a receiver, and likely would be able to determine who it was. The image transformations used to make the thumbnails were so specific that they could be considered unique. By mid-afternoon he’d generated the thumbnails and their corresponding md5 hashes. He now wrote a small application to scan specified directories and their subdirectories for those thumbnails, based on their unique signatures, their hashes. He was able to integrate this code with something he’d written a year before to help with forensic analysis of common Windows and UNIX file systems. He would be able to search for matches amongst even some deleted files. Viability of reading deleted files depends on whether the space the deleted files used has been needed and reused by new files. Just an hour or so before the end of his he got a version of his app compiled for the different target computers he would check. He had been given unofficial sudo (admin) access to a few key systems (when he was troubleshooting problems for people), as well as the other systems he had normal user access to; these included some of the NAIF and FLTOPS servers. The jobs would take hours to complete. He left for the day, the jobs still running. We ended up not meeting that night. We were both wiped from the lack of sleep the night before, and his avenue of investigation was better than anything I had in mind.

The next morning I got a call just after 7:00 A.M. One of his jobs, run on one of the servers used to receive downlink imagery before distribution to the teams had gotten six hits. The hits he got were all deleted files, in a temp directory under the home directory of a user he wasn’t familiar with. His sudo access on that computer was what allowed him to find the deleted files, and what allowed him to research the account. Items in the home directory and the user’s shell history pretty conclusively showed the account was owned by someone in JPL’s Quantum Sciences and Technology Group. We now had a bizarrely intriguing who, but the why remained wholly untouched. I could barely focus on my own tasks all day. We would meet up that evening, he was going to quietly recover what he could from that directory and we’d go over his findings. I left a little early, and so did he.

We met at his place, straight out of work. He sat at his computer, and I sat next to him with my laptop. He copied the data he’d archived from his thumb drive. Then he gave it to me and I did the same. He had copied much of what was under that user’s account as well as another account which was part of the same user group. He had recovered quite a few deleted files (though many were just usable as file meta data) under the original account. Most of the recovered files were in the same directory, apparently some sort of temporary staging directory. Those files were consistent with the thumbnail imagery, many of them matched the signatures he’d generated and others we could visually confirm were the same exact transformations of rover images, but these were ones he had not transformed for comparison. I felt somewhat uncomfortable with what we were doing. Up until the point where he had run his jobs and used unauthorized access to scour filesystems and go into other user’s directories, we had been overly curious but no one could fault us for anything we’d actually done. I couldn’t fault him for what he’d done, I likely would have given in to the same temptation. I was clearly a willing accessory before, during, and after the fact. Still, breaking the rules is not something I normally do, and I was deeply uncomfortable.

if you read my other posts you know wot i think of all this...

the story is obviously already written...hes purposeley not posting everything on here at once to keep everyone hanging on like kids at story time.

like i sed before........playing ATS for a fool.

hes even writing it like a dramatic novel...theres no reason for it other than his own personal pleasure of seein us follow his story like christians to the bible

btw heres the link again

astroengineer.wordpress.com...

[edit on 30-3-2010 by Silicis n Volvo]

Originally posted by Silicis n Volvo
if you read my other posts you know wot i think of all this...

the story is obviously already written...hes purposeley not posting everything on here at once to keep everyone hanging on like kids at story time.

like i sed before........playing ATS for a fool.

btw heres the link again

astroengineer.wordpress.com...


[edit on 30-3-2010 by Silicis n Volvo]

What?

Sorry, wot?

Of course it's already written, he has a blog. A lot of people post to their blog before they put it other places. Each chunk is a large chunk too. And I for one know it can take a while to write a lot. I can type fast but maybe he can't? Your assumptions, like several others - are just bizarre.

18 pages and the thread is only just turning round to possible theories and some real discussion.

You know for a thread in the Gray Area where a little outside of the box thinking is required - a lot of you people have completely ruined it - so thanks for that.

Evidence, answering questions - I'm sorry but what on Earth makes you think posting on ATS is a priority for anybody? Just because you're a forum junkie doesn't mean every other Tom dick and Harry that signs up has to become one to be a legitimate entity.

I think it's clear the OP isn't going to bother continuing posting it here, so some of you have completely destroyed any chance of getting questions answered by whinging too early that you need answers & evidence.

Don't you have any patience? At all? Or are there more 14 year olds here than I thought?

My point is this: The OP is doing the right thing by getting his story down first. This can help destroy a lot of potential questions. I know I'd do that if MY time was short. And if you didn't read the OP is now running his own business by the sound of it, and has a busy life outside of the internet.

Just wait til the story is over and then moan! The least you can do now is just discuss the theory, the story, with a little maturity. There is no real sign here yet of healthy skepticism, though some are saying we need all these people clogging up the thread. There's a difference between "skeptics we need" and "people just prepared to continue an argument". I'm currently falling into the second one there so I'll go back to subject.

The theory: His initial blog posts describe a "faster than light channel of communication" which from his longer posts so far suggest the radio plays a part with. As for all the thumbnail stuff, that kind of perplexed me a bit - I wasn't sure if it was actual images (ie photos of rocks) being pulled down or just data being turned into graphical data of some kind (a bit like ScanDisk becomes pretty colours and patterns).

The mention of perhaps this data going directly to a government and being censored...well, I haven't really gotten a sense of that from his 3 posts yet, so where is that idea coming from?

That isn't to say if that is the bottom line...it's very intriguing

reply to post by undo


I agree that religion does touch upon “other” life.

It may well be that news of alien existence would not cause the expected upheaval the Brookings Report suggests, because of our already ingrained beliefs in mysterious beings.

the issue is, the religions of the world do not have a non-ET view, for the most part. some believe them to be only involved with our planet in the last days, for evil purposes.

We are presuming (hoping) that Spirit captured images of live aliens, even if they are furry/scaly/feathered and running around on all-fours/sixes/eights.

the real issue is WHO or WHAT and HOW they fit into prophecies regarding the end of the current human dispensation on the planet.

What if they don’t?

Could it be that our governments already know that what is to be found on Mars absolutely goes against religious teachings?

What if the assurances that Man was made in God’s image absolutely doesn’t apply to Mars?

How would that subject be broached at Mecca or the Vatican?

Can you see my point?

Even though this discussion is theoretical – and could well have been caused by a hoax – it is, until we know for a certainty just what the ecology of Mars produced, perfectly viable to presume that we are being protected from information and concepts so potentially destructive to our civilization, that we simply cannot be told through fear of our civilization imploding.

Our religions are at war with one another now; what would we do if we were told those religions are, provably, wrong.

It isn’t a matter of

WHO or WHAT and HOW they fit into prophecies regarding the end of the current human dispensation on the planet.

but if they fit.

reply to post by markymint


so how long do u expect it to take to copy and paste from his blog to this thread? i just did it in 30 seconds...this story could have been put to bed a long time ago

its a shame you take his side so easily...if it wasnt for people like mr mask then imaginative fictional stories would get placed on here and passed as truth all the time...it already happens to often.

u just show how naive you are.

[edit on 30-3-2010 by Silicis n Volvo]

reply to post by markymint


SIGH.

The posters who are not all singing Kumbaya with the OP are NOT "ruining the thread'" for everyone else.

This is from the top of the page.






"The Gray Area will tolerate topics that may be unusually hypothetical or unproven for the purpose of vetting the stories of thread-starters by the ATS membership at large.''

This thread is a prime example that people are paid to post. Paid to bury this story. Paid to protect the governments sadistic secrets.

reply to post by markymint

There's a difference between "skeptics we need" and "people just prepared to continue an argument".

Here here.

Unfortunately, and in defense of several contributors to this thread, we on ATS have been pranked so many times that it has almost become a knee-jerk reaction to scream hoax.

As to my (normally) skeptical stance; I am impressed by AstroEngineer’s writing abilities, his refusal to get into pointless arguments, and the copious use of techno-jargon (95% of which goes straight over my head). That he hasn’t mentioned 2012, the Pleiadians, the NWO or any other popular conspiracy is, to my mind, to his credit. Of course, if he does…

Yes, he could well be a very well-versed scammer, or an ex-NASA techie. Time will tell…

His initial blog posts describe a "faster than light channel of communication"…As for all the thumbnail stuff, that kind of perplexed me a bit - I wasn't sure if it was actual images (ie photos of rocks) being pulled down…

The mention of perhaps this data going directly to a government and being censored...well, I haven't really gotten a sense of that from his 3 posts yet, so where is that idea coming from?

Granted he hasn’t mentioned government agencies specifically (Quantum physics labs at NASA, yes), but the implied inference is, we assume, that this hidden technology on Spirit allows other eyes to view imagery from Mars via FTL comms, before it was released to the JPL laboratory.

Perhaps we all hang around conspiracy sites waaaay too much.

Edit: fix coding.

[edit on 30-3-2010 by Beamish]

reply to post by markymint


you have to mention grammer because your real argument is a fail. so you just choose the easiest insult to back up your claims.

udont get many stars for that btw! u noticed?

yes im slating the OP...why is posting his material backing him? i think it poves my point well...its saying you (the easily swayed sheep) are all holding on for the 3rd installment of this story which ive just proved isnt going anywhere fast.

your next argument please???



[edit on 30-3-2010 by Silicis n Volvo]

Originally posted by 911stinks
This thread is a prime example that people are paid to post. Paid to bury this story. Paid to protect the governments sadistic secrets.

Sorry, can you point me to the direction of where I am to collect my pay? I clearly haven't seen one yet. This story was fishy from the beginning, I am sorry you haven't caught on.

If I am wrong I will apologize, but as of yet the OP has not provided on single evidence of proof. Usually whistle blowers will come to ATS and identify themselves to the web-site owners.

The web-site owners will only verify that this person used to work for NASA, and no other proof is needed.

That is all we ask for. Otherwise anyone can come waltzing in here claiming to be this or that.

And if you do the research, what AstroEngineer said could be easily found using Google. He isn't limited to the knowledge he holds.

The rovers run a VxWorks embedded operating system on a radiation-hardened 20 MHz RAD6000 CPU with 128 MB of DRAM with error detection and correction and 3 MB of EEPROM. Each rover also has 256 MB of flash memory. To survive during all of the various mission phases, the rover's vital instruments must stay within a temperature of −40 °C to +40 °C (−40 °F to 104 °F). At night the rovers are heated by eight radioisotope heater units (RHU) which each continuously generate 1 W of thermal energy from the decay of radioisotopes, along with electrical heaters that operate only when necessary. A sputtered gold film and a layer of silica aerogel are used for insulation.
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