Noah's Search: Probing Satellite Imagery for Lost Ark

Moviegoers were recently treated to "Noah," an epic story of bravery and sacrifice from the Old Testament, a saga in which the titular character takes on the divine mission to build an ark to save creation from an apocalyptic deluge.

Outside the big screen, speculation has swirled for decades that the leftovers of Noah's Ark hug the heights of Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey — at a spot known as the Ararat anomaly. In true detective jargon, call it an "anomaly of interest."

Satellite imagery and analysis may make it possible to resolve the mystery. [Satellite Quiz: How Well Do You Know What's Orbiting Earth?]

Porcher Taylor, a professor of paralegal studies in the School of Professional and Continuing Studies at the University of Richmond, has led the search into the Mt. Ararat anomaly. Taylor's quest began long ago, he said.

"The cognitive genesis of my journey began in 1973, some 41 years ago, in my junior year as a cadet at West Point," he told Space.com. Back then, Taylor came across "credible rumors" ricocheting off the walls of the academy that a CIA spy satellite had accidentally imaged "what appeared to be the bow of a ship sticking up out of the ice cap on Mt. Ararat," Taylor said.

A couple of decades later, Taylor launched his own satellite declassification initiative investigating the Mt. Ararat anomaly imagery.

Drawing on his  21 years of arm-chair sleuthing, Taylor has given unclassified presentations at the Pentagon and the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center.

Along the way, he declared victory in convincing the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1995 to declassify five 1949 U.S. Air Force aerial photos of Mt. Ararat. Additionally, thanks to Taylor's invitations, a number of experts over the years have "performed analyses of the satellite imagery, which thankfully tempered my zeal as an amateur," Taylor said.

Biblical proportions

So in this day and age, why continue the journey? The wealth of information provided by DigitalGlobe's satellite imagery keeps Taylor going, he said.

"My ultimate goal has always been that my acquisition over the years of progressively higher- and higher-resolution satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe of the anomaly might definitively change the anomaly into a known entity, either something geological or perhaps something of Biblical proportions," Taylor said.

DigitalGlobe's new and powerful WorldView-3 spacecraft is slated for launch from California'sVandenberg Air Force Base in summer 2014. Among its customer-provided attributes, the satellite will yield 31-centimeter (12 inches) panchromatic resolution, making it the highest-resolution commercial satellite in the world.

"DigitalGlobe's constellation of satellites would be the envy of Indiana Jones," Taylor told Space.com. "I'm grateful and humbled that Digital Globe has flown numerous gratis missions for me over Mt. Ararat over the past decade, especially the QuickBird satellite mission of February 2003 that captured the boat-like form of the anomaly at 15,000 feet, without excessive amounts of snow and ice cover." [See images from Digital Globe]

Precise view

Similar technology has already secured valuable scientific data for other purposes. Satellite imagery has proven to be a valuable tool for providing accurate information about the changing planet, said Kumar Navulur, senior director at DigitalGlobe's Product Development & Labs in Longmont, Colorado.

"State-of-the-art remote-sensing technology and analytics are now so advanced, we can not only view detailed information about man-made features, but also monitor the wonders of some of Mother Nature's hidden treasures," Navulur told Space.com. "For example, we have mapped polar bear patterns in the Arctic and penguin populations in the Antarctic," he said.

Navulur said that satellite imagery provides such a precise view from space "that we are able to proactively observe environmental changes which unravel human footprints from thousands of years ago, such as the Ararat anomaly, and contribute to space archeology in a real and meaningful manner."

Taylor hopes that a future DigitalGlobe satellite image might catalyze a scientific organization like National Geographic to launch an expedition to explore up under the ice cap on Mt. Ararat's Western Plateau at the 15,000-foot level.

The "game-changing" WorldView-3 satellite, Taylor said, "might just accomplish that goal, as that will be the world's first commercial satellite to have that skill set … a quantum leap in satellite technology!"

Dogged determination

Additional analytical techniques have aided Taylor in his mission. He recently made use of a panchromatic texture uniqueness analysis of the anomaly, provided by remote sensing researcher and Ph.D. candidate Francois Luus from the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and Luus' research supervisor, Sunil Maharaj.

Imagery used in the work was gleaned by the QuickBird satellite mission at 61 centimeters resolution in 2003. All the details of that recent analysis of the Mt. Ararat anomaly can be found in the following six-page report at:http://goo.gl/f8O3gs

Luus told Space.com that Taylor displays the tenacity and dogged determination characteristic of a successful investigator.

"His ability to rally support and repeatedly obtain specially commandeered satellite imagery of the Ararat anomaly is inspiring," Luus said.

Solving the riddle

Luus' texture analysis completed will help Taylor and others determine the anomaly's identity, Luus said.

"The texture uniqueness analysis we performed provides a more objective artificial intelligence perspective that shows us the parts of the anomaly that have novel textures and warrant further investigation," Luus said. "As a remote-sensing researcher, every pixel is given its due consideration, and good imagery is invaluable," he said.

Further study may consider the locations pinpointed by the uniqueness search to find clues about an artifact underlying the anomaly, Luus said.

"We are very excited about the new DigitalGlobe WorldView-3 satellite, which can truly shed some new light on the anomaly with its very high panchromatic and multispectral resolutions," Luus said. "Imagery of this quality may finally solve the riddle of the Ararat anomaly, or at least become the subject of a very satisfying remote sensing analysis," he said.

Source: Space.com 

Mystery object in lake on Saturn's moon Titan intrigues scientists

Nasa's Cassini probe took image last year as it passed by planet's largest moon – nothing seen when other images taken

The mystery object, described as a 'magic island' appeared out of nowhere in radar images of a hydrocarbon sea on Saturn's giant moon, Titan. Photograph: JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell/NASA/PA

Scientists are investigating a mystery object that appeared and then vanished again from a giant lake on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

They spotted the object in an image taken by Nasa's Cassini probe last year as it swung around the alien moon, more than a billion kilometres from Earth. Pictures of the same spot captured nothing before or some days later.

Little more than a white blob on a grainy image of Titan's northern hemisphere, the sighting could be an iceberg that broke free of the shoreline, an effect of rising bubbles, or waves rolling across the normally placid lake's surface, scientists say.

Astronomers have named the blob the "magic island" until they have a better idea what they are looking at. "We can't be sure what it is yet because we only have the one image, but it's not something you would normally see on Titan," said Jason Hofgartner, a planetary scientist at Cornell University in New York. "It is not something that has been there permanently."

Titan is one of the most extraordinary places in the solar system. The land is strewn with hydrocarbon dunes that rise above lakes fed by rivers of liquid methane and ethane. The atmosphere is so thick, and the gravity so weak, that a human could strap on wings and flap into the air. That air is laced with lethal hydrogen cyanide.

The largest moon of Saturn – there are more than 60 smaller ones – is the only place beyond Earth known to have stable liquids on its surface and rain falling from its skies. Spacecraft have mapped scores of lakes there. The three biggest are named after mythological beasts, the Kraken, Ligeia and Punga, and are large enough to qualify as seas, or mares.

The US team made their curious discovery while poring over radar images of Ligeia mare, a 150-metre-deep sea that stretches for hundreds of kilometres in Titan's northern hemisphere. Among the snapshots taken in 2007, 2009 and 2013 was one with the strange white feature, about six miles off the mountainous southern shore.

NASA handout photo dated 26/04/07 of the area in Titan's Ligeia mare before the object was seen (top) and 10/07/13 of the 'magic island'. Photograph: JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell/NASA/PA

Roughly 12 miles long and six miles wide, the bright spot appears in an image dated 10 July 2013 but is missing from pictures of the same spot taken previously and on 26 July. Hofgartner said the team had ruled out any errors in the radar imaging equipment that could result in the blob.

Through a process of elimination, the scientists have whittled the number of potential explanations down to four. It could be one or more icebergs floating around, or material in suspension beneath the surface. But Cassini's radar might also have picked upseen a rush of bubbles coming from the depths of the sea, or captured the first signs of deep-sea waves on Titan.

Last year's Cassini fly-by found that Ligeia mare, Titan's second-largest lake, was as smooth as glass. The tranquil expanse of liquid methane and ethane had no waves or surface ripples larger than 1mm.

The profound stillness may be because the wind on Titan is so feeble. But that could be changing. Titan's orbital path and tilted axis make for seasons that last for seven Earth years. The northern hemisphere is gently warming now, as spring gives way to summer, which arrives in earnest in 2017. Warmer weather brings stronger winds, and stronger windswhich bring waves.

"This may be waves picking up. The sun is shining brighter, and that energy can be powering the winds. All you would need is a light breeze, around half a metre per second," said Hofgartner, whose study appeared in the journal Nature Geoscience.

But the wind on Titan may never be strong enough to stir truly impressive waves. "If you had a large enough surfboard, you could certainly float there, but I don't think you'd really get the waves you'd want," Hofgartner said. The hydrocarbon seas, he added, are a chilly -180C.

If waves are the cause of the curious white blob, then Cassini spotted them before they had spread more widely across the sea. Follow-up images in the next few months are expected to shed more light on the mystery.

"We now have the first tantalising glimpse of some sort of dynamical process in one of Titan's largest seas," said John Zarnecki, professor ofspace science at the Open University.

"The observations with Cassini's radar are close to the limit of sensitivity so hard to interpret. But they do seem to be the first sign of something going on in the sea. Is it floating solids or erupting gas bubbles from below or wave action? We just don't know. The one thing we can say with certainty is that we just have to go back to Titan – but this time with a sea floater so that we can see close up just what is happening in the seas of this incredible place."

In March, some of the researchers who worked with Hofgartner reported what may have been glimpses of tiny waves on another Titan sea, called Punga mare. Instruments aboard Cassini found that sunlight reflecting off the sea was brighter than expected in places, an effect that could be caused by waves lapping at the shore.

Nasa has toyed with the idea of sending a boat to sail on the seas of Titan, but the proposal lost out to a mission to Mars. There are still hopes of exploring the moon with two other Nasa missions. One would fly a balloon on Titan and release a drone to map the surface. The other aims to drop a submarine into the largest of Titan's seas, the 300-metre-deep Kraken mare.

Source: The Guardian