Kosmische Regen

Kosmische Regen
VPRO Noorderlicht / 25 min / 22-02-1998
De Aarde wordt continu gebombardeerd door sneeuwballen zo groot als een woonhuis, die de oorsprong zouden zijn van het water op Aarde. Dat stelt de Amerikaanse fysicus Dr Louis Frank. Het probleem is dat niemand ‘m gelooft. Ziet hij ze vliegen of is hij kandidaat voor een Nobelprijs?

tekst van de uitzending:

VPRO NOORDERLICHT
UITZENDING 22 FEB 1998
AFLEVERING: KOSMISCHE REGEN
door Jos Wassink
eindredaktie Rob van Hattum

DR LOUIS A. FRANK
LEEST UIT ZIJN BOEK “THE BIG SPLASH”
I live on the plains of lowa, drive a pick-up truck, and build instruments for satellites that study the Earth. I am conservative in the way I dress, in the way I lead my life, in the people I vote for, and in the way I do science. Science is my life.
But four years ago pictures relayed from an orbiting satellite led me to a radical departure from the scientific mainstream. I proposed that the Earth was being showered by a vast number of previously undetected, small comets. I calculated that about twenty of these comets, each about the size of a small house and made essentially of water and ice, plunge through our at mosphere each and every minute of every day. If I am correct, then the water that we fish in, bathe in, drink, and are made of, is of extraterrestrial origin.

DR GEORGE PARKS
GEOPHYSICS PROGRAM, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
He is proposing completely radically different idea about where the water comes from. This is very very radical in the sense that water is so important for the planet Earth and he is proposing fundamentally new ideas and that is why it is so important to understand whether what he¹s saying is truly corect or not.

TITEL: KOSMISCHE REGEN

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
DPT. OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
This is an example of one of the electronics boxes that one the electrical engineers, usually from the department of engineering of this university would design, and then the actual housing was by mechnical engineers. You see the gold housing that surrounds that and they would design that to put int on a spacecraft, right. The actual science instruments, this is just some sort of computer that flew along with it, but the science instruments would have sensors on them. Like this one. It¹s pal went to in fact Venus and was one of the first instruments by Venus and these are geigertubes. The same thing you would have if indeed you had a geigercounter to prospect for Uranium. Only we were prospecting for radiation zones around planets and what was in interplanetary space.

COMMENTAAR
Dr Louis Frank¹s raakte als student aan de universiteit van Iowa betrokken bij het ruimteonderzoek. Hier bouwde men instrumenten voor ruimtemissies. Inmiddels heeft Frank al meer dan veertig missies op z¹n naam staan.

DR LOUIS A. FRANK
And then we went onto the larger instruments like the one I have in Gallileo or the imager on POLAR, which rather than 2 year and 100, 200, 300.000 dollars, now you¹re working for ten, twelve years and a considerable amount of money. The instruments are more sophisticated, more complex, but the excitement is still there.

COMMENTAAR
Na 25 jaar gedegen ruimteonderzoek onderging Frank¹s carriere midden jaren tachtig een drastische wending. Zijn verklaring van onbegrepen satellietbeelden maakte hem tot wetenschappelijk rebel tegen wil en dank.

DR LOUIS A. FRANK
In the fall of 1981 we launched a spacecraft with an instrument from our laboratory, the spacecraft was called Dynamics Explorer I and the camera was intended to look at the Earth¹s aurora, the global aurora. Shoot clear high above the northern hemisphere and look down at the hemisphere and see this magnificent ring of light, that is in fact the Northern Lights.
We achieved this excellent view of the aurora, no one had ever achieved these global pictures. You could see the Earth and you can see on it¹s poles the dancing ring of light that in fact are the Northern Lights. There is another strange thing that we saw in the images. We¹re supposed to also see a glow in the atmosphere due to the sun shining on the dayside. But there was something peculiar about the illumination or the light. Rather than being completely smooth there were these occasional black spots that occurred. And this really puzzled us because it was not supposed to happen at all.And all of a sudden, this camera sees this mystical transient black dots in the upper atmosphere.

The first conclusion, the one that any scientist must make, was that something was wrong with the camera, the camera must be putting artificial black spots into the atmosphere, at least as far as the images were concerned. And we spend, John Sigwarth and I spend years trying to show in fact that these black spots were really camera artifacts, that the only sensible thing to do, because the interpretation of these and the finding of these has enormous implications. But in the end, during the X-mas vacation of 1985, I spend strawling the halls here wondering what am I gonna do?
In the end, there was a very simple explanation why these objects were there and that was: it turns out that water is a very good spunge for absorbing the light from the atmosphere and that if you took some tens of tons of water and spread it over the 50 to 100 kms, you can create the black holes, you know the dark holes in the atmosphere.

COMMENTAAR
Invallend zonlicht, weerkaatst door de atmosfeer, wordt door water geabsorbeerd. Vanuit de satelliet ziet dat eruit als een zwart vlekje tegen een lichte achtergrond.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
When this came up, this by accident there were two things that could be done. One was to take the whole lot of it, put it in your desk and forget about it and the other was to inform the scientific community of which your findings were.

COMMENTAAR
Frank moest verklaren waar het water vandaan kwam dat hij hoog in de atmosfeer dacht waar te nemen. Hij trok de opzienbarende conclusie dat het water afkomstig moest zijn van tien meter grote sneeuwballen uit de ruimte. Tijdens de val, zo stelde hij, verbrokkelt en verdampt de sneeuw tot een hoge wolk van 50 kilometer doorsnee. De hypothetische sneeuwballen uit de ruimte noemde hij Œkleine kometen¹.

DR LOUIS A. FRANK
We have the evidence in fact that these objects exist and so we published and this is after a lot of thought and a lot of work and it¹s the only thing that you could do. It was our misfortune in fact that these black dots appeared in the images.

COMMENTAAR
Ondanks een negatief advies van referenten en tegen persoonlijke waarschuwingen in werd Frank¹s artikel geplaatst. Het verscheen in 1986. Uitgerekend op 1 april.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
You have no choice, I mean to hide it in your desk is not showing integrity, in fact with warnings from everybody. They told us the conclusion and the impact is so great that your scientific carreer will be destroyed if you publish it.

COMMENTAAR
Frank berekende dat er iedere minuut zo¹n twintig kleine kometen in de atmosfeer vallen. Ze vallen daar uiteen en verdampen tot hoge wolken die zich mengen met de atmosfeer.
Uiteindelijk valt het water van de komeet op de aarde als regen, kosmische regen, die de oosprong zou zijn van het water op aarde.
Frank¹s ideeën vielen niet in goede aarde. Deskundigen uit astrofysica, meteorologie en oceanografie reageerden vol ongeloof en kwamen met allerlei bezwaren tegen zijn theorie.
Kometendeskundige professor Mayo Greenberg bijvoorbeeld kan zich niet voorstellen dat er zulke kleine kometen bestaan.

PROF. MAYO GREENBERG
ASTROFYSICA, RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
The problem with the small objects hitting the Earth at the rate at which Frank thinks he sees them, is the fact that they only survive for the order of an hour or so. Ten meter objects survive for an hour at approximately the distance from the Sun as the Earth is. They evaporate very quickly.

COMMENTAAR
Maar volgens Frank hebben de kosmische sneeuwballen een koolstofmantel die ze tegen verdamping beschermt. Pas vlak voor de inslag breekt de mantel als een eierschaal en komt het water vrij.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
Survival without some kind of caoting will only be several minutes. In that we agree, but the fact is when you start considering having this kind of heat shield of carbon, of carbondust, then he whole story changes.

COMMENTAAR
Greenberg daarentegen kan zich de constructie van een sneeuwbal met een koolstofschil niet voorstellen. Dat klopt niet met wat hij weet over de oorsprong van kometen.

PROF. MAYO GREENBERG
When the solar system formed, it was made out the material that was in the cloud of dust and gas which collapsed to form this solar system. The dust was made up itself of some rocky silicane core material, also micron in size, with organic mantels and surrounding these mantels ices, and we see that observationally.
As a matter of fact, if you want to construct a comet out of all the available materials that make up the solar system, it turns out that only 30 % , one third of a comet is waterice, one third. Pure ice does not exist in comets.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
These objects are very different in compositon than the large comets. It really was a shock to us, we did not expect that. We were using the same analogue: look at bright sodium at Hale-Bopp, bright dust at Hale-Bopp, we have the filters to do it, we measured it directly with our camera. We turned our camera¹s to the small comets coming into the atmosphere. No sodium, no dust, what are they?

PROF. MAYO GREENBERG
As a matter of fact, when I heard Dr Frank give a talk on this, I said I don¹t know what these objects are, if they are, but one thing I would say that if they¹re pure water ice, they¹re no comets.

COMMENTAAR
Een andere tegenwerping kwam van professor Donahue van de universiteit van Michigan. Hij was één van de referenten van Frank¹s artikel. Als expert in atmosferen rond planeten vroeg hij zich af waarom er op andere planeten niets te merken is van de kleine kometen.

PROF. THOMAS DONAHUE
PLANETARY AND ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Mars for example is a very dry planet. If Earth is bombarded by small comets in such a rate, why isn¹t Mars. And if Mars is, where is the water. It isn¹t there.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
The amount of water we have on Mars is 10 times less than the water we have on Earth because it¹s a smaller planet and it has less gravity to pull these in, to suck these in. So the question simply is: is there water under the polar cap or is something else going on. Or there¹s no small comets at all. There is water at Mars, but we don¹t know how much. It¹s an indeterminate factor in the debate.

COMMENTAAR
Een ander probleem dat Donahue zag was de Maan. Waarom is daar geen water?

PROF. THOMAS DONAHUE
Well, again there¹s a problem. During the good old Apollo days we put a small seismic network on the Moon. These should have been triggered by moonquakes set off every time one of these 10 meter size objects hits the moon. No such seismic events have been discovered.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
A hunk of ice is heavy and dense. And in fact if it were to hit the surface of the moon, it would create in fact a seismic wave, but these objects are much less dense. It¹s snow and the snow is very fluffy and has no strength whatsoever.

PROF. THOMAS DONAHUE
Fluffy or not, they have a mass and a velocity and both are large. The product of mass and velocity is momentum and the momentum transferred from the comets to the moon is a certain amount of momentum. No matter how it is deposited and the result should be that the moon recoils, the surface of the moon recoils when that momentum is deposited on the moon, and that¹s what starts an earthquake or a moonquake.

COMMENTAAR
In de jaren na de publicatie lag Frank onophoudelijk onder vuur. Frank besefte dat hij alle tegenwerpingen terstond moest weerleggen om zijn theorie staande te houden.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
No matter how rough it got over that decade, I never doubted it. Otherwise, I wouldn¹t have risked my entire career by publishing this paper. We knew enough from the Dynamics Explorer data, the comet storms that came in and correlated with radar measurements etcetera that they simply, simply were there.

COMMENTAAR
Inmiddels trof Frank voorbereidingen voor z¹n revanche. Hij ontwiepr en bouwde een nieuwe camera. Officieel voor de bestudering van het Noorderlicht, maar stiekum ook geschikt om met grote scherpte de gaten in de atmosfeer te registreren.
In februari 1996, vijftien jaar na Dynamics Explorer, draaide Frank¹s nieuwe camera om de Aarde.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
We were very fortunate to later fly a very special camera. Very sophisticated camera that could go up again and look at the Earth¹s aurora and look at it high resolution fast, make movie sequences of the images of the aurora and see it dancing around the polar caps again and there it was.
You want to know what our first confirmation was? Well, John Sigwarth was in the control room at Goddard, as we were firing up, turning on the instruments. And I was here, making sure that everything was right with the instrument. The images were beautiful, there¹s aurora, here¹s the temperatures and there¹s the voltages and then he said: Oh, by the way there¹s the atmospheric holes.

DR JOHN B. SIGWARTH
POLAR PROJECT SCIENTIST, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
This is the original raw image that just came in a couple of minutes ago from POLAR spacecraft, the visibible imaging system on the POLAR spacecraft.
– Does it show black holes as well?
Yes it does, actually in this particular case, there are two black atmospheric holes in the dayside of the Earth over at the lefthand side of the image.
If we go in and look at the hole itself. So we blow it up. Here¹s a blow-up of the image and here¹s the atmospheric hole. It is the entire region through here. In this case then we have a group of pixels that were actually approximately six pixels grouped together that caused this spot, which we then can identify as an atmospheric hole because of it¹s total unlikeliness of being a random event.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
The results when they were announced in the spring of last year in 97 are very powerfull results and were not expected by the scientific community.
The number of people that were puzzled and disbelieving was down by an enormous factor but there were still people unconvinced by the finding thinking well, this camera has the same noise as the last camera.

COMMENTAAR
Dat standpunt wordt ingenomen door docter George Parks uit Seattle, momenteel Frank¹s belangrijkste opponent. Parks heeft ook een camera in de ruimte. In feite zit z¹n camera zelfs gebroederlijk naast die van Frank in de POLAR-satelliet.

DR GEORGE PARKS,
GEOPHYSICS PROGRAMME, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
We sensed that the observations would need some independent verification whether they¹re real or not and from that point of view we certainly had this obligation to the scientific community. To look at out data.
Our images of the dayglow from our own camera, we actually see the same kind of black dots that Dr Frank has talked about. And they appear in the dayglow as he says, so we verified that they actually exist.
But then, after analysing these black dots a while, we had decided in to the calibration images we had obtained from the same camera before the camera was launched on the spacecraft. What was surprising was that these calibration images also showed black dots, thus we concluded from that that because there aren¹t any snowballs in the laboratory that what the data is revealing is that these black dots are produced by the instrument noise.
– Do you know if a similar calibration has been performed by Dr Frank as well?
– Ah, I don¹t have an answer to that. We have requested data, calibration data from him and we have not received them….

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
We¹ve looked at Parks¹s images and by and large everything in Parks¹s images is noise. And in fact in 1000 images, he has only nine detections of small comets. In fact, Parks¹s camera in flight detects large holes in his images that he didn¹t see in his laboratory. I agree with with him, 99,99 % of his data are noise, I agree, but these very large holes which he does not see in his laboratory data are the ones to be investigated for real phenomena. And he ignores those.
The camera¹s are operated side-by-side, The question is whether or not at the same time at the same place in the atmosphere, as long as the pictures are taken simultaneous, taken at the same time, do you see, do both camera¹s see an atmospheric hole? And the answer is yes.
It¹s been published in our october papers and ignored by Parks.

DR GEORGE PARKS
The images have many dark spots in both of these, so if you overlay the both together, there is certain coincidence that the two will show up in the same place. And I believe that¹s what has happenend. There are enough dark spots in each image that if you put two together, you will have certain chance that they will coincide, and I believe this is what he has shown.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
The fact remains is that the probablity of seeing large black spots in the atmosphere with both camera¹s in the same time with a very limited number of images, you know the probabilities are highly against it being noise.

DR GEORGE PARKS
We wanted to really understand if these black dots exist what are they: are they really snbowballs or are they instrument artefacts, Œcause that¹s the other possibility. So the answer is I believe that he IS analysing noise rather than something that¹s geophysical in nature.

COMMENTAAR
Niet iedereen is zo skeptisch als George Parks. De beelden van POLAR hebben anderen ervan overtuigd dat weldegelijk iets aan de hand is. Dat denkt ook Frank¹s tegenstrever van het eerste uur, Professor Donahue.

PROF. THOMAS DONAHUE
PLANETARY AND ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
These 50 km wide regions in the upper atmosphere where airglow is absorbed needs to be explained and since I don¹t believe and not many of my colleagues believe that the explanation profered by Dr Frank is tenable, I think that we need to find another explanation.

PROF. MAYO GREENBERG
ASTROFYSICA, RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
I can¹t imagine it has anything to do with comets, I can¹t imagine what causes the observations he¹s finding. If the observations are real, we may have an extremely interesting result for which we still don¹t have an explanation.

DR. LOUIS A. FRANK
LEEST UIT ŒTHE BIG SPLASH¹
If I am right about the existence of the small comets, a whole generation of scientists in a dozen different fields will have been working from geophysical and astronomical assumptions that are simply not correct. The textbooks in a dozen sciences will have to be rewritten.

DR GEORGE PARKS
GEOPHYSICS PROGRAMME, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
If there are really small comets as Dr Frank has proposed, I will be the first to nominate him for a Nobel Prize.

AFTITELING
CAMERA Willem Heshusius
GELUID Bert van den Dungen
MONTAGE Jac Verheul
MIXAGE Jaap van Zoonen
KLEURCORRECTIE Hans Buitink
LEADER Marco Vermaas
COMMENTAAR Tessel Blok
RESEARCH Jacqueline de Vree
Ger Wieberdink
REDACTIE Hilbert Kamphuisen
Hansje van Etten
Simon Rozendaal
Karin Schagen
Annemiek Smit
Marjan Tjaden
Jos Wassink

MMV Dr Alex Dessler
Patrick Huyghe
University of Iowa
Eugene T. Howard
Denise Davis
Stacey Palen
Jeff Dolen
University of Washington
Mitch Brittnacher
John O¹Mara

ARCHIEF NASA
NOVA
PRODUCTIE Madeleine Somer
Karin Spiegel
SAMENSTELLING en REGIE Jos Wassink
EINDREDACTIE Rob van Hattum

© Het Inzicht / Jos Wassink, 1998

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