After Mars Science Laboratory: GO ONE WAY TO MARS!

MARS 1 WAY IS CLEARLY ENCODED IN TORAH. On 7/27/2012 John Brandon published an article entitled Mars One Plans Suicide Mission to Red Planet by 2023. His story is about a proposal to send a 1-way mission to Mars, but it isn't at all meant to be a suicide mission. Rather it's about taking an increasing number of people to Mars to live there permanently. See the Mars One video. IN A ROCKET is at the same absolute skip as the axis term, MARS 1 WAY. Mars is supposed to be a largely dead, desert world now. Two lines from the top is “There remained not any green thing either tree or herb of the field through all the land.” Crossing MARS 1 WAY is “If they were wise they would understand this they would discern their latter end.”  That sounds like Brandon’s suicide synopsis. In the open text is bread from heaven, something astronauts would hope for via resupply missions. But also there is surely cut off. There is also a warning to “Escape to the mountain lest you be swept away.”  It sounds like a warning about an asteroid impact. One mountain on Mars (Arsia Mons) has caves that might often shelter (see one on the lower right side of Matrix 1 below). CAVE shares a letter with Escape to the mountain. People who want a shot at the mission can buy a lotto ticket. LOTTO shares a letter with bread from heaven. Brandon's article is shown under the matrix. After it I'll document the truth about Martian air pressure, a truth kept secret by NASA since at least 1976.

Mars One Plan Suicide Mission to Red Planet for 2023

By John Brandon, Published July 25, 2012. Foxnews.Com

       There’s an old joke about sending someone you hate on a one-way trip to Mars. Now, a Dutch entrepreneur has formed a company around this concept -- and it’s no joke. Bas Lansdorp, the 35-year-old founder of Mars One, told FoxNews.com his company is serious about a one-way mission. The company will hold a worldwide lottery next year to select 40 people for a training team. They will then set up a mock colony in the desert, possibly somewhere in the U.S., for three months. This initial team will be reduced to ten crew members.

       They will then be sent to Mars, never again to return.

       “We will send humans to Mars in 2023,” he told FoxNews.com. “They will live there the rest of their lives. There will be a habitat waiting for them, and we’ll start sending four people every two years.”

       The habitat will consist of several housing structures that Mars One will launch before 2023. In 2016, the company plans to launch the first supply vessel. In 2018, it plans to send a rover.Lansdorp says his four-person company will coordinate the launches, but it will work with suppliers for the ship and rockets. For example, Mars One might use the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which is currently being developed as a launch system for larger spacecraft.

       To help fund the project, Lansdorp says there could be a reality show based on the selection process and test colony. Paul Römer, the co-founder and executive producer of the show "Big Brother," is an adviser for Mars One. Other advisers include Nobel Prize winner Dr. Gerard 't Hooft and Brian Enke, an analyst at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who studies space missions.

       'We will send humans to Mars in 2023. They will live there the rest of their lives.' - Mars One founder Bas Lansdorp

       Even with the complexities of sending a human to Mars, attention has centered on the one-way trip. Those selected won’t come back to Earth, although a return mission to retrieve the explorers might not be out of the question. 

       “In theory, it is less complex to get people back to Earth once you have a sustainable settlement on Mars,” Lansdorp told FoxNews.com. “However, our astronauts will be offered a one-way trip. We have no idea when it will be possible to offer return tickets.”

       Norbert Kraft, a former NASA researcher who studied group psychology for long-term human missions, says the Mars One crew will have to be carefully selected by psychiatrists and prepped to deal with psychological factors like how to collaborate in stressful situations and anticipate problems. Meanwhile, NASA has maintained that future missions will probably involve robots. That said, in late 2010, a director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California did make an off-hand comment about a DARPA project to send a spaceship with humans on a 100-year mission to Mars.

       Buzz Aldrin, the lunar module pilot with Neil Armstrong who landed on the moon, has maintained for years that the only way for humans to reach Mars is to plan a one-way mission. Still, the Mars One project faces some tough issues. Lansdorp says colonists would have to grow plants using a chemical process called hydroponics, which does not use soil. The spaceship design will have to be large enough to accommodate passengers and the fuel needed to reach the Red Planet, which is about 34 million miles from Earth at the closest launch point and orbital position. And, if there are any delays in developing the rockets or technology needed for the trip, Mars One would suffer.

       Enke says scientists have learned more about the Martian climate and geography in recent years. He says scientists view a trip to Mars as safer and more affordable now than in the past. Missions that involve only robots will not capture the public’s attention as much as a human mission.

       “Over those next ten years, NASA has planned a series of highly complex robotic missions to return a small sample of Martian regolith back to Earth. The cost of these missions will easily exceed $5 billion. When judged in terms of cost-benefit ratio or chances of mission success, these uber-expensive and risky robotic missions now have a hard time competing with simplified human missions,” says Enke.

       Enke and Lansdorp both argued that a human can explore in a way a robot can’t. There’s a six-minute delay between communications from Earth to the robot, so the robots would need to be highly autonomous and pre-programmed. Yet, a human can make decisions and judgments as needed. Enke, who prefers the term “extended stay” mission, says round-trip missions are much more complex because of the need for a contingency return trip. The mission to Mars, he says, removes 90 percent of the uncertainty. “Most of the complexity in short-stay missions involves creating fuel for the return trip, landing and launching an ascent vehicle for the return, orbital rendezvous, or returning to Earth.”

      Still, Lansdorp has not quite announced how the Mars One lottery will work. The selection process will start next year, he says. Unfortunately, you can’t make any suggestions.

Vikings 1 and 2 - The Mistakes and Deception Begin

     On August 6, 2012 at 1:31 AM EST the U.S. landed the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, Curiosity, within 1 miles of 4.5 degrees South latitude, 137.4 degrees East longitude, at the foot of layered Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater. The landing altitude was about 4,400 meters below Mars areoid, the equivalent of Martian sea level. At that altitude, based on an accepted average pressure of 6.1 mbar at areoid and a scale height of 10.8 km, average annual pressure can be expected to be around 9.17 mbar. This compares to an average pressure on Earth at sea level of 1,013.25 mbar. Thus what is expected is a pressure that is less than 1% of the pressure that we have here at sea level.

       While temperatures may rise to a relatively balmy 32° F (0° C) they are expected to fall to a bone chilling -130° F (-90° C). The crater has a central mount that rises 5.5 km above the crater floor, where the average pressure should be only 5.5 mbar. All these pressure projections are based on pressures recorded by previous four landers with pressure transducers on board - mostly the two Vikings, but also briefly Mars Pathfinder (MPF), and Phoenix. The problem that I will discuss briefly below is that these transducers gave us faulty data. At best, the problems were due to tiny dust filters that jammed immediately upon landing for the Tavis pressure transducers used for the Vikings and MPF, and for the Vaisala pressure transducer used for Phoenix.

       Despite my warning to Dr. Ashwin Vasavada (Deputy Director of the Mars Science Lab - see Figure 13 for his picture) about the fact that a duplicate to the faulty transducer sent on Phoenix was slated to fly on MSL, to the best of my knowledge that instrument flew. We discussed the problem briefly at the Mars Society Convention in Dallas in August 2011, and again by phone in October, 2011, a month before the MSL's launch. He seemed to grasp the issue, but there was no follow-up that I know about, perhaps because the mission was set to be more about geology than meteorology.

        Correct understanding of Martian pressure is crucial to successful planning of and funding for future Mars missions. My son and I have accumulated over 450 pages of data showing that Government supplied information is in error. What we are not yet certain about is why the pressures being supplied to the public are too low to explain the weather on Mars. It would appear that there are only two possibilities. The first explanation is a relatively innocent one – a combination of inadequate funding and incompetence. The joint paper that my son and I wrote about Martian pressure problems is based on NASA/JPL mistakes uncovered. Originally I wrote that this article (written soley by me) will go further, discussing the possibility that the mistakes were deliberate in nature, designed to kill both funding and exploration of the Red Planet. HOWEVER, on August 20th, 2012, I found an announcement that a new Mars mission is slated for 2016. It's supposed to be relatively cheap ($425 million maximum), and but its aim (to check out what makes the Martian core so different from Earth's) has nothing to do with the question of air pressure or weather on Mars. The announcement may just be an election ploy with the intent to cancel the project after the election in November, 2012.

       An example of the a past funding problem can be seen with the meteorological unit sent on Phoenix.  There was no anemometer included to accurately measure wind speed. Taylor et al. (2008) state, “We had hoped to include an anemometer in the MET package.  Faced with a lack of resources to achieve this, and the real desire to have some wind information we decided to make use of the SSI camera and have a novel Telltale to achieve this.” But their Telltale was too inaccurate. In fact, they state that when wind speed exceeded 10 meters per second the Telltale reaches maximum deflection, goes horizontal, and “loses its wind speed/deflection correlation ability.”  This means that it’s worthless in determining winds that exceed 22.4 miles per hour. By the way, the weather package with no wind meter cost U.S. taxpayers $37,000,000.

WHAT ARE THE GENERAL REASONS FOR ASSUMING THAT PUBLISHED PRESSURE DATA IS INCORRECT?  The enigma of dust devils (see Figure 1) and dust storms on Mars (with a near-vacuum pressure) was the first cause to question accuracy of accepted pressure values. Both Vikings showed consistent daily pressure spikes at the same times. They are highly correlated with how gas pressure in a sealed container would vary with Absolute temperature. We believe that dust kicked up on landing (see Figure 2) and sucked into to clog the tiny dust filters explain why the transducer "containers" were sealed, thus leaving the transducers out of contact with ambient atmospheric pressure conditions. Pressure fluctuations were linked to heating by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) or other heat-generating electronic operating cycles. When the heaters were most needed there was less than a 2% difference for predicted and reported pressures. The formula employed assumes a clogged air access tube/dust filter.

     Phoenix pressure transducer design problems included confusion by its manufacturer about dust filter location, and lack of information about nearby heat sources due to International Traffic and Arms Regulations. Further pressure questions arose from high densities encountered during aerobraking operations (particularly over the South Pole). Spectroscopy for pressure did not work over ice there. NASA could not replicate dust devils at 10 mbar without employing wind speeds 11+ times greater than associated with Martian dust devils. Sand dunes observed from HIRISE, and rapidly filled MER Spirit tracks (see Figures 3A and 3B) indicated sand movement that would require wind speeds of 80 mph at the assumed low pressures. These winds were not seen at either Viking, indicating higher pressures than recorded. Spiral clouds (see Figures 4A and 4B) with ~10 km-wide eye walls are seen over Arsia Mons where pressure was thought to be ~1 mbar. These things are all discussed in our technical paper at Basic Mars Report, and you can also get a quick overview of what we found at our Powerpoint. The standards that were used in conducting that research were in line with what would be acceptable at any respectable university. In fact, much of the writing was done by my son for his undergraduate courses in space physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. But we are now dealing with a new reality in which there are no plans by the U.S. for any further unmanned landings on Mars after the MSL.

       The new reality, which is part of the overall decline or death of almost all space exploration under the Obama Administration, is one that helped drive my son from space physics into theoretical particle physics for his PhD. But, as I hinted at earlier, the truth may go back to a time much earlier than Obama's assumption of office. There have been real reasons to question what our Government has been doing with respect to Mars back to at least 1976 when the Viking landers and orbiters arrived at Mars.

       The controversy started right with the first color pictures sent back from Mars showing a blue sky there (see Figures 5A and 5B). The following account is from pages 39-40 of DEAD MARS, DYING EARTH by Dr. John Brandenburg):

    The following day (sol 2 for Viking 1) was equally auspicious for JPL when the first color images were received.  As a crowd surrounded the monitors, the colors of the Martian landscape displayed themselves like an Arizona picture postcard: bright sunlight, blue sky flecked with hints of high clouds, reddish-brown soil and gray rocks. The technicians, scientists and media representatives were spellbound. It looked just like home – at least it looked very familiar to anyone who had seen the desert regions in the southwest of the United States. Who would have imagined that our first look at another world would appear so earthly?  An American flag was proudly emblazoned on a domed compartment of the spacecraft which figured prominently in the scene. Never had its red, white, and blue colors glowed so brightly as they did beneath the Martian sky that day. For the first time humans beheld the sky of a planet different from their own – and it was a reassuring deep blue.

    Amid the celebration, a very perplexed, newly graduated high school student named Ron Levin sat at a console at JPL. For over two hours Ron watched with the others as color images came in. Ron, the son of Dr. Gilbert Levin, a scientist connected with one of the tests aboard the lander, was fascinated. Like the rest of us, Ron saw the “blue sky” of Mars in the first color image. Unlike us, Ron also saw images of rocks with greenish patches on them.  While he watched, a Viking imaging team technician adjusted the color controls on every monitor in the laboratory, increasing the red channel so that the sky lost its blue tint and the color of the rocks shifted from an earthly reddish-brown to an unearthly, deep rusty-red hue.  When Ron attempted to adjust the monitors back to the original settings, he was told he’d be ejected from JPL if he persisted. To this day, Ron, now Dr. Ron Levin, physicist, makes it clear that, in his considerable estimation, there was no scientific justification for the adjustment in color. He speculates that the color was changed primarily because the planetary scientists took a dim view of the greenish patches on the rocks, which might have suggested to the public that some primitive form of plant life might be growing right on the surface of Mars. The sky of Mars has been red ever since.

       I delve into the sky color issue in greater detail elsewhere on my site, but MSL had indeed sent back new pictures showing a blueish sky. Perhaps there is a JPL technician who is slated to lose his or her job, but who wants to correct the sky color lie before moving on to some other field.

       One of the fundamental differences from a standard scientific approach I take when analyzing data, especially where there is controversy, is to turn a spotlight on the personalities and agendas of those backing the data or extraordinary challenges to it. In this case, the above sky color story is given to us by Dr. John Brandenburg. I have an extensive article about him on my site. I have also interviewed him at great length, and I've read two of his books. Earlier I mentioned the reporter John Brandon. He has long been interested in Mars, but sometimes he has problems in conveying the full implications of the Mars stories that he writes. His story about Brandenberg was very incomplete. Brandon published an article for FoxNews on April 1, 2011. It was that date, April Fool's Day, that led me to call Brandenberg's employer (Orbitec) to find out if he was a real person. When they put my call through to him, I learned that he was indeed real. But whereas Brandon wrote, "According to Brandenburg, the natural explosion, the equivalent of 1 million one-megaton hydrogen bombs, occurred in the northern Mare Acidalium region of Mars where there is a heavy concentration of radioactivity," Brandenburg presented a very different story shortly after his paper was accepted for publication by the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Unfortunately, in his rush to let us know the truth after getting the natural nuclear explosion idea printed in the aforementioned respectable forum, he chose a subsidy publisher, Adventures Unlimited Press. They tend to print somewhat weird material and they don't edit the text very well, leaving plenty of spelling mistakes. On page 179 of his 2011 book, LIFE AND DEATH ON MARS, Brandenberg writes of his newly announced Airburst (Martian nuclear war) idea:

"However this is a much more complex hypothesis than natural reactors. It involves not just great intelligence, but also great malice. Therefore the absence of a crater means that we must leave open the possibility that Mars was the site of an interstellar genocide on a planetary scale, like the planet Alderan of Star Wars. The idea that the whole of Mars may have been the site of mass murder is unimaginable except for the fact we have seen such things on Earth."

        In reference to ancient Martian civilization, Brandenburg writes that Mars and the Cydonia face (shown on Figures 6A and 6B) have been at the focus of his intense research for three decades now. On page 41 of DEAD MARS, DYING EARTH he indicates that a few hours after the Cydonia face image was taken at local sunset in Cydonia, JPL lied to the public by indicating that a second image of the area, taken when it had to be dark at Cydonia, had shown the face had disappeared. JPL, he alleges, said the earlier image was obviously a trick of light and shadow.

       Brandenburg, a plasma physicist with an impressive resume, left my son with the clear message that a probing interest in UFOs and ancient Martian history is not a career enhancing pursuit. His problems, combined with NASA funding cuts have basically convinced David to pursue other areas of physics for a career. I, however, continue my investigations into Mars because I believe they are fundamental to understanding who we really are, and what our place in the universe really is. It does, of course, help that I'm retired, with no boss to worry about.

       My bottom line on Brandenburg is as follows: If he's right, then our Government has long known (and lied) about alien presence on Earth and on Mars. It has chosen to stall (with 40 years of orbital flights) and then basically kill (using excuses of unbalanced Federal budgets and financial hard times) our unclassified space program to prevent panic like that associated with the broadcast of War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938. However, from my personal dealings with this man, and the company he works for or worked for, I'm reluctant to do more than point out his beliefs. Between the time that I first spoke to him on April 6, 2011, and the summer that year his company led my son to believe that they might offer him an internship there for the summer. But it turned out that the offer was valid only if I could help deliver funding for their research on cold fusion. To help make the vital link with a venture capitalist in California, Brandenberg and Orbitec needed to deliver a detailed project description by July, 2011. They failed to do so, even when I offered to help with the writing just in exchange for housing for the summer vacation in Madison, Wisconsin. Although Brandenburg and my son both delivered presentations about Mars in the same room two hours apart at the Mars Society Convention in Dayton, Ohio in 2010, we never met face to face. Our conversations ended with the possibility of an internship for David, however Brandenberg's ideas should at least considered when trying to get at truth about Mars.

PRESIDENTS JOHN F. KENNEDY, RICHARD M. NIXON. On September 12, 1962 President Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” By July 20, 1969 we were there with Apollo 11. It took us just 6 years 10 months 8 days to fulfill an ancient dream. But the far more important dream of sending people to Mars died at the hand of President Nixon when he cancelled Apollos 18, 19 and 20, and put an emphasis on the Space Shuttle that took us nowhere but Low Earth Orbit. The last man left the moon during Nixon's Administration on December 14, 1972.

PRESIDENT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA AND NASA DIRECTOR CHARLES BOLDEN. Obama allowed the Space Shuttle to die with no immediate replacement. He put our access to an International Space Station that we largely built and paid for into the hands of the Russians. For 40 years we have had no meaningful space exploration. Now we have a NASA Director, Charles Bolden, who let it be known that one of the space agency's primary missions is to improve relations with Muslim countries. Why?

PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN. To best answer the above question, we may need to pull back and look to events under President Truman (Figure 16) beginning near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, then follow that history and hear what experts have found (or admitted to). The reason to consider the entire Roswell Incident is simple. If our Government did recover an alien craft with alien bodies, then it established a policy of denial and coverup at that time in 1947. With such a policy in force, it's obvious that evidence of an ancient civilization on Mars (at Cydonia) or of an ancient nuclear war there like that spoken of by Dr. Brandenberg would not receive a friendly reception by our Government. It would also explain why our Government has stonewalled for so long on the issue of sending people there. Figure 16 shows Truman with our first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal. Forrestal doesn't look too happy in the photo. Soon after it he committed suicide (or was murdered). Supposedly he opposed keeping the Roswell Incident a secret.    

       One of the best ways to pour water on the flames of any passion to explore Mars further is to paint a portrait of that planet as being too hostile to support life. To do this  NASA/JPL portrayed the atmosphere as being far less dense than it is. But not everyone at JPL or in NASA is in step with this intent. It seems that each time we hear more from them lately, there's more evidence that the air is denser on Mars than believed before.The problem is that they give us the evidence of blowing sand, running water, and more water vapor in the atmosphere, but they never dare to tell us what it really means in terms of air density.The 6.1 mbar areoid pressure is considered too sacred.

DR. ROBERT ZUBRIN, INTERNATIONAL MARS SOCIETY'S PRESIDENT. Before discussing Dr. Zubrin (shown in Figure 10 with my son) and his ideas, please take a minute to view his testimony before the Senate in 2003. The statement at the end of the video about going back to the Moon by 2020 was undone by Obama's election.

       My son attended three of Zubrin's International Mars Society Conventions (Boulder, CO in 2008, Dayton, OH in 2010 and Dallas, TX in 2011). David was a guest speaker at the last two. I went to the last two, and was a speaker at Dallas. Each convention begins on a Thursday night and runs through Sunday afternoon. So David has observed Zubrin for 12 days. I've done so for 8 days, and I spoke to him by phone on other occasions. David and I have also read most of his books. Born in 1962, Zubrin often acts like a teenager. While he's a brilliant visionary who will no doubt have a city named after him on Mars some day, he's also (in my opinion) an angry, frustrated, and very naïve guy who needs to learn to listen much better if he's ever going to see his life-long dream of Mars colonization come true. He spends far too much time at his conventions out in the hallway selling and autographing his books, and not enough time in the lecture halls hearing what his guest speakers have to say. In this sense he lets his conventions get away from him. His political savvy also leaves much to be desired. His books seem to insult everyone (especially his satire, THE HOLY LAND which portrays Christian Fundamentalists as Muslim terrororists). I have much more to say about this man who is often portayed as central to Mars exploration, but he merits his own page on my site. See Zubrin and Mars.

       I must give Zubrin credit for one astute statement. At the convention in Dayton in 2010 he told us that the only way for the U.S. to get to Mars (round trip) was to do it all during the reign of one U.S. president, as was the case when Kennedy set a goal of sending men to the Moon by the end of what he hoped would have been his second term in office. The moment that a president (like Obama) sets a goal of getting there in 20 or 30 years, he is in effect killing the program because he can't control what later administrations (or Congress) will do to annual budgets. It should be noted that President Obama never got one single annual budget passed by Congress (even when the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate).

My son and I have challenged two major professors to an open debate: JAMES TILLMAN, Director of the Viking Computer Facility, and DR. ANDREW P. INGERSOLL, Professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology.

       Tillman and Ingersoll are probably more responsible than anyone else is (with the exception of those who designed faulty pressure transducers) in assigning the low pressure at areoid on Mars. Again, all the data we audited is derived directly from what Professor Tillman (shown on Figure 8) has posted on his web site. His initial attitude toward David's inquiries was condescending with a lot of incomplete answers for critical questions about Viking Tavis pressure transducers. Then, out of the blue, he sent David an apology. On 11/23/2010 he wrote, "A relative said I was too harsh in my responses to you, and I hope you will forgive me and erase them from our Martian history." As for Dr. Ingersoll (see Figure 9A below), although he did not accept our challenge for a public debate, he did debate us via e-mail and that full DATA DEBATE is here. While he apparently thinks we are impudent, our offer to debate him (and Professor Tillman or anyone else) in public, on live TV, anywhere, any time, stands. I have personally debated Tillman over the phone for about an hour (17-year old David was too intimidated by his reputation to do battle with him). While I was shocked that he was no match for me, I'm not sure if that was because of his health (which wasn't good) or because he knew that we were right, but he wasn't at liberty to do more than apologize to David. Both Tillman and Ingersoll have, to different extents, built careers based around the low atmospheric pressure assertions for Mars. The 6.1 mbar pressure figure is deadly when it comes to arguing for more funding of Mars missions

ASTRONAUTS BUZZ ALDRIN AND EDGAR MITCHELL. Buzz Aldrin (Figure 14), the second man to walk on the moon, clearly stated on C-SPAN that there is a monolith on one of the moons of Mars (Phobos). Click here to see him say it in the last 13 seconds of a 61-second video, and watch how his manuscript was taken from him and how fast he was cut off the air when he did. I have more about him at  ALDRIN AND OBAMA. Aldrin isn't the only lunar astronaut to make extraordinary claims. Edgar Mitchell (Figure 15) has been clear about the Roswell crash being real (hear interview of Mitchell at 3:47 into this link), about aliens being here, and about how, at least in the past, our Government would threaten the lives of people who knew too much about this matter. Since I've been threatened too, I know he's right. I have evidence about another lunar astronaut who saw UFOs on his flight to the moon, but it is only hearsay for now so I can't publish it.

THE ROLE OF THE PRESS: CNN'S JOHN ZARRELLA. One of our objectives in driving to and speaking at the Mars Society Convention in Dallas in 2011 was to get the proof of higher Martian air density into the hands of the press, and specifically into the hands of John Zarrella. As is shown on Figure 11, we succeeded in giving a copy of our report to him and to Pat Duggins (on the left in Figure 11) of National Public Radio. Both men were only there for a dinner where they spoke. Zarrella promised to check with NASA about our report, but in informing us that he would get back to us after checking with NASA, he was also letting us know that he couldn't go against the party (i.e., Government) line. And so, he can publically lament the death of our space program, but he can't help us supply the ammo required to save it. His access to what's left of our science programs is likely tied to pleasing the masters of those programs.

The Evidence for Higher Than Advertised Martian Air Pressure.  All Roffman research into Mars began with a Current Topics in Space Science for my son. He needed a topic for his course. I suggested that he investigate how dust devils (often present on the beach in back of our home) could also form on Mars where the pressure and atmospheric density was so low. Frankly, he struggled just to keep his paper short enough (5 pages) to meet course requirements. In fact, he found so much evidence for a fatal flaw in the 6.1 mbar figure that he was invited to take a Special Topics Honors Course just to focus on the problem. In that course the paper grew to about 40 pages, and when he finished it, with my help, the research became a team effort that culminated in a technical report that exceeds 450 pages. The bulk of the larger report is a detailed audit of Mars Viking Landers 1 and 2 meteorology posted by Dr. James Tillman and his Viking Project Group. An abstract of my findings included the following: NOTE: LINKS HERE ARE UNDER REPAIR. SEE http://davidaroffman.com/catalog_1.html. 

The Viking Project Data did not seem to explain weather phenomena (spiral clouds over Arsia Mons, dust devils, etc.) clearly seen on Mars. A general discussion of the problems is offered in the Basic Report by David Roffman. The data audit results are presented in seven Annexes. The Viking Project data divides every Martian day into 25 time-bins (hours), each ~59 minutes long. Annex A (Viking 1 sols 1 to 350) and Annex B (Viking 2 sols 156 to 361) emphasize how pressures change during morning time-bins that correspond to 0630 to 0830. A simple formula, Pressure predicted = (6.51 mbar*255.77 K)/Temperature K measured, was often correct for 0730. Annex C examines how often the pressure sensor did not work (stuck or no pressures) between Viking 2 sols 639 and 799. Annex D examines the percent differences between hourly predictions and reported pressures for Viking 1 from sols 1 to 350. Annex E focuses on predictions and reported pressures for the 0.3 (0730) and .34 (0830) time-bins. Annex F maps out the best and worst prediction times each day, clearly proving the influence of the RTG heaters on hourly pressure reports. Annex G shows what went wrong in the transducer selection and testing process. These Annexes provide hard evidence that the Tavis pressure transducers used for the Vikings (and Pathfinder) likely jammed with dust during the landing process. The meaning of this is that it is doubtful that they ever measured ambient pressure conditions of Mars. There is evidence that all subsequent attempts to measure pressure were colored by the reported Viking results.

       Problems with Phoenix pressures based on a Vaisala transducer are discussed in conjunction with Figures 17A through 18 below. A PowerPoint summary of my findings is here: PowerPoint Summary of HIGHER THAN ADVERTISED MARTIAN AIR PRESSURE - PART 2 by Barry S. Roffman.

WHY WE MUST TAKE MARTIAN EXPLORATION OUT OF GOVERNMENT HANDS - THE CASE FOR MARS ONE. I love the United States and I’m extremely proud of all its achievements. However, after having spent years researching the Martian atmosphere, and even more years investigating the Roswell Incident, UFOs, abduction reports and after having interviewed many top officials in our Mars programs, as well as people (even in my extended family) that claimed to have back engineered alien craft or at least worked with them in their capacity at NASA; I don’t believe the U.S. Government when it comes to Mars or UFOs. The pattern of deceit is nothing less than overwhelming wherever I look. Clearly our Government has systematically used nondisclosure forms for workers involved, with threats of damage to careers or imprisonment or loss of pensions for those who talk (like former Space Craft Operator Clark McClelland); and threats of physical harm or death in its arsenal of weapons to keep the truth from the world. In fact, this site was attacked by a virus only one day after publication of this article. The attack had me basically offline for a week. 

       I would reach the above conclusion even if I never saw a UFO, but, alas, I did see one clearly on the evening of my 10^th birthday back in 1957. It was my only observation of a UFO until a less significant sighting that I filed a report about 55 years later on July 4, 2012. The first observation was of a glowing object that had the angular diameter of a full moon, but it was oval shaped and moving at high speed. The second object was much less spectacular, but it was seen and reported by people from Boynton Beach, Florida up 332 miles north through Fernandina Beach, Florida. I noticed it enter restricted airspace over Cape Canaveral only after I saw that people around me were all pointing up at it as I swam laps in our pool. There were numerous similar sightings elsewhere that night, but July 4 is always a night with plenty going on the sky, so extra care must be exercised in analyzing reports then.

    John Brandon wrote Mars One’s planned one way mission to Mars was suicide because they couldn't depend on help from Earth after arriving there. However it may turn out that Mars is indeed livable. Water is readily available from ice just under surface, carbon dioxide is in the air, and there is plenty of sunlight for greenhouses to grow plants to make food and oxygen. The real risk of suicide for people planning to move to Mars permanently is to ignore the nature of our Government. People who would go to lengths to prevent the public from knowing about ancient civilizations there (and UFOs in general) might also be willing to shoot down any civilian effort to move there and disclose the truth. Therefore, a very essential aspect of planning for Mars One must be security. The mission should be well armed, with the identity of any crews should kept top secret. There must also be planning for transmission of data back to Earth in a manner that will preclude interference by any Government entities.

IMPLICATIONS OF MARTIAN HISTORY. When my son David attended his first Mars Society Convention in Boulder in 2008 he was surprised to find a representative of the Vatican there. While the Vatican was once famous for persecuting Galileo for what he saw in his telescope, the Vatican now has its own astronomical observatories including one in Arizona.

       Some major shifts in Vatican doctrine began soon after President Clinton made remarks about a possible fossil found in a Martian meteorite (ALH 84001).  He said, “If this discovery is confirmed it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as we can imagine." The discovery was not confirmed, however on 22 October 1996 Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the Church's openness to the theory of evolution. He said, “In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Piux XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points.”

       Pope John Paul made his remarks while it still appeared that the Mars fossil was legitimate. But then in 2009 Vatican astronomer, Father Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory near Rome, said intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space. He wrote that “Just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God. And some aliens could even be free from original sin.” There may a very close link between the political leadership in the U.S., and the Vatican. Zbigniew Brzezinski may be case in point. He was President Carter’s National Security Advisor. Wikipedia notes that in 1978, Polish Cardinal Korol Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II – an event which the Soviets believed Brzezinski orchestrated. However Wikipedia admits that a citation is needed. Whatever the case may be, clearly the Vatican has enormous financial concerns with 1,150,661,000 followers in 2010 (just over 50% of the world’s Christian population). It can’t allow itself to be blindsided, but it must understand that when disclosure occurs it’s financial wealth is likely to drop. How much more so if it turns out that our own ancestors we not Adam and Eve on Earth, but Martians who were largely exterminated in a nuclear holocaust on that planet as Dr. Brandenburg seems to imply. President Clinton, who may not have been informed about the full Martian truth, let us know that such a discovery would be “one of the most stunning insights into our universe.” It would also be one that would have an enormous impact on the political and financial powers here on Earth. Whatever the truth is, people can learn to deal with it. But even if a one way mission does nothing more than move some of our life forms to a now and always dead planet, at least it will help to ensure that any catastrophe that might threaten to annihilate life on Earth will not annihilate us all. For that reason alone, while I don’t know that they’ll want me, I intend to volunteer my support to Mars One. If I were younger, I’d volunteer to fly there myself one way, but in 2023 I’ll be 76 year old. I’d appreciate the relief from gravity that my arthritis always reminds me about. It would be terrific to go from 210 pounds down to 79 pounds without needing to go on a severe diet, but I’ll have to settle for the vicarious pleasure of seeing someone else do it.

       Godspeed Mars One!