The Viking spacecraft arrived at Mars in the summer of 1976 and passed through superior conjunction on November 25, as Mars passed directly behind the Sun as seen from Earth. This provided researchers the opportunity to use the spacecraft in an experiment to test general relativity.
This image shows the surface of Mars looking across the Viking 2 Lander. (Source: NASA)
After completing the primary missions, the Viking continuation mission objectives included a radio science solar conjunction relativity experiment. Scientists began an experiment that used the landers and orbiters as transponders, sending radio signals to the lander on Mars and instructing the lander to the return signals. The round-trip travel times of the radio signals going from Earth to the Viking landers and orbiters were measured.
Using dual-band, one-way ranging allowed estimation of the contribution of the solar-corona plasma to the echo delays obtained from ranging to the spacecraft.
The data confirmed the Shapiro time delay effect, which states that radar signals passing near a massive object take slightly longer to travel to a target and longer to return than they would if the mass of the object were not present.
Published by Albert Einstein in 1916, the general theory of relativity predicted that the round-trip or echo delays of light signals traveling between the Earth and Mars would be increased by the direct effect of solar gravity. The theory included gravitational time dilation, where time passes differently in regions of different gravitational potential.
NASA has continued to test general relativity, most recently with the Cassini space probe (see a NASA artist rending of its testing at right) and Gravity Probe B, which also confirmed the theory.
For more moments in tech history, see this blog. EDN strives to be historically accurate with these postings. Should you see an error, please notify us.
Editor’s note: This article was originally posted on November 25, 2013 and edited on November 25, 2019.
THE NAZI HUNT FOR HOLY TREASURE FROM THOR'S HAMMER TO THE HOLY GRAIL
Heinrich Himmler was infected by a virulent strain of spiritualism which fed into his racist, supremacist world view and drove him to search for holy relics.
Lost Relics of the Knights Templar sees treasure hunters Carl Cookson and Hamilton White embark on a global odyssey. Their objective: to trace the past of a hoard of artefacts which may have once belonged to the Templars. One of their destinations is Wewelsburg, the imposing German castle which served as the spiritual sanctum for Heinrich Himmler and the SS.
Today, the castle is a looming reminder of how so many members of the Third Reich were beguiled by ancient myths, old orders of chivalry, and the occult. We all know the pantomime villain Nazis of the Indiana Jones films, desperate to dig up the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. But the fact is, many real-life Nazis were just as obsessed as their cackling silver screen counterparts.
Himmler in particular was infected by a virulent strain of spiritualism which fed into his racist, supremacist world view. For him, establishing a new Aryan empire meant resurrecting ancient Germanic myths and iconography. He believed the war against the lesser races required the overturning of traditional Christian morality, replacing it with a new kind of pseudo-religion that drew on chivalry and mysticism.
The now-notorious insignia of the SS, resembling two lightning bolts, was based on runes devised by an Austrian occultist and pagan called Guido von List. The SS itself was, in Himmler’s mind, an elite organisation in the tradition of the Teutonic Knights – an order which, like the Templars, came into existence during the Crusades. Himmler’s grand scheme was to establish Wewelsburg Castle as the Camelot of his modern-day knights. One of the rooms was even named after King Arthur, while another was designated the ‘Grail Room’.
Despite his aversion to conventional Christianity, Himmler was fascinated by the legend of the Grail, perhaps seeing it as a source of immense power. After all, he believed that another fabled artefact – Thor’s hammer – could be requisitioned as a weapon by the Third Reich. In an outlandish letter to the Ahnenerbe, a think tank set up to give academic backing to Nazi racial ideology, Himmler stated his belief that Thor’s hammer was ‘an early, highly developed war weapon of our forefathers’. For this reason, Himmler demanded that Ahnenerbe’s team should ‘find all places in the northern Germanic Aryan cultural world where an understanding of the lightning bolt, the thunderbolt, Thor's hammer, or the flying or thrown hammer exists’.
Himmler personally embarked on a failed mission to find the Holy Grail in 1940, visiting an abbey perched within the Montserrat mountain range in Catalonia. He was presumably led there by the belief that Montserrat was the real-life ‘Montsalvat’, location of the Grail in an Arthurian opera by Hitler’s favourite composer, Richard Wagner. This opera, Parsifal, was based on a medieval German poem called Parzival, written by a knight named Wolfram von Eschenbach. And this poem had already been an inspiration to another Grail hunter in the Nazi regime: Otto Rahn.
Rahn was a somewhat eccentric medievalist who believed there was a link between the story of Parzival and Catharism – a movement that flourished in medieval Europe, particularly in France. Condemned as heretics by the Catholic Church, the Cathars revived old Gnostic concepts that radically overturned traditional Christian thinking. They believed, for example, that the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament were separate entities – the latter sinful, and the former good. Such ideas led to a crusade against the Cathars, and their wholesale slaughter.
A major Cathar stronghold was Montségur, a remote fortress in southwestern France. This became the site of a dramatic confrontation between the Cathars and French royal forces in 1243. Thousands of French troops besieged the fortress for nine long and gruelling months before the people inside eventually surrendered. Hundreds of Cathars were burnt alive in a bonfire after refusing to renounce their blasphemous beliefs. However, it’s believed that a number of Cathars managed to smuggle themselves out of the fortress, undetected, before their brethren surrendered.
It’s been speculated that these survivors of the siege took some kind of treasure with them. Gold, perhaps. Or maybe even the Holy Grail itself, brought back to Europe from the Holy Land, by the Templars or other Crusaders. Otto Rahn, prompted by previous occultists and mystics, identified Montségur with the ‘Montsalvat’ Grail castle of Parzival. His ideas appealed greatly to Himmler, and Rahn eventually joined the SS himself.
The extent of Rahn’s own Nazi beliefs have been a subject of debate. He himself apparently said, ‘A man has to eat. What was I supposed to do? Turn Himmler down?’ But having such powerful patronage certainly spurred him on to publish more about the Grail, with the SS brazenly inserting anti-Semitic passages into his romantic, mystical prose. Rahn eventually resigned from the SS and died of exposure on a mountain in 1939 – allegedly suicide, though the details have never been confirmed.
Colourful theories regarding the Cathars, the Grail and the potential involvement of Crusader warriors have persisted in the decades after the fall of the Third Reich. Most famously, in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which theorised that the Cathars knew the secret of the Holy Grail – namely, that it was the bloodline of Christ, from the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This concept fuelled the plot of Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code, which also portrays the Templars as guardians of this earth-shaking secret.
Carl Cookson and Hamilton White may not have a fabled holy relic in their hoard, but their quest may well bring new insights into the Templars and their religious treasure hunts in the Holy Land, which has fascinated everyone from eccentric occultists to high-ranking Nazis to serious historians today.
Also interesting, Google Earth’s historical satellite pictures have shown that the monolith has been there since 2016. The monolith was in effect patiently waiting for years to be discovered at the “right time”.
Some people have already gone to the site using the coordinates yesterday and are apparently disappointed to discover that it looks more man-made than alien, as if that was the only issue.
As reader Atom commented:
What is really remarkable is the amount of attention it is getting and how it is intentionally or unintentionally pushing/triggering the ET theme into the public’s mind. I think we’ve never had anything like this ET-related in the MSM ever before. That’s quite something.
Here on Super Torch Ritual we are a bit different than most out there as we avoid focusing on the literal/surface level of anomalies and events. So while it’s nice to get these new details, they are not something that affects our multicontextual decoding, interpretations and projections. The Utah Monolith whispering…
+ – + – +
UPDATE – November 29
The Utah Monolith is gone! It’s not there anymore. ???????? Disappeared on the evening of November 27th.
Le site de la chapelle était autrefois une léproserie. La chapelle actuelle a été reconstruite en 1976. Une permanence est assurée l'été par les habitants du quartier. Le pardon a lieu en juillet. A côté de la chapelle, vous découvrirez sa fontaine, dont la source est recherchée pour guérir la fièvre et les maladies de peaux. A proximité le dolmen er-Roch-Feutet
Le site de la chapelle était autrefois une léproserie. La chapelle actuelle a été reconstruite en 1976. Une permanence est assurée l'été par les habitants du quartier. A côté de la chapelle, vous découvrirez sa fontaine, dont la source est recherchée pour guérir la fièvre et les maladies de peaux. Son pardon a lieu en juillet.
Black monolith on the moon. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Universal Pictures
2001: A Space Odyssey, Universal Pictures 1/4
Black monolith in orbit around Jupiter. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Universal Pictures
1/4
NASA Photos show that the Monolith in Utah's Red Rock Desert may have visited the Red Planet just 4 years ago.
Wikipedia 1/4
The Mars monolith is a rectangular object discovered on the surface of Mars. It is located near the bottom of a cliff, from which it likely fell. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of it from orbit, roughly 180 miles away.
2001: A Space Odyssey, Universal Pictures 1/4
Black monolith on the moon. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Universal Pictures
2001: A Space Odyssey, Universal Pictures 1/4
Black monolith in orbit around Jupiter. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Universal Pictures
1/4
NASA Photos show that the Monolith in Utah's Red Rock Desert may have visited the Red Planet just 4 years ago.
Wikipedia 1/4
The Mars monolith is a rectangular object discovered on the surface of Mars. It is located near the bottom of a cliff, from which it likely fell. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of it from orbit, roughly 180 miles away.
Apparently the silver Monolith discovered in Utah's Red Rock desert is part of a family of monoliths, distributed throughout our Solar System by another civilization for some unknown purpose. Either that or it's moving around through our solar system, phasing into different locations at different times.
The monolith (or monoliths), has previously been sighted by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Mars and one of its moons, Phobos.
The Mars monolith is a rectangular object discovered on the surface of Mars. It is located near the bottom of a cliff, from which it likely fell. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of it from orbit, roughly 180 miles away.
This of course calls to mind the 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a black monolith is found buried on the moon. Then an astronaut named Dave travels to Jupiter, only to find a black monolith in orbit for thousands of years.
The Phobos monolith was a large pillar located on the surface of Mars's moon Phobos. It measured about 279 ft across and 300 feet in height--significantly bigger than the Utah Monolith.
The Mars monolith is a bright object near Stickney crater, described as a "building sized" boulder, which casts a prominent shadow. It was discovered by Efrain Palermo, who did extensive surveys of Martian probe imagery, and later confirmed by Lan Fleming, an imaging sub-contractor at NASA Johnson Space Center.
"A monolith is a geological feature consisting of a single massive piece of rock. Monoliths also occur naturally on Earth, but it has been suggested that the Phobos monolith may be a piece of impact ejecta," claims Wikipedia. But we know better.
The general vicinity of Phobos' monolith is a proposed landing site by Optech and the Mars Institute, for a robotic mission to Phobos known as PRIME (Phobos Reconnaissance and International Mars Exploration).
The PRIME mission would be composed of an orbiter and lander, and each would carry four instruments designed to study various aspects of Phobos' geology. At present, PRIME has not been funded and does not have a projected launch date. Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin has spoken about the Phobos monolith and his support for a mission to Phobos.
The object appears in Mars Global Surveyor images SPS252603 and SPS255103, dated 1998. The object may be related to another monolith located on the surface of Mars, which NASA noted as an example of a common surface feature in that region. In fact, all three monoliths may be related structures left by an unknown civilization, for us Earthlings to discover and wonder about. Or perhaps they're just rocks.
First, the summer of 2001 was, like in 2003, marked by a Martian close encounter. It was during June, instead of August, that the Mars 'flyby' took place. Not as spectacular as that of 2003, but the Red Planet was a prominent light in the night sky. On June 13-14 (2001), Mars was at 'opposition' (i.e. 180 degrees away from the Sun) and it made its closest approach to Earth several days later on June 21.
Mars Opposition (June 2001)
On the same day, June 21, there was a total solar eclipse - as if to commemorate the Martian visit. In fact, June 21 was even the day of summer solstice (midsummer)!
So, while not as historic, the 2001 Mars opposition closely preceding the events of 9/11 was spectacular - or in hindsight 'ominous' - in its own way.
It still 'missed' 9/11 by about 3 months... Actually, it did not miss. It hit the bull's-eye perfectly - in a coded form:
September 11Gregorian corresponds to 'Thoth 1' (New Year's Day) of the Egyptian calendar which was originally marked by the heliacal/dawn rising of Sirius. In the early phase of the ancient Egyptian civilization the Sirius rising (accompanied by the annual Nile flood) coincided with the summer solstice. It was a 'magical' day that the Egyptians naturally used to anchor their calendar. So by highlighting June 21 (i.e. Gregorian summer solstice), the special Mars opposition event in 2001 conceptually pinpointed September 11, the historical/Egyptian summer-solstice date!
On 9/11, there was another remarkable combination of summer solstice, Mars, and the Moon (i.e. all the key players of the June 21 alignment except the Sun). As the earthshaking events of 9/11 were unfolding on the planet, up in the heavens was observed the following configuration: 1) the Moon was at the summer-solstice point (i.e. where the Sun would be on the midsummer day); 2) Mars was positioned exactly 180 degrees away from the Moon on the opposite side of the sky, closely marking the winter-solstice point; and 3) consequently there was a tight Mars-Earth-Moon alignment bridging the two solstice points!
As the above illustrations show, the solstice points today are neatly indicated by the intersections of the apparent path of the Sun ('ecliptic', green line) and the Milky Way ('galactic equator', blue band). This arrangement is coincidental/temporary and is thus astronomically quite special. Some view these points as something akin to 'stargates'.
Now, the prophetic quality of all this dramatically increases as we progress forward (from 9/11/01). Mars opposition occurs approximately every 26 months, so the Sun-Earth-Mars alignment would be established again in the summer of 2003 - specifically on Aug. 28. As already discussed, it seemed to have 'anticipated' the 'Martian' event of Schwarzenegger entering politics on August 6. The same type of code was used here since Aug. 6 is or represents the actual day on which Sirius' heliacal rising occurs in our epoch. Through Sirius, June 21, Sept. 11, and Aug. 6 are but different expressions of the same archetypal date!
This calendrical link is reinforced by one of Schwarzenegger's nicknames being 'The Oak'. In pagan tradition, the 'Oak King' is associated with midsummer which is also reflected in the fact that the Christian version of the Oak King, John the Baptist, has his feast day on June 24, intended to mark the summer solstice (~June 21).
Similarly, Jesus Christ's birthday is celebrated on Christmas in mid-December to mark the winter solstice. The summer and winter solstices represent two opposite calendrical/spatial points. This makes John the Baptist (Oak King) the anti-Jesus, or 'anti-Christ'. Hence Schwarzenegger 'The Oak', whose political rise on Aug. 6 was marked by the Sirius rising associated with midsummer, would also share the ominous epithet. And why not, he's already the 'Terminator'... after all.
Argomento precedente
A report, “Viking relativity experiment: verification of signal retardation by solar gravity” published in 1979 by researchers at MIT and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, analyzed 14 months of data obtained from radio ranging to Viking to verify the prediction of the general theory of relativity.
