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Ancient rock carving linked to astronomical event? APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY NEWS RELEASE Posted: June 6, 2006 At the beginning of the wildly popular film The Da Vinci Code, the lead character played by Tom Hanks delivers a presentation titled "The Interpretation of Symbols" and begins by saying "Symbols are a language that can help us understand our past." Two astronomers attending the 208th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Calgary, Canada could not agree more.
Until now, the one-thousand year old supernova was thought to only have been recorded by star watchers in the Old World. Simultaneous written records from Asia, the Middle East and Europe recognize the appearance of a "new star" in the modern constellation of Lupus on May 1, 1006. Confirmation of this proposition would advance understanding of prehistoric Native American astronomy and traditions concerning the night sky. On believing he may have found the first New World record of the exploding star, Barentine says, "The supernova of 1006 was perhaps the brightest such event visible from Earth for thousands of years, reaching the brightness of a quarter moon at peak, yet to date no representations of the event have been identified in Native American art. If confirmed, this discovery supports the idea that ancient Native Americans were aware of changes in the night sky and moved to commemorate them in their cultural record. It may also be of benefit to archaeologists trying to fix precise dates to petroglyphs in the Southwest and elsewhere in the world, providing a rare opportunity to relate a specific historical event to its depiction in rock art." Traditionally, assigning dates of origination to prehistoric Native American art has been extremely difficult because of the lack of a written language and little continuity with the culture and folklore of historic Native American tribes. Barentine, who studies Southwest archeology as a hobby says, "Quantitative methods such as carbon-14 dating are alternative means to assign ages to works of prehistoric art, but they lack precision of more than a few decades, so any depiction in art that can be fixed to a specific year is extremely valuable." Though he admits, "Without my background in astronomy, I probably wouldn't have recognized the petroglyph for what it might represent."
Similar petroglyphs have been identified as likely depictions of historic astronomical events in the prehistoric Southwest. One of the most widely recognized examples is the pictograph near Penasco Blanco in Chaco Canyon National Monument, New Mexico. There, a painted rock symbol is theorized to depict the supernova of July 4, 1054. As for the White Tanks Regional Park petroglyph in Arizona and its suspected relationship to the 1006 astronomical event, the results are not fully conclusive. The proposition is advanced and supported through circumstantial evidence. However, chemical dating, which relies on the abundance of certain elements in the rock varnish, could help confine the range of dates in which the petroglyph was created. A result substantiating an early 11th century date of origin would lead considerable credence to the claim that the prehistoric symbol represents the 1006 supernova event. Indeed, "Symbols are a language that can help us understand our past." |
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Space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale and launch director Mike Leinbach hold this news conference May 31 from Kennedy Space Center to offer a status report on STS-121 mission preparations. The briefing was held at the conclusion of the debris verification review, which examined the external fuel tank and threats to the shuttle from impacts during launch.
Dial-up: 
NASA created its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system to serve as a constellation of orbiting spacecraft that would replace the costly ground tracking stations scattered around the globe for communications with space shuttles and other satellites. Space shuttle Discovery's STS-29 mission in March 1989 launched the massive TDRS-D craft. This post-flight film narrated by the crew shows the deployment, the astronauts running a series of medical tests and the monitoring of a student-developed chicken embryo experiment.
Space shuttle Columbia began mission STS-61C with a beautiful sunrise launch in January 1986 after several delays. Led by commander Hoot Gibson, the astronauts deployed a commercial communications satellite and tended to numerous experiments with the Materials Science Laboratory, Hitchhiker platform and Getaway Special Canisters in the payload bay. The crew included Congressman Bill Nelson of Florida, the first U.S. Representative to fly in space. Watch this post-flight film narrated by the astronauts.
The Boeing Delta 4 rocket launches from pad 37B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with the GOES-N spacecraft, beginning a new era in weather observing for the Americas.
As night fell over Kennedy Space Center on May 19, space shuttle Discovery reached launch pad 39B to complete the slow journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building. Discovery will be traveling much faster in a few weeks when it blasts off to the International Space Station.
The November 1985 flight of space shuttle Atlantis began with a rare nighttime blastoff. The seven-member crew, including a Mexican payload specialist, spent a week in orbit deploying three communications satellites for Australia, Mexico and the U.S. And a pair of high-visibility spacewalks were performed to demonstrate techniques for building large structures in space. The crew narrates the highlights of STS-61B in this post-flight crew film presentation.
