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Radio => Propagation => Topic started by: AD on September 25, 2014, 09:15:06 AM

Title: ‘SPACE BUBBLES’ MAY HAVE AIDED ENEMY IN FATAL AFGHAN BATTLE
Post by: AD on September 25, 2014, 09:15:06 AM
‘SPACE BUBBLES’ MAY HAVE AIDED ENEMY IN FATAL AFGHAN BATTLE


WASHINGTON, DC—In the early morning hours of March 4, 2002, military officers in Bagram, Afghanistan desperately radioed a Chinook helicopter headed for the snowcapped peak of Takur Ghar. On board were 21 men, deployed to rescue a team of Navy SEALS pinned down on the ridge dividing the Upper and Lower Shahikot valley. The message was urgent: Do not land on the peak. The mountaintop was under enemy control.

The rescue team never got the message. Just after daybreak, the Chinook crash-landed on the peak under heavy enemy fire and three men were killed in the ensuing firefight.

A decade later, Michael Kelly, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), happened to read a journalistic account of Operation Anaconda, one of the first major battles of the War in Afghanistan, and thought radio operators may have been thwarted by a little-known source of radio interference: plasma bubbles.

Now, Kelly and his colleagues provide evidence that plasma bubbles may have contributed to the communications outages during the battle of Takur Ghar and present a new computer model that could help predict the impact of such bubbles on future military operations. Their work has been accepted for publication in a journal of the American Geophysical Union called Space Weather.

Giant plasma bubbles –wispy clouds of electrically charged gas particles – form after dark in the upper atmosphere. Typically around 100 kilometers (62 miles) wide, the bubbles can’t be seen but they can bend and disperse radio waves, interfering with communications.

Read more here
http://news.agu.org/press-release/space-bubbles-may-have-aided-enemy-in-fatal-afghan-battle/ (http://news.agu.org/press-release/space-bubbles-may-have-aided-enemy-in-fatal-afghan-battle/)
Title: Re: ‘SPACE BUBBLES’ MAY HAVE AIDED ENEMY IN FATAL AFGHAN BATTLE
Post by: spacecase0 on September 25, 2014, 11:09:59 AM
that is sure odd,
I wonder what else they do other than mess with radio waves
Title: Re: ‘SPACE BUBBLES’ MAY HAVE AIDED ENEMY IN FATAL AFGHAN BATTLE
Post by: AD on September 25, 2014, 11:44:10 AM
I thought it very interesting i have never heard of this before.
Title: Re: ‘SPACE BUBBLES’ MAY HAVE AIDED ENEMY IN FATAL AFGHAN BATTLE
Post by: W.Lynn on September 25, 2014, 11:43:12 PM
Sounds to me like it could be that the bubbles are where gremlins breed.  From the earliest days of flight, those blasted things have been playing havoc with all kinds of systems.
Title: Re: ‘SPACE BUBBLES’ MAY HAVE AIDED ENEMY IN FATAL AFGHAN BATTLE
Post by: spacecase0 on September 26, 2014, 11:02:36 AM
are you going to start talking of the "clockwork elves" next ?
this is one of the starting points that if you look into it enough,
you start to see what reality is really made of,
I plan on staying far from the space bubbles,
and will read the findings from the safety of the internet