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Sailors witnessed mysterious light in the sky over the Indian Ocean
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By USH
The legend of the 13 crystal skulls is one of mystery, intrigue, and ancient wisdom. According to myth, these skulls hold the complete knowledge of our galaxy and the history of the human race. Twelve are said to represent different worlds where intelligent life once thrived, while the thirteenth serves as the key that unites them all.
One of the most famous crystal skulls, the Mitchell-Hedges Skull, was discovered in 1927 by archaeologist F.A. Mitchell-Hedges during an excavation at an ancient Mayan site in the dense jungles of Yucatán. This artifact defied conventional understanding of physics and engineering, astonishing scientists at Hewlett-Packard's crystal laboratory, who had never encountered anything like it.
Other crystal skulls have been found across Central and South America, Mexico, and beyond. Both the Maya and Aztecs are believed to have used them in sacred rituals and ceremonies. Additionally, various Native American tribes and indigenous cultures worldwide have passed down similar stories, linking these artifacts to ancient Atlantean and Lemurian civilizations.
Crystals can transfer, retain, and amplify energy, focusing and transmitting it over great distances to similar crystals. They also have the capacity to store vast amounts of data and knowledge, much like a computer, and can even be used for communication. Could it be, then, that these crystal skulls possess the same mysterious power as the crystal 'Atlantis' sphere discovered by Ray Brown in the submerged ruins of an ancient temple near Bimini?
Now, the crystal skulls story spans from ancient Mars to modern-day laboratories, weaving through lost civilizations and CIA psychic programs. As scientists unravel the truth behind these mysterious artifacts, they discover something even more fascinating about the potential of crystal technology.
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By NASA
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this feather-shaped iridescent cloud just after sunset on Jan. 27, 2023. Studying the colors in iridescent clouds tells scientists something about particle size within the clouds and how they grow over time. These clouds were captured as part of a seasonal imaging campaign to study noctilucent, or “night-shining” clouds. A new campaign in January 2025 led to Curiosity capturing this video of red- and green-tinged clouds drifting through the Martian sky.
Learn more about iridescent twilight clouds on Mars.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured these drifting noctilucent, or twilight, clouds in a 16-minute recording on Jan. 17. (This looping clip has been speeded up about 480 times.) The white plumes falling out of the clouds are carbon dioxide ice that would evaporate closer to the Martian surface.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/SSI While the Martian clouds may look like the kind seen in Earth’s skies, they include frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice.
Red-and-green-tinted clouds drift through the Martian sky in a new set of images captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover using its Mastcam — its main set of “eyes.” Taken over 16 minutes on Jan. 17 (the 4,426th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s mission), the images show the latest observations of what are called noctilucent (Latin for “night shining”), or twilight clouds, tinged with color by scattering light from the setting Sun.
Sometimes these clouds even create a rainbow of colors, producing iridescent, or “mother-of-pearl” clouds. Too faint to be seen in daylight, they’re only visible when the clouds are especially high and evening has fallen.
Martian clouds are made of either water ice or, at higher altitudes and lower temperatures, carbon dioxide ice. (Mars’ atmosphere is more than 95% carbon dioxide.) The latter are the only kind of clouds observed at Mars producing iridescence, and they can be seen near the top of the new images at an altitude of around 37 to 50 miles (60 to 80 kilometers). They’re also visible as white plumes falling through the atmosphere, traveling as low as 31 miles (50 kilometers) above the surface before evaporating because of rising temperatures. Appearing briefly at the bottom of the images are water-ice clouds traveling in the opposite direction roughly 31 miles (50 kilometers) above the rover.
Dawn of Twilight Clouds
Twilight clouds were first seen on Mars by NASA’s Pathfinder mission in 1997; Curiosity didn’t spot them until 2019, when it acquired its first-ever images of iridescence in the clouds. This is the fourth Mars year the rover has observed the phenomenon, which occurs during early fall in the southern hemisphere.
Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, led a paper summarizing Curiosity’s first two seasons of twilight cloud observations, which published late last year in Geophysical Research Letters. “I’ll always remember the first time I saw those iridescent clouds and was sure at first it was some color artifact,” he said. “Now it’s become so predictable that we can plan our shots in advance; the clouds show up at exactly the same time of year.”
Each sighting is an opportunity to learn more about the particle size and growth rate in Martian clouds. That, in turn, provides more information about the planet’s atmosphere.
Cloud Mystery
One big mystery is why twilight clouds made of carbon dioxide ice haven’t been spotted in other locations on Mars. Curiosity, which landed in 2012, is on Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, just south of the Martian equator. Pathfinder landed in Ares Vallis, north of the equator. NASA’s Perseverance rover, located in the northern hemisphere’s Jezero Crater, hasn’t seen any carbon dioxide ice twilight clouds since its 2021 landing. Lemmon and others suspect that certain regions of Mars may be predisposed to forming them.
A possible source of the clouds could be gravity waves, he said, which can cool the atmosphere: “Carbon dioxide was not expected to be condensing into ice here, so something is cooling it to the point that it could happen. But Martian gravity waves are not fully understood and we’re not entirely sure what is causing twilight clouds to form in one place but not another.”
Mastcam’s Partial View
The new twilight clouds appear framed in a partially open circle. That’s because they were taken using one of Mastcam’s two color cameras: the left 34 mm focal length Mastcam, which has a filter wheel that is stuck between positions. Curiosity’s team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California remains able to use both this camera and the higher-resolution right 100 mm focal length camera for color imaging.
The rover recently wrapped an investigation of a place called Gediz Vallis channel and is on its way to a new location that includes boxwork — fractures formed by groundwater that look like giant spiderwebs when viewed from space.
More recently, Curiosity visited an impact crater nicknamed “Rustic Canyon,” capturing it in images and studying the composition of rocks around it. The crater, 67 feet (20 meters) in diameter, is shallow and has lost much of its rim to erosion, indicating that it likely formed many millions of years ago. One reason Curiosity’s science team studies craters is because the cratering process can unearth long-buried materials that may have better preserved organic molecules than rocks exposed to radiation at the surface. These molecules provide a window into the ancient Martian environment and how it could have supported microbial life billions of years ago, if any ever formed on the Red Planet.
More About Curiosity
Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam.
For more about Curiosity, visit:
science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity
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Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
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Last Updated Feb 11, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
“I do evolutionary programming,” said NASA Goddard oceanographer Dr. John Moisan. “I see a lot of possibility in using evolutionary programming to solve many large problems we are trying to solve. How did life start and evolve? Can these processes be used to evolve intelligence or sentience?”Courtesy of John Moisan Name: John Moisan
Formal Job Classification: Research oceanographer
Organization: Ocean Ecology Laboratory, Hydrosphere, Biosphere, Geophysics (HBG), Earth Science Directorate (Code 616) – duty station at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore
What do you do and what is most interesting about your role here at Goddard? How do you help support Goddard’s mission?
I develop ecosystem models and satellite algorithms to understand how the ocean’s ecology works. My work has evolved over time from when I coded ocean ecosystem models to the present where I now use artificial intelligence to evolve the ocean ecosystem models.
How did you become an oceanographer?
As a child, I watched a TV series called “Sea Hunt,” which involved looking for treasure in the ocean. It inspired me to want to spend my life scuba diving.
I got a Bachelor of Science in marine biology from the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, and later got a Ph.D. from the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
Initially, I just wanted to do marine biology which to me meant doing lots of scuba diving, maybe living on a sailboat. Later, when I was starting my graduate schoolwork, I found a book about mathematical biology and a great professor who helped open my eyes to the world of numerical modeling. I found out that instead of scuba diving, I needed instead to spend my days behind a computer, learning how to craft ideas into equations and then code these into a computer to run simulations on ocean ecosystems.
I put myself through my initial education. I went to school fulltime, but I lived at home and hitchhiked to college on a daily basis. When I started my graduate school, I worked to support myself. I was in school during the normal work week, but from Friday evening through Sunday night, I worked 40 hours at a medical center cleaning and sterilizing the operating room instrument carts. This was during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
What was most exciting about your two field trips to the Antarctic?
In 1987, I joined a six-week research expedition to an Antarctic research station to explore how the ozone hole was impacting phytoplankton. These are single-celled algae that are responsible for making half the oxygen we breathe. Traveling to Antarctica is like visiting another planet. There are more types of blue than I’ve ever seen. It is an amazingly beautiful place to visit, with wild landscapes, glaciers, mountains, sea ice, and a wide range of wildlife. After my first trip I returned home and went back in a few months later as a biologist on a joint Polish–U.S. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) expedition to carry out a biological survey and measure how much fast the phytoplankton was growing in different areas of the Southern Ocean. We used nets to measure the amounts of fish and shrimp and took water samples to measure salinity, the amount of algae and their growth rates. We ate well, for example the Polish cook made up a large batch of smoked ice fish.
What other field work have you done?
While a graduate student, I helped do some benthic work in the Gulf of Maine. This study was focused on understanding the rates of respiration in the muds on the bottom of the ocean and on understanding how much biomass was in the muds. The project lowered a benthic grab device to the bottom where it would push a box core device into the sediments to return it to the surface. This process is sort of like doing a biopsy of the ocean bottom.
What is your goal as a research oceanographer at Goddard?
Ocean scientists measure the amount and variability of chlorophyll a, a pigment in algae, in the ocean because it is an analogue to the amount of algae or phytoplankton in the ocean. Chlorophyll a is used to capture solar energy to make sugars, which the algae use for growth. Generally, areas of the ocean that have more chlorophyll are also areas where growth or primary production is higher. So, by estimating how much chlorophyll is in the ocean we can study how these processes are changing with an aim in understanding why. NASA uses the color of the ocean using satellites to estimate chlorophyll a because chlorophyll absorbs sunlight and changes the color of the ocean. Algae have other kinds of pigments, each of which absorbs light at different wavelengths. Because different groups of algae have different levels of pigments, they are like fingerprints that can reveal the type of algae in the water. Some of my research aims at trying to use artificial intelligence and mathematical techniques to create new ways to measure these pigments from space to understand how ocean ecosystems change.
In 2024, NASA plans to launch the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite, which will measure the color of the ocean at many different wavelengths. The data from this satellite can be used with results from my work on genetic programs and inverse modeling to estimate concentrations of different pigments and possibly concentrations of different types of algae in the ocean.
You have been at Goddard over 22 years. What is most memorable to you?
I develop ecosystem models. But ecosystems do not have laws in the same way that physics has laws. Equations need to be created so that the ecosystem models represent what is observed in the real world. Satellites have been a great source for those observations, but without a lot of other types of observations that are collected in the field, the ocean, it is difficult to develop these equations. In my time at NASA, I have only been able to develop models because of the great but often tedious work that ocean scientists around the world have been doing when they go on ocean expeditions to measure various ocean features, be it simple temperature or the more complicated measurements of algal growth rates. My experience with their willingness to collaborate and share data is especially memorable. This experience is also what I enjoyed with numerous scientists at NASA who have always been willing to support new ideas and point me in the right direction. It has made working at NASA a phenomenal experience.
What are the philosophical implications of your work?
The human capacity to think rapidly, to test and change our opinions based on what we learn, is slow compared to that of a computer. Computers can help us adapt more quickly. I can put 1,000 students in a room developing ecosystem model models. But I know that this process of developing ecosystem models is slow when compared what a computer can do using an artificial intelligence approach called genetic programming, it is a much faster way to generate ecosystem model solutions.
Philosophically, there is no real ecosystem model that is the best. Life and ecosystems on Earth change and adapt at rates too fast for any present-day model to resolve, especially considering climate change. The only real ecosystem model is the reality itself. No computer model can perfectly simulate ecosystems. By utilizing the fast adaptability that evolutionary computer modeling techniques provide, simulating and ultimately predicting ecosystems can be improved greatly.
How does your work have implications for scientists in general?
I do evolutionary programming. I see a lot of possibility in using evolutionary programming to solve many large problems we are trying to solve. How did life start and evolve? Can these processes be used to evolve intelligence or sentience?
The artificial intelligence (AI) work answers questions, but you need to identify the questions. This is the greater problem when it comes to working with AI. You cannot answer the question of how to create a sentient life if you do not know how to define it. If I cannot measure life, how can I model it? I do not know how to write that equation. How does life evolve? How did the evolutionary process start? These are big questions I enjoy discussing with friends. It can be as frustrating as contemplating “nothing.”
Who inspires you?
Many of the scientists that I was fortunate to work with at various research institutes, such as Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. These are groups of scientists are open to always willing to share their ideas. These are individuals who enjoy doing science. I will always be indebted to them for their kindness in sharing of ideas and data.
Do you still scuba dive?
Yes, I wish I could dive daily, it is a very calming experience. I’m trying to get my kids to join me.
What else do you do for fun?
My wife and I bike and travel. Our next big bike trip will hopefully be to Shangri-La City in China. I also enjoy sailing and trying to grow tropical plants. But, most of all, I enjoy helping raise my children to be resilient, empathic, and intelligent beings.
What are your words to live by?
Life. So much to see. So little time.
Conversations With Goddard is a collection of question and answer profiles highlighting the breadth and depth of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s talented and diverse workforce. The Conversations have been published twice a month on average since May 2011. Read past editions on Goddard’s “Our People” webpage. Conversations With Goddard is a collection of Q&A profiles highlighting the breadth and depth of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s talented and diverse workforce. The Conversations have been published twice a month on average since May 2011. Read past editions on Goddard’s “Our People” webpage.
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Last Updated Feb 10, 2025 EditorJessica EvansContactRob Garnerrob.garner@nasa.gov Related Terms
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By NASA
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February’s Night Sky Notes: How Can You Help Curb Light Pollution?
Light pollution has long troubled astronomers, who generally shy away from deep sky observing under full Moon skies. The natural light from a bright Moon floods the sky and hides views of the Milky Way, dim galaxies and nebula, and shooting stars. In recent years, human-made light pollution has dramatically surpassed the interference of even a bright full Moon, and its effects are now noticeable to a great many people outside of the astronomical community. Harsh, bright white LED streetlights, while often more efficient and long-lasting, often create unexpected problems for communities replacing their old street lamps. Some notable concerns are increased glare and light trespass, less restful sleep, and disturbed nocturnal wildlife patterns. There is increasing awareness of just how much light is too much light at night. You don’t need to give in to despair over encroaching light pollution; you can join efforts to measure it, educate others, and even help stop or reduce the effects of light pollution in your community.
Before and after pictures of replacement lighting at the 6th Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River. The second picture shows improvements in some aspects of light pollution, as light is not directed to the sides and upwards from the upgraded fixtures, reducing skyglow. However, it also shows the use of brighter, whiter LEDs, which is not generally ideal, along with increased light bounce back from the road. City of Los Angeles Amateur astronomers and potential citizen scientists around the globe are invited to participate in the Globe at Night (GaN) program to measure light pollution. Measurements are taken by volunteers on a few scheduled days every month and submitted to their database to help create a comprehensive map of light pollution and its change over time. GaN volunteers can take and submit measurements using multiple methods ranging from low-tech naked-eye observations to high-tech sensors and smartphone apps.
Globe at Night citizen scientists can use the following methods to measure light pollution and submit their results:
Their own smartphone camera and dedicated app Manually measure light pollution using their own eyes and detailed charts of the constellations A dedicated light pollution measurement device called a Sky Quality Meter (SQM). The free GaN web app from any internet-connected device (which can also be used to submit their measurements from an SQM or printed-out star charts) Night Sky Network members joined a telecon with Connie Walker of Globe at Night in 2014 and had a lively discussion about the program’s history and how they can participate. The audio of the telecon, transcript, and links to additional resources can be found on their dedicated resource page.
Light pollution has been visible from space for a long time, but new LED lights are bright enough that they stand out from older street lights, even from orbit. The above photo was taken by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti from the ISS cupola in 2015. The newly installed white LED lights in the center of the city of Milan are noticeably brighter than the lights in the surrounding neighborhoods. NASA/ESA DarkSky International has long been a champion in the fight against light pollution and a proponent of smart lighting design and policy. Their website (at darksky.org) provides many resources for amateur astronomers and other like-minded people to help communities understand the negative impacts of light pollution and how smart lighting policies can not only help bring the stars back to their night skies but make their streets safer by using smarter lighting with less glare. Communities and individuals find that their nighttime lighting choices can help save considerable sums of money when they decide to light their streets and homes “smarter, not brighter” with shielded, directional lighting, motion detectors, timers, and even choosing the proper “temperature” of new LED light replacements to avoid the harsh “pure white” glare that many new streetlamps possess. Their pages on community advocacy and on how to choose dark-sky-friendly lighting are extremely helpful and full of great information. There are even local chapters of the IDA in many communities made up of passionate advocates of dark skies.
DarkSky International has notably helped usher in “Dark Sky Places“, areas around the world that are protected from light pollution. “Dark Sky Parks“, in particular, provide visitors with incredible views of the Milky Way and are perfect places to spot the wonders of a meteor shower. These parks also perform a very important function, showing the public the wonders of a truly dark sky to many people who may have never before even seen a handful of stars in the sky, let alone the full, glorious spread of the Milky Way.
More research into the negative effects of light pollution on the health of humans and the environment is being conducted than ever before. Watching the nighttime light slowly increase in your neighborhood, combined with reading so much bad news, can indeed be disheartening! However, as awareness of light pollution and its negative effects increases, more people are becoming aware of the problem and want to be part of the solution. There is even an episode of PBS Kid’s SciGirls where the main characters help mitigate light pollution in their neighborhood!
Astronomy clubs are uniquely situated to help spread awareness of good lighting practices in their local communities in order to help mitigate light pollution. Take inspiration from Tucson, Arizona, and other dark sky-friendly communities that have adopted good lighting practices. Tucson even reduced its skyglow by 7% after its own citywide lighting conversion, proof that communities can bring the stars back with smart lighting choices.
Originally posted by Dave Prosper: November 2018
Last Updated by Kat Troche: January 2025
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