SMALL COMET VAPOR CLOUDS IMAGED FOR THE FIRST TIME

Abstract:

High quality, long sequences of images of vapor clouds from Small Comets discovered by Dr. Louis Frank, are now being obtained after a 30-year effort to image them. In the 1980s, Dr Frank, using an imager on the Dynamics Explorer 1 satellite saw holes in the atmosphere 200 to 600 miles above the Earth’s surface, on the outer edge of the atmosphere. Dr. Frank later discovered that these “holes” were caused by small comets of water ice about the size of a house hitting the Earth’s upper atmosphere. These comets undergo a phase change from a frozen “snow ball” to a “vapor cloud” when near the Earth. It is these clouds that I’m now observing. His estimate that one of these comets strikes our atmosphere about every second is a good estimate of the flux from my observations. This discovery has largely been dismissed by the Atmospheric Chemistry science. These new observations should totally change our knowledge of the origin of much of Earth’s water.