NASA Creepily Dismisses Claims That a Mystery 9th Planet Is ‘Pulling’ On Its Cassini Craft

The plot of the mysterious ‘Planet X’ thickens: After Nasa dismisses claims a mystery ninth planet is ‘tugging’ on its Cassini craft around Planet Saturn.  At the start of this year, a team of US researchers predicted the existence of a mysterious ninth planet, much to the cynicism of other experts.

A group of physicists in France then looked at their own models, along with data from the Cassini spacecraft, to narrow down the search for the giant stellar body.

Nasa scientists have dismissed claims that an unexplained object is ‘tugging’ on the spacecraft – and added that even if it did, the tugs would not be caused by a planet.  But the leading researchers involved with all of this have told British newspaper the MailOnline that the Nasa scientists are WRONG in their dismissal of the paper.

This is the latest in a series of developments surrounding the controversial mysterious extra planet.  Many believe that Planet X is on its way towards Planet Earth, to cause world wide death and destruction across the planet – please click HERE to read more about this mysterious planet.

Planet X & Nibiru System on its way towards us?

This unknown world, which is dubbed ‘Planet Nine’ by some and ‘Planet X/Nibiru’ by many others, is thought to be at least 10 times more massive than Planet Earth and the furthest planet from the sun, but guess what, its exact location is unknown!

It was a team of French scientists suggested gravity from the planet could explain perturbations in the orbit of Saturn as seen by Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft.

The paper which was published in March this year, which has now been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, suggests that small fluctuations in the orbit of Cassini could be used to narrow down an area of space where the planet could be.

But Nasa scientists have now said the Cassini spacecraft is not experiencing unexplained deviations in its orbit around Saturn – and unsurprisingly denying these reports!

‘An undiscovered planet outside the orbit of Neptune, 10 times the mass of Earth, would affect the orbit of Saturn, not Cassini,’ said William Folkner, a planetary scientist at JPL. 

Folkner develops planetary orbit information used for Nasa’s high-precision spacecraft navigation.

‘This could produce a signature in the measurements of Cassini while in orbit about Saturn if the planet was close enough to the sun.’

But Professor Jacques Laskar, researcher on the study told MailOnline: ‘This is exactly what we have done. We have simulated the presence of [Planet Nine] and look to the induced effect on the Earth-Saturn distance, as measured by Cassini.

‘Our zones of exclusions occur when the perturbation of [Planet Nine] on Saturn is too large to be compatible with the Cassini data. With data from 2004 to 2014, the exclusion zoneis 180 degrees wide.’ 

‘The press release of JPL is very confusing and essentially wrong,’ Professor Laskar added. 

‘We do not see any unexplained signature above the level of the measurement noise in Cassini data taken from 2004 to 2016,’ Mr Folkner added, in Nasa’s JPL press release. 

Cassini currently passing by Saturn

Professor Mike Brown, Professor of Planetary Astronomy at Caltech, who originally reported finding Planet Nine in January this year, told MailOnline that both Nasa and the French researchers are correct.

‘This was very confusing, but mostly because the Nasa press release was pretty unclear,’ he said. 

‘But the upshot is that everyone is correct.’

‘Cassini has been measuring very precise Earth-Saturn distances for a decade.’ 

He said the data seen by Nasa from Cassini fits in, within uncertainty, with models predicting the expected distance between Saturn and Earth, which is why Nasa are saying they have not seen any unusual orbits.

‘The March paper, which I find very impressive, says what happens if we add in Planet Nine to all of this?’ he said.

‘Not only does it affect Saturn, but also every other body in the solar system (by small amounts), which means they affect Saturn differently, so we have to recompute everything we thought we knew about where the planets should be.’

There is one place, identified by the French researchers, where if Planet Nine exists it would explain the distance between Earth and Saturn slightly better.

‘No one would look at the Cassini data and say there must be a Planet Nine,’ he said. ‘But you might consider a Planet Nine and then realize it makes the Cassini data ever so slightly better.’ 

Alan Stern is an engineer and planetary scientist. He is the principal investigator of Nasa’s New Horizons mission to Pluto (artist’s impression pictured). He is famously a defender of Pluto’s planet title, which was stripped from it in 2006

But external astronomers admit even the original paper published in January is very theoretical, and does not confirm the existence of a ninth planet.

‘The paper is…all modelling’

‘It might be there, it might not be,’ Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University told MailOnline.

She added that the French paper is ‘very very hypothetical’ and if Nasa is not reporting unknown tugs on the orbit of Cassini, it is unlikely they exist.

If the planet is in the Kuiper Belt, our telescopes are not powerful enough to be able to see it, Professor Grady added.

Nasa said the paper predicts that, if data tracking Cassini’s position were available out to the year 2020, they might be used to reveal the ‘most probable’ location for the new planet in its long orbit around the sun.

But Professor Laskar told MailOnline this was incorrect and that the team had asked for a correction to be issued.

‘The outcome of our simulation of an extended Cassini mission over 2020 is not to improve a possible determination of the location of planet 9, which in fact is not easy, and even impossible to do as we cannot simulate the data including a planet 9 in a coherent way

‘Our simulation is for the extension of the zones of exclusion of the planet 9,’ he said. 

Instead of looking for places the planet could be, they have ruled out the places it could not.

‘This result is very robust,’ he added. 

‘And nothing in what has been said by JPL navigation team contradicts this result. We are quite sure that if the JPL navigation team were performing the same simulation, they would end up with the same results.

‘But up to now, it does not seem that they have searched to reproduce this part of our results.’ 

Cassini’s mission is planned to end in late 2017, when the spacecraft, too low on fuel to continue on a longer mission, will plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere.

‘Although we’d love it if Cassini could help detect a new planet in the solar system, we do not see any perturbations in our orbit that we cannot explain with our current models,’  said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at JPL.

Whilst this proposed planet’s existence may eventually be confirmed by other means, mission navigators said they have observed no unexplained deviations in the spacecraft’s orbit since its arrival there in 2004.

But if the planet is where the French researchers predicted, other instruments might be able to help find it.

The Dark Energy Survey is a Southern Hemisphere observation project designed to probe the acceleration of the universe that started in 2013

It was not designed to look for a ninth planet, but by chance it is already looking in the right direction, according to the Cassini data.

‘It turns out fortuitously that the favoured region from Cassini is smack dab in the middle of our survey footprint,’ said David Gerdes, who is working on the cosmology survey.

‘We could not have designed our survey any better.’

It was back in January 2016 that Nasa warned that claims of a new planet lurking in our solar system are premature – interestingly, NASA usually kept quiet about Planet X’s existence!?

The space agency said the controversial Caltech paper claiming a ninth planet exists beyond Pluto was ‘just a prediction’. It called for caution – but pledged ‘if it’s there, we’ll find it.’

In a YouTube video, Jim Green, director of planetary science at Nasa addressed the new findings.

‘The January 20 paper in the Astronomical Journal is fueling our interest in planetary exploration,’ Green said. ‘Stimulating a healthy debate that’s part of the scientific process.

‘It is not, however, the detection of a new planet. It’s too early to say with certainty that there’s a so-called ‘Planet X’ out there.

He pledged Nasa experts would take part in the process to try and find it.

‘It’s all about starting the process that could lead to an exiting result.

‘If Planet X is out there, we’ll find it together.

Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who is the principal investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond, was also sceptical.

‘This is about the fifth or 10th prediction like this. … Not one has panned out,’ he said

‘If they do find it, it’ll be more like Number 19, not Number 9,’ he told GeekWire in an email.

Again, it is a huge new move by NASA to actually discuss about the mysterious Planet x??

U.I.P SUMMARY

Well what do we have here people, NASA actually now discussing about Planet X and denying its affects on their spacecraft in space – There must be something tugging on the Cassini Spacecraft, something HUGE!?

The evidence is building that there is definitely ‘something’ out there on the outskirts of our Solar system – and the evidence is pointing towards a HUGE planet, which many now believe is the mythical Planet X!

When NASA start getting twitchy about things, you can always tell that a nerve has been hit and they are struggling with containing the TRUTH!

It appears that the TRUTH is soon about to reveal itself….

MWV