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Northrop Grumman Secret bomber prototype

NGB demonstrator may be a twin-engine aircraft resembling an X-47B. Initial version will be piloted, but an unmanned endurance version is a probable followup.

Is Northrop Grumman building a secret bomber prototype? In late April, the company revealed first-quarter financial results. Data indicated $2 billion in new “restricted programs” contract awards at Integrated Systems, the aircraft division. This almost certainly confirms what DTI first reported earlier this year: Northrop Grumman has a classified, sole-source contract to build a demonstrator for the U.S. Air Force’s Next-Generation Bomber (DTI March, p. 30).

USAF budgets show no funding for the Next-Generation Bomber (NGB) itself in 2008, although documents show money for technology work in Fiscal 2008-10. Northrop Grumman CEO Ron Sugar said last year that Integrated Systems had made strides in black programs and identified restricted projects as the top new-business opportunity. Taken together, the evidence points to a single, very large contract win. Northrop Grumman also acquired Scaled Composites in 2007, a company that can develop large prototype aircraft quickly.

The $2-billion contract casts new light on the decision in January by Boeing and Lockheed Martin to reveal their year-old collaboration on NGB. (Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman declined interview requests.) Hailed as an NGB “dream team” combining Boeing’s bomber experience with Lockheed Martin’s stealth technology, the teaming now looks like an effort to catch up with a rival that has a lead in the next major U.S. combat aircraft program.

It is likely that the prototype will build on technology under development for the Navy’s X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator (UCAS-D), putting within reach USAF’s goal of a 2018 initial operational capability date for the bomber. Industry and USAF sources have talked about a competition in 2010, leading to the start of systems development and demonstration in 2011. But it would be Northrop Grumman’s to lose.

Events since 2000 placed Northrop Grumman in pole position. USAF interest in a replacement bomber was rekindled after 9/11, but USAF Secretary Jim Roche and Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper focused on the Lockheed Martin FB-22, seeing it as a low-risk solution that bolstered the case for the embattled F-22.

The departures of Roche and Jumper in 2005 coincided with a change in thinking. In October, USAF defined a three-stage Next-Generation Long-Range Strike program. Phase I would keep the force effective until 2018, with upgrades to aircraft. Phase II would be a new “2018 bomber,” while Phase III encompassed hypersonic concepts. This was the end of the road for the FB-22, since nobody envisioned the F-22 remaining in production long enough to dovetail with Phase II.

Late in 2005, at a conference on unmanned combat air vehicles in London, there were signs of convergence between the bomber requirement and the Joint UCAS project. J-UCAS had been kicked off as a major effort three years earlier, but USAF was interested in a platform larger than the Navy could accommodate.

Northrop Grumman J-UCAS Program Manager Scott Winship said at the time that the company had proposed completing a third prototype as an X-47C with a 172-ft. wingspan and 10,000-lb. payload. J-UCAS leader Mike Francis stressed an advantage of the unmanned vehicle: an inherently lower radar cross-section (RCS) than conventional tailed aircraft.

Despite the tension in J-UCAS, it was a surprise when an early-2006 high-level Pentagon review killed it, splitting resources into a white-world Navy effort and a classified USAF program, while endorsing a plan to field a bomber in 2018.

It’s now apparent, however, that USAF had already picked a primary approach to the NGB, and that the next two years of work, starting with the remaining Fiscal 2006 J-UCAS funding, are intended to validate that choice.

This approach emerged from J-UCAS, and particularly from Northrop Grumman, which anticipated the J-UCAS split and was prepared to respond. The company believed that the basic 42,000-lb. J-UCAS was better suited to the Navy than to USAF, had focused on the carrier-based J-UCAS demonstration and picked a design that offered high lift and a simple wingfold.

Northrop Grumman’s proposal for a bigger X-47C also preceded — and may have inspired — USAF’s switch to a larger long-range bomber. This meant, too, that the NGB program could get a running start because it would use aerodynamics and stealth technology that were in the works for J-UCAS.

The X-47B was much more advanced, in aerodynamic terms, than it appeared (see sidebar), and the same is likely true of its low-observable (LO) qualities. The aircraft is one of the first to combine a highly blended tailless configuration with new materials developed since the 1980s. The NGB will be the same, if not more so.

Northrop Grumman has stressed the “all-aspect, broadband” stealth inherent in the X-47B. Tailless shapes don’t have the “bow-tie” RCS pattern, with the smallest RCS on the nose and tail and peaks on the beam configurations, which characterizes conventional aircraft. They are stealthier against low-frequency radars — including updated, active-array VHF radars marketed by Russia — because they do not have shape features which are so small that their RCS in the VHF band is determined by size, rather than shape or materials. It may be significant that John Cashen, leader of the B-2 signatures team, returned in 2006 after 10 years in Australia and is now a consultant for Northrop Grumman.

RCS test facilities across the U.S. have been upgraded since the F-22 and B-2 were designed: USAF’s range at Holloman AFB, N.M., was reequipped to handle bistatic measurements, and a sophisticated airborne RCS measurement program based on a modified 737 was delivered in 2001.

How low can LO go? One paper, co-authored by a principal in DenMar Inc., the company founded by Stealth pioneer Denys Overholser, refers to the development of fasteners for a body with an RCS of -70 dB./sq. meter — one-thousandth of the -40 dB. associated with the JSF, and one-tenth that of a mosquito. DTI queried RCS engineers who don’t believe such numbers are possible; but then, when mention of a -30 dB. signature leaked out in a 1981 Northrop paper, nobody believed that either.

Tags: b-2, bomber, f-22, northrup, secret, stealth bomber, top secret, weapon, x-wing

Video: Truth About the Moon

Apollo Astronauts Revealing revelations about their experiences while orbiting over the dark side of the moon, strange music was heard by all and objects such as UFO’s were seen that should not have been there…..

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Tags: apollo, astronauts, moon, music, ufo

Mars Polygon Mystery

Scientists working with images from the Mars Phoenix mission are baffled by an unexpected difference between what they thought they would see and what Phoenix is now showing them.

The difference suggests that the northern plains of Mars may be a more complicated and active environment than previously imagined.

Phoenix landed on Monday at 0053 GMT (1643 PDT on Sunday). Since then it has been relaying images and data back to Earth via the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which periodically passes over the landing site.

Among the most spectacular images thus far is a colour mosaic of the terrain looking out from the northward side of the lander. It clearly shows the so-called “polygons” that are typical features of this region.

There’s just one problem: the polygons are too small.
Size surprise

During a press briefing yesterday, principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, US, said that preliminary estimates suggest the polygons in the foreground of the image are about 1.5 to 2.5 metres across.

This is much smaller than scientists estimated based on overhead views from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and on models of the Martian climate.

“I think it means that there are polygons within polygons within polygons,” said Smith. “At different climate times there may have been big polygons and at other times there may be small polygons, and it just may go back and forth over time.”

Polygons are produced by seasonal expansion and contraction of ground ice. When the ice is very cold it contracts and fractures in geometric patterns, much like mud cracks in the desert.
Ice depth

The fractures may only be a few millimetres across and are not visible on the surface. However, if they fill in with material, such as dry dust in the case of Mars, the ground ice will have no room to expand again when the temperature rises. As a result, the ground ice buckles, producing low mounds at the centres of polygons, and shallow troughs at the boundaries.

The potential for using polygon sizes to investigate the Martian climate is something that mission scientists have been preparing for since long before Phoenix was launched. “We knew they would be there, but we didn’t know what they would look like” says Michael Mellon, a Phoenix mission team member at the University of Colorado.

According to Mellon, the size of these polygons should be affected by the thickness of the soil layer above the ground ice and also by the climate itself. In general, the nearer ground ice is to the surface, the more it is subjected to temperature extremes and the more fractured it becomes, which leads to smaller polygons.
Active troughs

Deeper ground ice makes bigger polygons. On Mars, if the ice is more than about 30 centimetres below ground, the polygons should disappear altogether. A colder climate also affects the size of the polygons by making ice fracture more readily at greater depths.

One feature that has generated excitement during the first day since touchdown is the small polygon seen nearest to the lander in the first colour “postcard” from Phoenix (see image, top right). The upper right-hand side of this diamond-shaped polygon is extremely sharp edged, creating a dark furrow in the soil.

“That means it could be very recent,” said Smith, because a geologically old feature would likely have been softened and filled in by wind-blown dust long before now. “We think these are active troughs,” says Mellon.

If the polygons are “active”, it means they are currently expanding and contracting with some regularity. In the process, they may be churning up soil and rocks through a process called cryoturbation. By looking at the spacing between clusters of rocks across the surface it is possible to get a sense of whether polygon sizes, and therefore climatic conditions, have been changing on Mars in the recent past.

For example, a warmer climate would have driven the ground ice to lower depths and produced larger polygons. Polygons sizes can also point out local variations in soil composition and insolating properties.
Local anomaly?

Meanwhile, Mellon and his colleagues are pondering what appears to be a geoclimatic mystery. Polygons on Earth tend to be big, measuring 15 to 20 metres across. On Mars, based on the best available knowledge of conditions in the northern plains, Mellon calculates that the polygons should be, on average, 5 metres across. They are not.

“It has certainly got our brains turning,” says Mellon.

The simplest explanation is that the first images sent back by Phoenix show a collection of atypically small polygons. A view in another direction may well show the 5-metre polygons that Mellon and other scientists were expecting.

If that proves not to be the case, however, it means that scientists are missing a key piece of information about the northern plains - a piece they hope that Phoenix will eventually provide.

Tags: mars, phoenix lander, polygons, space

More Rumors of Attack on Iran

NEW YORK - The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.

Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.

The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC’s elite Quds force. With an estimated strength of up to 90,000 fighters, the Quds’ stated mission is to spread Iran’s revolution of 1979 throughout the region.

Targets could include IRGC garrisons in southern and southwestern Iran, near the border with Iraq. US officials have repeatedly claimed Iran is aiding Iraqi insurgents. In January 2007, US forces raided the Iranian consulate general in Erbil, Iraq, arresting five staff members, including two Iranian diplomats it held until November. Last September, the US Senate approved a resolution by a vote of 76-22 urging President George W Bush to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. Following this non-binding “sense of the senate” resolution, the White House declared sanctions against the Quds Force as a terrorist group in October. The Bush administration has also accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program, though most intelligence analysts say the program has been abandoned.

Rockin’ and a-reelin’
Senators and the Bush administration denied the resolution and terrorist declaration were preludes to an attack on Iran. However, attacking Iran rarely seems far from some American leaders’ minds. Arizona senator and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain recast the classic Beach Boys tune Barbara Ann as “Bomb Iran”. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton promised “total obliteration” for Iran if it attacked Israel.

The US and Iran have a long and troubled history, even without the proposed air strike. US and British intelligence were behind attempts to unseat prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq, who nationalized Britain’s Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company, and returned Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power in 1953. President Jimmy Carter’s pressure on the Shah to improve his dismal human-rights record and loosen political control helped the 1979 Islamic revolution unseat the Shah.

But the new government under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned the US as “the Great Satan” for its decades of support for the Shah and its reluctant admission into the US of the fallen monarch for cancer treatment. Students occupied the US Embassy in Teheran, holding 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days. Eight American commandos died in a failed rescue mission in 1980. The US broke diplomatic relations with Iran during the hostage holding and has yet to restore them. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric often sounds lifted from the Khomeini era.

The source said the White House views the proposed air strike as a limited action to punish Iran for its involvement in Iraq. The source, an ambassador during the administration of president H W Bush, did not provide details on the types of weapons to be used in the attack, nor on the precise stage of planning at this time. It is not known whether the White House has already consulted with allies about the air strike, or if it plans to do so.

Sense in the senate
Details provided by the administration raised alarm bells on Capitol Hill, the source said. After receiving secret briefings on the planned air strike, Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, said they would write a New York Times op-ed piece “within days”, the source said last week, to express their opposition. Feinstein is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Lugar is the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

In a statement received by Asia Times Online from Feinstein’s office, the senator said she “has not received any briefing, classified or unclassified, from the administration involving any plans to strike Iran”.

Given their obligations to uphold the secrecy of classified information, it is unlikely the senators would reveal the Bush administration’s plan or their knowledge of it. However, going public on the issue, even without specifics, would likely create a public groundswell of criticism that could induce the Bush administration reconsider its plan.

The proposed air strike on Iran would have huge implications for geopolitics and for the ongoing US presidential campaign. The biggest question, of course, is how would Iran respond?

Iran’s options
Iran could flex its muscles in any number of ways. It could step up support for insurgents in Iraq and for its allies throughout the Middle East. Iran aids both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Israel’s Occupied Territories. It is also widely suspected of assisting Taliban rebels in Afghanistan.

Iran could also choose direct confrontation with the US in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, with which Iran shares a long, porous border. Iran has a fighting force of more than 500,000. Iran is also believed to have missiles capable of reaching US allies in the Gulf region.

Iran could also declare a complete or selective oil embargo on US allies. Iran is the second-largest oil exporter in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and fourth-largest overall. About 70% of its oil exports go to Asia. The US has barred oil imports from Iran since 1995 and restricts US companies from investing there.

China is Iran’s biggest customer for oil, and Iran buys weapons from China. Trade between the two countries hit US$20 billion last year and continues to expand. China’s reaction to an attack on Iran is also a troubling unknown for the US.

Three for the money
The Islamic world could also react strongly against a US attack against a third predominantly Muslim nation. Pakistan, which also shares a border with Iran, could face additional pressure from Islamic parties to end its cooperation with the US to fight al-Qaeda and hunt for Osama bin Laden. Turkey, another key ally, could be pushed further off its secular base. American companies, diplomatic installations and other US interests could face retaliation from governments or mobs in Muslim-majority states from Indonesia to Morocco.

A US air strike on Iran would have seismic impact on the presidential race at home, but it’s difficult to determine where the pieces would fall.

At first glance, a military attack against Iran would seem to favor McCain. The Arizona senator says the US is locked in battle across the globe with radical Islamic extremists, and he believes Iran is one of biggest instigators and supporters of the extremist tide. A strike on Iran could rally American voters to back the war effort and vote for McCain.

On the other hand, an air strike on Iran could heighten public disenchantment with Bush administration policy in the Middle East, leading to support for the Democratic candidate, whoever it is.

But an air strike will provoke reactions far beyond US voting booths. That would explain why two veteran senators, one Republican and one Democrat, were reportedly so horrified at the prospect.

Tags: Bush, Iran, iraq, middle east, terrorism, war

Cold War Espionage and Computer Security

A smiling Hu Jintao mentioned how he used Mr. Gates operating system every day, and Bill promised to help him out with technical support. But Bill and the Redmond crowd might be helping out with more than just technical support, and not to help the Chinese government either.

Humour me a moment, while I take a little diversion back to 1982. The largest non-nuclear explosion ever recorded by satellite took place in Russia in 1982, and was an explosion in the Siberian gas pipeline. The shocking, and little-known truth about this catastrophe was that it was directly caused by the CIA by deliberately giving the Soviet Union modified software (in binary only format of course) that was engineered to destroy the pipeline.

Lest you think this is a paranoid fantasy (it sounds like one, I know) this was documented in the book “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War”, by Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who served in the National Security Council, reported on by the Washington Post in 2004, and even mentioned in a 1996 article in the CIA journal “Studies in Intelligence”.

This wasn’t just an attack on the Soviet Union, but indirectly affected Western European gas prices (the pipeline destroyed was designed to feed gas to Europe), as a side effect of the US attempt to disrupt Soviet hard currency earnings. I wonder if the Chinese are students of this particular part of history? Judging by their eagerness to embrace Windows in their infrastructure, and the recent promises by Chinese PC makers to include “genuine Windows” on PC’s shipped in China, it would seem not.

This single incident of modified binary-only software causing massive economic damage should be required reading for the decision makers of any nation that might have conflicting interests to the USA. That’s everyone else in the world, just in case you were wondering. Even that normally docile American pet, the UK, has balked at accepting binary-only control software for the new Joint Strike Fighter aircraft and threatened to cancel the order if they don’t get access to the source code. Maybe the UK isn’t so docile after all, as the UK military certainly seems to understand the need to control the software in at least some critical parts of their own infrastructure.

So who can you trust in computing, and why? I’d love to say that open source companies can be trusted as they give you the source code, and proprietary companies can not, as source code isn’t available, but it’s not as simple as that. Microsoft loudly proclaims that it already makes the Windows source code available to China and any other countries who complain about the possibility of such binary-only threats. Do you imagine that any US Linux distributor would say no to the US government if they were requested (politely, of course) to add a back-door to the binary Linux images shipped as part of their products? Who amongst us actually uses the source code so helpfully given to us on the extra CDs to compile our own version? With Windows, of course, there are already so many back-doors known and unknown that the US government might not have even bothered to ask Microsoft. They may have just found their own, ready to exploit at will. What about Intel or AMD and the microcode on the processor itself?

Even with access to Windows source code, it is still not safe to trust it unless you compile that code yourself and only install the binary versions you create on your own machines. Having source code that claims to match a product proves nothing about the binary version of the product you’re using, unless you’ve created it yourself. How many versions of Windows installed on Chinese government computers were actually compiled by the Chinese themselves. None, I’d guess. The same of course is true for the UK. What this means is that governments around the world who accept binary packaged software from US software companies are at the mercy of the US intelligence services who may or may not have decided to add just that little “extra” into the code. If you think I’m being paranoid about this, just ask the Russians…

Just for completeness, for the truly paranoid even compiling the source code yourself actually isn’t enough to ensure you’re getting “trusted” computing. In his landmark 1984 paper “Reflections on trusting trust” Ken Thompson, one of the original UNIX authors, tells a tale of how he hacked the C compiler on the UNIX system, the software used to create new binary code from source code, to add a completely undetectable back-door into UNIX. Once set up there was no trace of the back-door he added in any of the publicly available UNIX source code. It was cleverly hidden in the binaries and was designed to propagate itself into any new binaries created on the system. This was a theoretical attack, not something he actually did, but something he could have done. At least I hope so, but then I’m inclined to trust him.

The only way to get trusted code is to design the processor yourself (yes, there can be back-doors in processor microcode as well as ordinary binary code), write your own compiler and audit all the open source code you create yourself for use in your command and control systems. Anything else is trusting the untrustworthy.

I’ll leave you with some words from Ken Thompson’s paper that are just are true today as in 1984. “The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.”