‘Hitler bomber’ Bentley found in garage after 30 years

Hitler Bomber Bentley

A 1936 Bentley 4.5-Litre Vanden Plas Tourer previously owned by former RAF pilot Charles Blackman has sold at auction for £454,250 at the H&H Classics sale at Duxford.

It last sold for £260 in 1952 and has spent the last 30 years locked up at Mr Blackman’s home in Stockport. But the Bentley was unearthed following the death of the former pilot and sold as part of his estate.

Despite being in a ‘barn-find’ condition, the Bentley fetched more than double the pre-auction estimate of between £150,000 and £200,000, helped in no small part by the fact that it’s one of only six W.O. Bentley 4.5-Litre cars assembled by the service department using new old stock parts in 1936.

Mr Blackman served in the RAF 500 Squadron and took part in the bombing of Hitler’s mountain retreat in Bavaria in April 1945. In the same month, he made emergency food drops on the German/Dutch border where people were facing famine.

RAF 550 Squadron

RAF 550 Squadron, with Flight Sargent Blackman pictured centre

He bought the Bentley in 1952 and drove it for 36 years before age caught up with him and the car was taken off the road. It remained in his garage ever since.

Damian Jones, head of sales at H&H Classics said: “This is the ultimate Bentley ‘barn-find’ in the marque’s centenary year. It is a really wonderful discovery for all fans of the marque made even more special in the make’s 100th birthday year.

“It sold last time for just £260 so this time we believed it would do a thousand times better and it did not disappoint.”

1936 Bentley 4.5-Litre Vanden Plas Tourer

He added: “This Bentley is so unusual because it was assembled in the mid 1930s using a chassis and mechanical parts which dated from no later than 1931.”

“Only the body was freshly made when the car was assembled and sold as a new car in 1936. The W.O. Bentleys made from 1919 to 1931 are far more valuable than the Derby Bentleys which followed from 1933 to 1940. The car was accepted as a W.O. Bentley because its chassis and mechanicals were all made during the W.O. era.”

Rare Beatles album once owned by John Lennon to be auctioned

The rare album cover of Yesterday And Today by The Beatles

A Beatles album once owned by John Lennon - and believed to be one of the rarest in the band's history - is up for auction.

The so-called "butcher" cover of Yesterday And Today caused controversy when it was released in the US back in 1966.

Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison posed, group shot - at the 'A Hard Day's Night' premier

It shows the Fab Four smiling, dressed in white coats and covered in pieces of raw meat and decapitated baby dolls.

The cover, believed to be The Beatles' protest against the Vietnam War, was subsequently withdrawn and replaced with more public-friendly artwork.

English singer, songwriter, and peace activist John Lennon (1940 - 1980) of the Beatles, UK, 28th May 1964

It is estimated that Lennon's personal copy of the record will sell for £136,000 when it goes under the hammer at Julien's Auctions annual event - Music Icons: The Beatles In Liverpool.

Lennon kept the record on the wall of his apartment in New York and later gave it to Beatles fan Dave Morrell, with the star writing: "To Dave, from John Lennon, Dec 7th 1971."

John Lennon sketched a man holding a shovel with his dog

He also scrawled a sketch on the back, showing a man holding a shovel with his dog in front of a setting sun.

Mr Morrell later obtained autographs from Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, and the record is believed to be the only original that bears three Beatles signatures.

Gary Hein, a Beatles expert, said: "There is no Beatles album in the world that compares with this one in terms of both rarity and value.

The Beatles pop group, left to right, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison

"This important world-class pop culture piece would add significantly to any Beatles collector, art, pop culture or record collector's collection."

Other items being auctioned include a guitar strap from a 1956 Les Paul Junior guitar that was owned and signed by Lennon - and used at the One to One Sessions at Butterfly Studios in New York. That has a guide price of between £15,000 and £23,000.

Lennon's detention record from his teachers at what was then known as Quarry Bank High School has an estimate of between £2,200 and £3,800.

A baseball signed by The Beatles during their final US concert in August 1966 has an estimate of between £60,000 and £75,000.

A baseball signed by The Beatles and given to Mike Murphy

Darren Julien, president and chief executive of Julien's Auctions said: "Julien's Auctions is honoured to have been a part of Beatlemania history with our record-breaking sales of some of the Fab Four's most important and newly discovered memorabilia to come to auction."

"Each year we look forward to setting the bar even higher by putting together another spectacular auction event that celebrates the brilliance and artistry of rock and roll's greatest and most iconic band."

The auction will take place online and live at The Beatles Story Museum in Liverpool on the 9 May. 

The Mysterious Exploding Asteroid

                                                                 The asteroid Bennu spewing gravel-size particles into space

Billions of years ago, something—perhaps the vibrations of an exploding star—jostled a cloud of cosmic gas and dust suspended in space. The cloud collapsed on itself and flattened into a spinning disk. The center grew heavy and ignited, forming our sun. The stuff that remained ricocheted, collided, and congealed. The biggest clumps of space stuff smoothed into spheres—the planets and moons. The smallest, the asteroids and comets, stayed as they were, like crumbs left over from an elaborate feast.

And right now one of those crumbs is exploding.

An asteroid named Bennu has been caught spewing particles into space—hundreds of gravel-size bits, hurtling from the surface at high speed.

Asteroids, also referred to as minor planets, are small, rocky bodies floating between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. They are mainly made of materials (metal or rock) left over from the formation of the inner solar system.

The tiny explosions were spotted by a NASA spacecraft named OSIRIS-REx. The probe settled into an orbit around the asteroid in late December and noticed the first ejection within days. Over the next two months, OSIRIS-REx observed nearly a dozen of these events. And more are still being detected.

“It’s one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career,” says Dante Lauretta, the lead investigator of the mission.

The solar system is littered with asteroids, from near Earth to the edges well beyond Pluto. Bennu, a blob-shaped object slightly larger in diameter than the height of the Empire State Building, resides close by, and its orbit occasionally crosses paths with the orbit of Earth.

But particle-spewing asteroids are extremely rare. Only about a dozen of the 800,000 known asteroids in the solar system are classified as “active” like this. That’s why, when NASA launched a spacecraft to study Bennu, scientists didn’t expect it would be one of them. The numbers were against them.

Asteroid 2003 SD220

Part of the Aten group, the asteroid was discovered in September 2003 by astronomers of the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search at Anderson Mesa Station near Flagstaff, Arizona, U.S. Expected to flyby Earth on Dec, 22, 2018, its radar images have revealed its shape to be like "a hippopotamus wading in a river." This will be its closest approach until 2070. 

Astronomers don’t know what’s causing the ejections, but they have several potential explanations. Some asteroids spin so fast that pieces of them start to fly apart. Others are sideswiped by floating debris, a collision that can expose icy particles buried beneath the surface and sweep them into space. Andy Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who studies asteroids, suspects the sun might have something to do with it. When the light hits a rocky object without a protective magnetic field—such as Earth—the particles become positively charged, while those in the shade remain negatively charged.

“Near the terminator or the shadows, the charge difference leads to a voltage difference that can be really huge,” Rivkin says. “On the moon, this effect has been seen to levitate dust. On asteroids … who knows what happens.”

Vesta

Asteroid Vesta was discovered by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers in 1807. It’s about the length of Arizona and its surface is made of frozen lava.

The OSIRIS-REx team says the plumes of particles aren’t dangerous to the spacecraft. Some particles rain down on Bennu. Others are thrown deeper into space, beyond the tug of the asteroid’s gravity. Still others get stuck in between and settle into an orbit around Bennu, creating a new population of tiny moons around the asteroid. “That has never been seen before in any solar-system object,” Lauretta says.

Some of the evicted particles might eventually make their way to Earth and plunge into the planet’s atmosphere in a dazzling meteor shower. Lauretta predicts the particles could reach Earth as soon as September.

The past few months of observations have turned up other surprises. Scientists predicted the surface of Bennu would be quite smooth. Instead, it’s rugged and cluttered with boulders. The textured terrain presents a new challenge to the OSIRIS-REx team. The spacecraft hovers safely around the asteroid, but it was designed to swoop in and collect samples of the surface material. Scientists and engineers say they will now reconsider potential landing spots for the maneuver. After scooping up some asteroid grains, OSIRIS-REx will depart Bennu and head back to Earth. The samples will arrive in 2023, and scientists can’t wait to get their hands on them.

Eros

Asteroid Eros, the first to be orbited and landed on by a spacecraft, was discovered on August 13, 1898, by German astronomer Gustav Witt at the Urania Observatory in Berlin. It is named after the god of love in Greek mythology.

Unlike planets and moons, asteroids have remained virtually unchanged since the beginning of the solar system, preserved by the vacuum of space. Scientists suspect that asteroids such as Bennu, which is covered in water-rich minerals, delivered some of the water present on Earth today, though they’re not sure on the specifics. (Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft found evidence that another asteroid, named Ryugu, had less water than expected, according to newly released results from the mission.) To study these objects is to explore the past of our cosmic neighborhood. “It’s almost like doing archaeology,” says Eva Lilly, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.

Scientists have another motive in their research: self-preservation. Because of its close proximity to Earth, Bennu is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid. The risk isn’t immediate; scientists estimate a 1-in-2,700 chance of an impact late in the 21st century. But they want to be prepared, for the sake of future generations.

Lutetia

Officially termed 21 Lutetia, this asteroid was discovered by Hermann Goldschmidt from the balcony of his apartment in Paris in 1852. Lutetia is Paris' Latin name.

“In case there is, one day, an asteroid heading toward Earth, we want to know what we are dealing with,” says Lucille Le Corre, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute who works on the OSIRIS-REx mission.

The rocky relics of the ancient past might also hold some clues about the solar system’s future.

“The more that we can understand the early parts of the solar system and the evolution that we’ve taken to get to this point in our history, the more we can understand what happens next,” says Cristina Thomas, an assistant professor of astronomy and planetary science at Northern Arizona University.

What happens next?

“That’s a good question,” she says. “Who knows?”

Ida

Asteroid Ida, discovered by the Galileo probe in 1993, is 32-mile (52 km) long and has a tiny moon, Dactyl. 

Gaspra

Asteroid Gaspra is named after a resort on the Crimean peninsula. Interestingly, many of the asteroid's craters have been named for resorts and spas from across the World.

Neptune’s Moon Triton Is Destination of Proposed NASA Mission

Crescents of Neptune and Triton in an image taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft, about three days from its closest approach to Neptune in 1989.

Is it time to go back to Neptune?

Scientists representing NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposed a spacecraft and mission on Tuesday at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas that would explore Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.

The unusual satellite is believed to be an object — similar in many ways to Pluto — from the solar system’s icy Kuiper belt that was captured billions of years ago by the giant planet’s gravity. And Triton is thought to harbor an ocean, hinting at the possibility that a world quite distant from the sun may contain the ingredients for life.

A color mosaic of Triton made by Voyager 2.

Unlike multibillion dollar proposals for spacecraft that the agency has usually sent to the outer solar system, this spacecraft, named Trident, aims to be far less expensive, the mission’s scientists and engineers said, or the price of a small mission to the moon.

“The time is now to do this mission,” said Louise Prockter, director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston and the principal investigator of the proposed mission. “The time is now to do it at a low cost. And it will investigate whether it is a habitable world, which is of huge importance.”

Visits to the outer solar system are usually conducted as NASA flagship missions that cost billions of dollars, like the recently concluded Cassini mission to Saturn or the Europa Clipper spacecraft set for launch in the 2020s.

While these projects have produced significant achievements, smaller, less pricey missions also might advance planetary science. On Mars, for instance, no single spacecraft did everything, but in aggregate and over time, the robots sent there revealed the planet’s watery past and set the stage for future astronauts.

That’s why the scientists behind Trident proposal, which will be formally presented to NASA later this month, are seeking support under the agency’s highly competitive Discovery program, for missions that are supposed to cost less than $500 million.

NASA aims to launch these missions every two years. The most recent Discovery program was the InSight lander, which reached Mars in November. The next is expected to be the Lucy mission, which will explore asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the sun.

Trident will be up against proposals for more extensive surveys of the moon, a visit to Jupiter’s moon Io and a return to Venus. Trident proponents hope that the possibility of exploring the solar system’s most distant known planet without spending billions of dollars usually required for such a mission will persuade the agency to support it.

Neptune and its moons were last visited in 1989 during a brief flyby of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which took Earth’s first and only close images of the solar system’s eighth planet.

Voyager 2 also recorded data showing possible plumes of water being blasted from Triton’s interior. Since that time, many planetary scientists have wanted to return to Triton. It was recently declared a top priority for exploration in NASA’s Roadmap for Ocean Worlds.

“Triton shows tantalizing hints at being active and having an ocean,” said Dr. Amanda Hendrix of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., who was a leader of the Roadmap study. “It is a three-for-one target, because you can visit the Neptune system, visit this interesting ocean world, and also visit a Kuiper belt object without having to go all the way out there.”

Studying such places, she said, could bring new insights into how ocean worlds originate, how they vary and how they maintain liquid water. For instance, water in Triton’s ocean could be much colder than the usual freezing point, but the presence of ammonia could preserve it in a liquid state. Such clues will help in the search for life beyond Earth.

Neptune is thirty times farther from the sun than Earth. Over the last couple of decades, the notion of where life could arise in the solar system has greatly expanded.

Scientists once thought the habitable zone ended at Mars, because places farther out would not be warmed enough by the sun. But then an ocean was discovered beneath Europa, one of Jupiter’s big moons, and then farther out, another beneath Saturn’s Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.

If Trident confirms an ocean exists on Triton, it would mean that an even broader expanse of the solar system may be capable of sustaining life.

To get to Triton, the spacecraft would fly in a fast, straight trajectory after an orbital assist from Jupiter, similar to the flyby that was used by the New Horizons spacecraft to visit Pluto in 2015. It would rely on a payload of scientific instruments to conduct ocean detection and atmospheric and ionospheric science. The spacecraft would photograph the entirety of Triton, which is the largest object in the solar system that has not yet been fully imaged.

“We are comparing with the Voyager encounter in 1989, which was built on early 1970s technology, essentially a television camera attached to a fax machine,” said Karl Mitchell, the proposed mission’s project scientist, of the Voyager imager. “It was remarkable for its day, but it doesn’t have anything like the efficiency of a modern digital imaging system.”

Timing is also critical because of the moon’s changing seasons as Neptune makes its orbit around the sun.

“In order to view the plumes that Voyager saw in 1989, we have to encounter Triton before 2040,” said Dr. Mitchell. Otherwise, because of the positions of the objects in their orbits, Triton will not be illuminated again for over eighty years.

Baikal-sjön i Sibirien, förevigad i ett foto av den kanadensiska astronauten Chris Hadfield, taget ombord den internationella rymdstationen ISS.

Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right – after 2,469 years

An archaeologist inspects the keel of a shipwreck discovered in the waters around the sunken port-city of Thonis-Heracleion.

In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and wrote of unusual river boats on the Nile. Twenty-three lines of his Historia, the ancient world’s first great narrative history, are devoted to the intricate description of the construction of a “baris”.

For centuries, scholars have argued over his account because there was no archaeological evidence that such ships ever existed. Now there is. A “fabulously preserved” wreck in the waters around the sunken port city of Thonis-Heracleion has revealed just how accurate the historian was.

“It wasn’t until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right,” said Dr Damian Robinson, director of Oxford University’s centre for maritime archaeology, which is publishing the excavation’s findings. “What Herodotus described was what we were looking at.”

Engraving of bust of Greek historian Herodotus by George Cooke.

In 450 BC Herodotus witnessed the construction of a baris. He noted how the builders “cut planks two cubits long [around 100cm] and arrange them like bricks”. He added: “On the strong and long tenons [pieces of wood] they insert two-cubit planks. When they have built their ship in this way, they stretch beams over them… They obturate the seams from within with papyrus. There is one rudder, passing through a hole in the keel. The mast is of acacia and the sails of papyrus...”

Robinson said that previous scholars had “made some mistakes” in struggling to interpret the text without archaeological evidence. “It’s one of those enigmatic pieces. Scholars have argued exactly what it means for as long as we’ve been thinking of boats in this scholarly way,” he said.

But the excavation of what has been called Ship 17 has revealed a vast crescent-shaped hull and a previously undocumented type of construction involving thick planks assembled with tenons – just as Herodotus observed, in describing a slightly smaller vessel.

Herodotus. Greek historian wrote An Account of Egypt in The Histories. Some critics have questioned whether he actually visited Egypt.

Originally measuring up to 28 metres long, it is one of the first large-scale ancient Egyptian trading boats ever to have been discovered.

Robinson added: “Herodotus describes the boats as having long internal ribs. Nobody really knew what that meant… That structure’s never been seen archaeologically before. Then we discovered this form of construction on this particular boat and it absolutely is what Herodotus has been saying.”

About 70% of the hull has survived, well-preserved in the Nile silts. Acacia planks were held together with long tenon-ribs – some almost 2m long – and fastened with pegs, creating lines of ‘internal ribs’ within the hull. It was steered using an axial rudder with two circular openings for the steering oar and a step for a mast towards the centre of the vessel.

Robinson said: “Where planks are joined together to form the hull, they are usually joined by mortice and tenon joints which fasten one plank to the next. Here we have a completely unique form of construction, which is not seen anywhere else.”

Alexander Belov, whose book on the wreck, Ship 17: a Baris from Thonis-Heracleion, is published this month, suggests that the wreck’s nautical architecture is so close to Herodotus’s description, it could have been made in the very shipyard that he visited. Word-by-word analysis of his text demonstrates that almost every detail corresponds “exactly to the evidence”.