Stealth Saga #70

Su-57:

The F-35 hater team is now hating on the Su-57.

The Su-57 will start production in 2018 (supposedly) with 12 'pre-production' aircraft delivered in 2019.

The Su-57 is making progress on the engine and other development milestones, but concerns remain.

"New" Russian VTOL Fighter:

Russia claims it is working on the replacement of the MiG-29 and Su-33 with a VTOL fighter.  That would mean the LMFS is definitely dead instead of almost certainly.

J-20 & J-31:

A report on the J-20 updates the capabilities.

A report states future Chinese aircraft carriers will have the two 5th gen fighters aboard.

TF-X:

Turkey has released the technical specifications on the TF-X.

MAGMA:

The Brits are testing out a drone without control surfaces.  Instead, it uses airflow to control direction.

Tornado Replacement:

The Luftwaffe might prefer the F-35, but the German MoD prefers the Eurofighter.

CF-18 Replacement:

Canada is starting its replacement procurement for the CF-18.  The F-35 might be a contender.

Sixth Generation Fighter:

Directed energy weapons are finally gearing up for deployment.

F-22:

The Russians are claiming an F-22 interfered with an attack run by Su-25s but was "chased away" by an Su-35.

Could the reason the Su-35s and F-22s be shadow boxing is because both sides are trying to gather intel on the other's capabilities?

An F-22 damaged during touch and goes six years ago will be fixed soon.

UTC received an almost seven billion dollar contract for maintaining the F119 engines on the F-22.

F-35:

The F-35 is going to get a deep dive review on its costs.

66 F-35s were delivered this year.

Is there a change coming for testing on the F-35s?

F-35 weapon accuracy testing is complete.

The USAF claims to no longer need its A-10 maintenance crews to work on the F-35A.

The 115th and 187th Air National Guard Fighter Wings are getting upgraded to the F-35A.

F-35C aviators qualified on the Lincoln.

Britain is not happy about the lack of transparency for the F-35 program.

More on Israel's declaration of the F-35I being operational.

Poland has launched its Harpia fighter procurement and the F-35 is a contender.

Russian military observers went to Norway's base where its first F-35s are.

South Korea is reportedly buying 20 more F-35s.

META:

F/A-18s spotted an unknown aircraft and tracked it on their FLIR.

Fictional Aircraft:

A real US Naval Academy professor did a presentation on the stealthiness of cinematic version of the fictional MiG-31 Firefox.

SETI Talk on High Temperature Volcanism During the Archean

Did a Magma Injection Into Organic Sediments at the Barremian/Aptian Boundary Release Carbon Gases, Trigger Oceanic Anoxic Event 1a?

The Early Cretaceous Barents Sea Sill Complex: Distribution, 40Ar/39Ar geochronology, and implications for carbon gas formation

Authors:

Ploteau et al

Abstract:

Mafic igneous rocks of Cretaceous age (80–130 Ma) scattered around the Arctic Ocean are commonly referred to as the High Arctic Large Igneous Province (HALIP). We have mapped out the distribution of HALIP igneous rocks in the Barents Sea region over the past decade based on integrated seismic–gravity–magnetic interpretation, field work, review of publications, and analyses of new and vintage borehole and field samples. The mapping reveals abundant igneous rocks in the northern and eastern Barents Sea covering an area of ~ 900,000 km2 with a conservative volume estimate of 100,000 to 200,000 km3 of intrusions. The igneous province is dominated by sheet intrusions injected into Triassic and Permian sedimentary rocks. Hydrothermal vent complexes are rare, and only two potential vent complexes have been identified on seismic data in the eastern Barents Sea. We have further done extensive radiometric dating of the igneous samples in the Barents Sea region. New 40Ar/39Ar dating of thirteen samples from Svalbard reveal ages of crystallization and alteration. The large age span (60–140 Ma for the raw ages) is likely due to partial or complete overprint of the K/Ar system in plagioclase, and the age of the magma emplacement is better represented by U/Pb TIMS ages. Only one of our 40Ar/39Ar analyses of plagioclase yielded a statistically valid age that is in line with the recently published U/Pb TIMS ages of 122–125 Ma. The new data clearly document that relying on published data from the K/Ar system can lead to erroneous conclusions on the age of crystallization in this province without a careful use of additional 40Ar/39Ar degassing data (i.e., K/Ca). We propose that the magmatism on Svalbard and Franz Josef Land represents a distinct magmatic event near the Barremian/Aptian boundary (125 Ma) in the Barents Sea. This Early Cretaceous Barents Sea magmatism resulted in the formation of the BSSC (Barents Sea Sill Complex). BSSC age rocks are also present in Arctic Canada (Sverdrup Basin) and on Bennett Island (New Siberia Islands). The massive injection of hot magma into potentially organic-rich sediments in the eastern and northern Barents Basin caused rapid organic matter maturation and formation of thermogenic gas and oil in contact aureoles. We estimate that up to 20,000 Gt of carbon were potentially mobilized, corresponding to 175 trillion barrels of oil equivalent. The production rates and fate of the carbon gases are uncertain. However, we speculate that rapid release of aureole greenhouse gases (methane) may have triggered the Oceanic Anoxic Event 1a (OAE1a) and the associated negative δ13C excursion in the Early Aptian. Some of the methane may also be trapped in the vast hydrocarbon gas accumulations found in the east Barents Basin.

Does Io Have a Subsurface Magma Sea?

Tides flowing in a subsurface ocean of molten rock, or magma, could explain why Jupiter's moon Io appears to have its volcanoes in the "wrong" place. New NASA research implies that oceans beneath the crusts of tidally stressed moons may be more common and last longer than expected. The phenomenon applies to oceans made from either magma or water, potentially increasing the odds for life elsewhere in the universe.

"This is the first time the amount and distribution of heat produced by fluid tides in a subterranean magma ocean on Io has been studied in detail," said Robert Tyler of the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "We found that the pattern of tidal heating predicted by our fluid-tide model is able to produce the surface heat patterns that are actually observed on Io." Tyler is lead author of a paper on this research published June 2015 in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

link.

Evidence of NeoArchean Magma Transporting Large Amounts of Water and Carbon dioxide in South Africa

Fluid-assisted interaction of peraluminous metapelites with trondhjemitic magma within the Petronella shear-zone, Limpopo Complex, South Africa

Authors:

Safonov et al

Abstract:

The principal problem concerning the evolution of Precambrian granulite complexes located between granite-greenstone cratons is their interaction with the underthrusted greenstone belts during exhumation from the lower crust. Besides evidence for pervasive and localized fluid fluxes arising from devolatilization of the greenschist and amphibolite-facies rocks in the course of their burial underneath the granulites, this interaction might also be expressed in formation of diverse magmas of granitic, trondhjemitic and granodioritic composition. We present results of a petrological, fluid inclusion and thermobarometric study of interaction between fluidized trondhjemitic magma and peraluminous metapelitic granulites associated with the regional high-grade Petronella shear zone located in the Southern Marginal Zone (SMZ) of the Limpopo Granulite Complex (South Africa). The hot (T ∼ 1000 °C) trondhjemitic magma, which, presumably, originated from partial melting of a basaltic (amphibolite) material at the base of the granulite complex or at the top of the underthrusted greenstone blocks, intruded granulites at P ∼ 8.0–9.5 kbar (24–28 km depth) at 2.667 ± 0.9 Ga during the exhumation of the SMZ. The magma heated and assimilated orthopyroxene-cordierite metapelites and dragged them to a depth of 18–20 km (6.3–6.5 kbar). The magma was heterogeneously saturated with MgO, FeO, Al2O3 by the dissolved metapelites. This process provoked crystallization of several garnet generations from the trondhjemitic melt. Various mineral assemblages included in the different generations of garnet allowed application of TWQ method combined with PERPLE_X pseudo sections to trace sub-isobaric cooling of the magma from T ∼ 900–600 °C at 5.5–6.5 kbar. The isobaric cooling also affected the associated metapelites. Fluid inclusions trapped in garnet and quartz in the trondhjemite show that the magma transported carbonic fluid with densities corresponding to the late stages of magma cooling (600–650 °C and 5.5–6.5 kbar). Carbonic fluids coexisted with aqueous-salt fluids (preserved as inclusions with salinity up to 20.58 wt.% NaCl eq.). These low water activity fluids (aH2O less than 0.3)(aH2O less than 0.3) bearing Na, K and Ca salts, being exsolved from the magma on cooling and solidification, provoked formation of complex Na-gedrite + biotite + sillimanite + quartz ± staurolite ± plagioclase-bearing assemblages after cordierite in metapelites at temperatures 630–570 °C and pressures 5.5–6.5 kbar. These data provide evidence that hot trondhjemitic melts played a critical role in the exhumation of granulites onto the adjacent granite-greenstone craton. The trondhjemite transferred heat from the lower to the middle crust and transported large volumes of external aqueous-carbonic-salt fluids that participated in the rehydration of a significant portion of the SMZ.