Off Topic The "That's interesting"/geek thread

Nice move and great finish by Chair!

1-1

COYR’s!!!!

 

Hey @kiwiqpr - how's this for "middle class"? My son used to play in these streets when he was wee...

 

The post apocalyptic world looks like Scotland
at least castle stellsey has a nice view down

 

‘WTF?’: Newly Discovered Ghostly Circles in the Sky Can’t Be Explained by Current Theories, and Astronomers Are Excited
By
Ray Norris
-
Dec 30, 2020
31,544
space like a cosmic smoke-ring. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what it was. A few days later, our colleague Emil Lenc found a second one, even more spooky than Anna’s.

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The ghostly ORC1 (blue/green fuzz) on a backdrop of the galaxies at optical wavelengths. There’s an orange galaxy at the centre of the ORC, but we don’t know whether it’s part of the ORC, or just a chance coincidence. Image by Bärbel Koribalski, based on ASKAP data, with the optical image from the Dark Energy Survey (https://www.darkenergysurvey.org). Image Credit: Author provided.
Anna and Emil had been examining the new images from our pilot observations for the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, made with CSIRO’s revolutionary new Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope.

EMU plans to boldly probe parts of the universe where no telescope has gone before. It can do so because ASKAP can survey large swathes of the sky very quickly, probing to a depth previously only reached in tiny areas of sky, and being especially sensitive to faint, diffuse objects like these.

I predicted a couple of years ago this exploration of the unknown would probably make unexpected discoveries, which I called WTFs. But none of us expected to discover something so unexpected, so quickly. Because of the enormous data volumes, I expected the discoveries would be made using machine learning. But these discoveries were made with good old-fashioned eyeballing.

Hunting ORCs
Our team searched the rest of the data by eye, and we found a few more of the mysterious round blobs. We dubbed them ORCs, which stands for “odd radio circles.” But the big question, of course, is: “what are they?”

At first we suspected an imaging artifact, perhaps generated by a software error. But we soon confirmed they are real, using other radio telescopes. We still have no idea how big or far away they are. They could be objects in our galaxy, perhaps a few light-years across, or they could be far away in the universe and maybe millions of light years across.

When we look in images taken with optical telescopes at the position of ORCs, we see nothing. The rings of radio emission are probably caused by clouds of electrons, but why don’t we see anything in visible wavelengths of light? We don’t know, but finding a puzzle like this is the dream of every astronomer.

We Know What They’re Not
We have ruled out several possibilities for what ORCs might be.

Could they be supernova remnants, the clouds of debris left behind when a star in our galaxy explodes? No. They are far from most of the stars in the Milky Way and there are too many of them.

Could they be the rings of radio emission sometimes seen in galaxies undergoing intense bursts of star formation? Again, no. We don’t see any underlying galaxy that would be hosting the star formation.

Could they be the giant lobes of radio emission we see in radio galaxies, caused by jets of electrons squirting out from the environs of a supermassive black hole? Not likely, because the ORCs are very distinctly circular, unlike the tangled clouds we see in radio galaxies.

Could they be Einstein rings, in which radio waves from a distant galaxy are being bent into a circle by the gravitational field of a cluster of galaxies? Still no. ORCs are too symmetrical, and we don’t see a cluster at their centre.

A Genuine Mystery
In our paper about ORCs, which is forthcoming in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, we run through all the possibilities and conclude these enigmatic blobs don’t look like anything we already know about.

So we need to explore things that might exist but haven’t yet been observed, such as a vast shockwave from some explosion in a distant galaxy. Such explosions may have something to do with fast radio bursts, or the neutron star and black hole collisions that generate gravitational waves.

Or perhaps they are something else entirely. Two Russian scientists have even suggested ORCs might be the “throats” of wormholes in spacetime.

From the handful we’ve found so far, we estimate there are about 1,000 ORCs in the sky. My colleague Bärbel Koribalski notes the search is now on, with telescopes around the world, to find more ORCs and understand their cause.

It’s a tricky job, because ORCs are very faint and difficult to find. Our team is brainstorming all these ideas and more, hoping for the eureka moment when one of us, or perhaps someone else, suddenly has the flash of inspiration that solves the puzzle.

It’s an exciting time for us. Most astronomical research is aimed at refining our knowledge of the universe, or testing theories. Very rarely do we get the challenge of stumbling across a new type of object which nobody has seen before, and trying to figure out what it is.

Is it a completely new phenomenon, or something we already know about but viewed in a weird way? And if it really is completely new, how does that change our understanding of the universe? Watch this space!

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Bärbel Koribalski / ASKAP, author provided

Space

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RAY NORRIS
Ray Norris is a British/Australian astronomer in the School of Science at Western Sydney University and with CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science. He researches how galaxies formed and evolved after the Big Bang, and the process of astronomical discovery with large data volumes. He also researches the astronomy of Australian Aboriginal people.

Ray was educated at Cambridge University, UK, and...
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When astronaut Chris Hadfield serenaded the Earth with Bowie’s Space Oddity, many of us got cracking with back-of-the-envelope calculations attempting to figure out how much the guitar cost to send up: probably around $75,000.

On balance, it seems like money well spent—but the prohibitive cost of sending stuff into space is one of the many reasons the moon bases and Mars landings envisioned by science fiction writers and 17th century bishops alike haven’t yet materialized.

Since it was first dreamed up by the Russian rocket scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, supposedly inspired by looking at the Eiffel Tower, and later refined by another Soviet engineer in 1959, many people have pointed to a space elevator as the solution. The latest proposal—that building a space elevator from the moon to Earth orbit is theoretically feasible right this very second—comes to us via a new paper from researchers at the University of Cambridge and Columbia University.

But first, a little space elevator background.

Ending the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation
Why is getting to space so expensive? The problem is that you have to carry your fuel with you, and you need to find a way to provide enough thrust to lift that fuel—as well as carrying the payload that you actually want to take into space. Most of the fuel and energy, therefore, ends up being expended just lifting fuel higher into Earth’s atmosphere so that it can be burned to accelerate the payload. And low Earth orbit—where Commander Hadfield’s guitar was sent—is cheaper than sending things to the moon or deeper space, where they have to escape gravity entirely.

The basic idea behind a space elevator is to do away with the pesky requirement of carrying all that fuel with you…by building a giant cable and climbing up it. This isn’t as ludicrous as it sounds.

Imagine such a cable, extending into space with an orbiting counterweight, which could be an asteroid or a space station, on the end of it. Just like in a game of tetherball, the (apparent) centrifugal force from that orbiting counterweight as it rotates around the Earth pulls the rope taut. If the cable is long enough, that centrifugal force can be enough to support the weight of the cable, suspending it: a vast elevator to the sky.

Once you have this elevator to space, robotic “climbers” on the outside crawl up the rope. You can send payloads into low Earth orbit, geostationary orbit, or further out into space—all just by choosing how far to climb. If the tower is tall enough, simply letting go at the top flings you into deep space, escaping Earth’s orbit entirely.

Regardless of the design, the economics of the space elevator always look glorious: sending mass into low Earth orbit could be reduced from $10,000 per pound to $400 per pound. Some estimate that an elevator could be constructed for as little as $6 billion. Compare this to the space shuttle program, which cost a total of $209 billion by one estimate.

Sounds wonderful. But, of course, all the creative designs so far have been torpedoed by one flaw: What do you make the cable from?

The cable has to support a tremendous amount of tension without snapping. Since part of that tension is supporting the cable’s own weight, the less dense the material is, the less force it will feel. So you need a material that’s lightweight and can be pulled without breaking. Steel, titanium, and almost everything else you can think of would simply snap under the forces involved.

For a while, it was thought that maybe carbon nanotubes might provide the solution—they’re the first material designed that might get up to the strength required. But issues abound here, too.

Manufacturing them at sufficient purity is extremely difficult. A single defect can ruin the strength of the material. Then there’s the fact that the cable might be vulnerable to lightning strikes and, if you’re not sold yet, the fact that the longest ever carbon nanotube cable manufactured was around half a meter, falling an agonizing 35,768 kilometers short of the length required.

If an Earth-Based Elevator Won’t Work, Why Not Dangle a Cable From the Moon?
The new design, which the authors dub the Spaceline, circumvents some of these nasty requirements by proposing that the cable should be built on the moon and dangle down to Earth orbit. This immediately does away with the counterweight. The Earth’s gravity pulling down on the cable is sufficient to hold it taut.

The major advantage is that the cable does not need to be nearly as strong, as it need not support large amounts of cable mass in Earth’s strong gravitational field, but instead in the weaker lunar field. This means that you could actually make such a cable with materials that exist: the authors note that Kevlar, the same material used in bulletproof vests, could be up to the challenge.

The major disadvantage is that the cable can only extend slightly closer than geostationary orbit, which is still a long distance from Earth’s surface. So you’ll have to make that first stage of the journey and grab the rope by yourself. But for the cool (estimated) price of a billion dollars, this lunar space elevator could enable regular travel to the moon’s surface with only a third of the fuel.

While this doesn’t solve the problem of escaping Earth’s gravitational field—you’ll still need rockets and the miserable physics of space launch to reach the Spaceline in the first place—the authors envisage some potential advantages, alongside saving fuel costs once you reach the line.

For example, the cable would run through the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Moon—in other words, where the Earth’s gravitational pull cancels out the Moon’s gravitational pull. This is one of the regions in space where you can actually dream of stably constructing a floating base. And the Spaceline could transport materials from the moon to Earth orbit for, well, for whatever it is we want to build there—satellites, spacecraft, space stations, you name it.

The idea of using the Lagrange points as stepping stones—beyond our only current space outpost, the ISS—is an exciting one that offers many benefits. Not least, it gives humanity a workable project to focus on whereby we can develop all of the ancillary technologies that are going to be necessary to achieve anything practical in space.

If it really costs a billion dollars to build a Spaceline, can’t you think of some billionaires that might do it? We can all dream of a multiplanetary future in the abstract but, as the recent Moon mission Vikram can tell you, managing space is extremely difficult. If we are ever to leave the cradle of our civilization, we’ll need all the ingenious ideas we can get.

 

I have only just become aware of this interesting event. I look forward to swing the results and pictures

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/

 

A great summary with stunning photos of Curiosity’s rumble on Mars.


Nasa's Curiosity rover: 3,000 days on Mars https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-55562150

 

The sky is ever changing with an array of spectacular colours and patterns......

 

XP-79: THE US FIGHTER BUILT TO RAM ENEMY BOMBERS
Alex Hollings | October 6, 2020

In the waning days of World War II, the world of military aviation was at a turning point. By the close of 1944, America’s prop-driven B-29 Superfortress was pushing the limits of extended-duration bombing missions thanks to technological advances like its uniquely pressurized cabin and remote-controlled defensive turrets. On the other side of the fight, the Nazi Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first operational jet aircraft, was proving that the days of propeller driven fighters were numbered. In a very real way, the future of warfare in the skies was so in flux that, in the minds of many, just about anything seemed possible.

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Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwable, the world’s first jet fighter. (U.S. Air Force photo)
At the onset of World War II, a number of British Royal Air Force units were still operating bi-planes. By the end of the war, jet fighters were screaming across the sky in massive air battles for the future of Europe.

The famed Supermarine Spitfire so often credited with winning the Battle of Britain, for instance, offered its pilots little more than a floating reticle on the windscreen (advanced technology at the time) and fifteen seconds worth of ammunition if a pilot were so bold as to release it all in just one volley. As technology advanced, many aircraft were fitted with more powerful guns and more efficient engines, but dogfighting remained a close-quarters shoot out — a far cry from the over-the-horizon missile engagements of today.

Downright Crazy
But it was that powerful belief that air warfare was changing that prompted a number of governments to pursue unique and original air combat ideas that, in hindsight, seem downright crazy. One such program was Northrop’s XP-79, colloquially known as The Flying Ram.

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(WikiMedia Commons)
The XP-79 was a design conceived by John K. (Jack) Northrop himself, and was one of a number of platforms developed by Northrop to leverage the flying wing design. Today, Northrop Grumman continues to advance flying wing designs, most notably in the form of the in-service B-2 Spirit and forthcoming B-21 Raider.

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Jack Northrop,next to his N-1M “Jeep”, at Muroc fielf (Edwards Air Force Base), circa 1941. In the cockpit of teh flying wing is test pilot Moye Stephens. (USAF Flight Test Center Archives)
The XP-79 was much smaller than its stealthy successors would be, with a fuselage built only large enough for a single pilot to lay down in horizontally, marking this aircraft’s first significant departure from common flying wing designs as we know them today. Northrop and his team believed that pilots would be able to withstand greater G forces if they were oriented in the laying position, and because the XP-79 was being designed to utilize jet propulsion, the shift seemed prudent. Northrop, in fact, had already used this cockpit layout in another experimental aircraft just a few years earlier, the MX-334.

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(USAF Image)
Northrop originally designed the platform to use “rotojet” rocket motors, not unlike the German Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, but issues with propulsion prompted a shift to using twin Westinghouse 19B (J30) turbojets instead. After the shift to these jet motors, the aircraft’s designation shifted as well, to XP-79B.

The Flying Ram
The most unusual thing about the aircraft wasn’t its unique propulsion, nor was it the unusual way the pilot rode — it was the way the aircraft was meant to engage enemy aircraft. The name “Flying Ram” wasn’t just a bit of artistic license. The heavy duty welded magnesium monocoque construction made the aircraft exceptionally strong — and that was by design. Northrop didn’t intend for the XP-79 to shoot enemy bombers down, he wanted it to flyright through them.

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(USAF FlightTest Center Archives)
Instead of relying on heavy guns and lots of heavy ammo, the XP-79 would literally collide with other aircraft, using its strong wings to tear through the wings or fuselages of encroaching bombers.

The plan for the XP-79 was fairly straightforward: It was intended to serve as an interceptor aircraft that could engage an incoming fleet of bombers quickly and effectively. Pilots responding to an inbound air raid would rely on the on-board jet engines to power them through a series of high speed passes through bomber formations, downing aircraft as they tore through them.

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(USAF FlightTest Center Archives)
The XP-79 was equipped with no other offensive weapons (though there were plans for cannons eventually), and instead would use the specially reinforced trailing edges of each wing to cut through enemy air frames. An armored glass cockpit positioned between the two large jet inlets was meant to protect the pilot during these high speed, mid-air collisions.

The aircraft was believed to have a top speed of 525 miles per hour with a service ceiling of 40,000 feet, but alas, the XP-79 was, to bastardize a Hunter S. Thompson quote, simply too weird to live.

First and Final Flight

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Harry Crosby stands inside the MX-334 (XP-79 predecessor) during a lull in unpowered gliding tests in early 1944. (USAF FlightTest Center Archives)
The jet-powered XP-79B only took to the skies once, with test pilot Harry Crosby in the unusual cockpit. Crosby had the plane airborne for just over 14 minutes when he attempted his first banking maneuver at around 10,000 feet. Unfortunately, as the Flying Ram banked, it promptly went into an uncontrolled spin.

Crosby and the aircraft both plummeted to the ground, killing the test pilot. Some believe he may have been unconscious throughout the fall, while others suggest that he may have been struck by the aircraft itself as he bailed out. The prototype aircraft was also a total loss.

With Hitler already dead and the success of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan just a month prior, the need for a jet-powered interceptor that could literally cut through enemy bombers was just not as pressing. No XP-79 would ever fly again.

 

Am looking forward to following this mission.

Nasa's Perseverance rover is bearing down on Mars https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-55843377

 

A “techie” post with a sporty theme.

Golf on the moon: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and show how far he hit it
https://www.bbc.com/sport/golf/55927727

 

Tensions rise as rival Mars probes approach their final destination
Anxious moment for scientists in US, China and UAE as spacecrafts enter crucial stages of long journey to red planet

Robin McKie
Sun 7 Feb 2021 01.15 EST

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The skies above Mars will witness some startling aeronautical displays in the next few days when three rival space robot probes reach the red planet after journeying for millions of miles across space.

US billionaires vie to make space the next business frontier
The United Arab Emirates’ probe Hope orbiter will arrive first, on Tuesday, followed by China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft the next day. Finally, the US rover Perseverance will make its dramatic descent to the surface of Mars on 18 February.

It is a remarkable armada that reveals the growing desire of many nations to develop their own space technology and explore the solar system. Just how well they succeed when they reach their target this week and next remains to be seen, however. Mars is an unforgiving place to visit.

Of the dozens of Mars missions since 1960, about half have crashed or missed the planet altogether, thanks to component failures, rocket engine mishaps or software errors.

“It can be a heartbreaking business,” admitted UK physicist Colin Wilson, of Oxford University. “I have had instruments on two previous Mars missions – Britain’s Beagle lander and Europe’s Schiaparelli probe – and each time I was in the control room, clutching my seat, during their descents. And on both occasions the probes crashed.”

Mars is a difficult destination for several reasons. First, it is millions of miles away, astrobiologist Susanne Schwenzer of the Open University pointed out. “It is not like going to the moon which is only a quarter of million miles distant. That is the equivalent of a putt in a game of golf. By contrast, Mars is incredibly distant. In golf terms it is the equivalent of a full tee-shot and a lot trickier.”

In addition, Mars has an atmosphere but not a thick one. “That means there is enough air to trigger dust storms and winds that sheer and push your lander off course and into danger,” added Wilson. “On the other hand, it is not thick enough to allow you to use parachutes for a probe’s entire descent.”

In the past, US space engineers have relied on fitting airbags to their probes allowing them to bounce to a standstill after being dropped from a parachute. However, Nasa’s new generation of rovers are too complex and heavy for such manoeuvres and Perseverance will instead rely on a rocket platform called a sky crane to lower it to the Martian surface.

This technique was used once before, in 2012, to land the US rover Curiosity. Now Perseverance, a much heavier rover, will follow suit on a journey that has been dubbed Nasa’s “seven minutes of terror”. That is the time the SUV-sized rover, which weighs more than a tonne, will take to reach the surface of Mars after striking the planet’s upper atmosphere at more than 13,000mph.

Atmospheric friction will bring about the first cut in speed. Then a huge parachute will be released automatically and this will cut the probe’s speed to a few hundred miles an hour. Then the sky crane’s rocket engines will fire and the probe will slow down until it hovers about 20 metres above the surface of the red planet.

The crane will lower the rover on cables until it touches the surface, the cables will be cut and the sky crane will fly off to make its own uncontrolled landing a safe distance from Perseverance. Only then will a message be relayed to Nasa engineers to let them know the good news.

By contrast, the UAE’s spaceship Hope, the Arab world’s first interplanetary spacecraft, will have a relatively simple time this week. It is designed merely to orbit Mars, which it will achieve by carrying out a 30-minute burn of its main engine.

If the burn is successful that will slow the spaceship sufficiently for it to be captured by Mars’ gravitational field and enter orbit round it. Hope will then spend the next two years studying Mars to better understand how, over billions of years, it lost a thick atmosphere that was capable of sustaining water vapour on its surface but which was slowly transformed into a cold and arid world.

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The US Mars rover Perseverence depicted on the surface of the planet. Photograph: NASA/AFP via Getty Images
China’s Tianwen-1 is also scheduled to enter Martian orbit this week. It will study the planet for several months before dropping a lander that will carry a 250kg robot rover on to the planet. If it works, China will become only the second nation in the world to successfully land a robot vehicle on another world, after the US.

“China has already safely landed rovers on the moon, but this will be a far greater achievement and will really show what their space scientists can do today,” said Schwenzer.

Crucially, the three probes form part of a spearhead of missions that in coming years should transform our knowledge of the planet, by returning Martian rock and soil samples to Earth for study. This task will be started by Perseverance, which is scheduled to pinpoint promising geological sites, extract soil samples and leave caches of them at selected locations. Future missions, involving Europe and the US, will then retrieve these samples and return them to Earth.

“When we do that, we will hopefully get answers to the simple question: is there, or was there, life on Mars,” added Schwenzer.

“It is a crucial issue – for if life did evolve on Mars, independently of life on Earth, that means life evolved twice, separately, in the same solar system and is likely to be common in the cosmos.”

 

Same place, same memory, 58 years later.

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Amazing. I will be following this closely and with great interest.

 

Discovering WW1 tunnel of death hidden in France for a century
By Hugh Schofield
BBC News, Paris

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18 hours ago
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• World War One

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image copyrightPierre Malinowski
Not since the 1970s has there been such an important discovery from the Great War in France. In woods on a ridge not far from the city of Reims, the bodies of more than 270 German soldiers have lain for more than a century - after they died the most agonising deaths imaginable.

Forgotten in the confusion of war, their exact location was till now a mystery - one which the French and German authorities were in no hurry to elucidate. But thanks to the work of a father-and-son team of local historians, the entrance to the Winterberg tunnel on the Chemin des Dames battlefront has been found.

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image copyrightHohenzollern memorial book 1914-1918
image captionSome of the 270 soldiers whose lives were lost in the Winterberg tunnel have now been identified
The urgent question is what to do next. Should the bodies be brought up quickly and buried in a German war cemetery? Should there be a full-scale archaeological dig so we can learn more about the conduct of the war and the lives of the men who fought it?

Should there be a memorial, or a museum?

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The two governments are still deliberating, but time presses. Because if the tunnel's location is in theory still a secret, it is a secret that has been badly kept.

When I visited the spot a few days ago, it was to discover that bounty-hunters had been the night before. A three-metre deep hole had been dug near the entrance, and a collection of wartime artefacts - axes, spades and pit-props as well as unexploded shells - left in a heap.

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image captionThe Winterberg tunnel lies deeper than the three metres dug by looters at the site
We also found a human ulna - the fore-arm bone.

The looters had not managed to break into the tunnel - that lies even deeper down - and what they found are bits and pieces thrown up in the shell explosion that sealed it off.

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image captionSome of the debris uncovered by looters at the site
But no-one doubts they will be back, because whoever gets into the Winterberg tunnel first will find a treasure trove.

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In the spring of 1917 the French launched a doomed offensive to retake the hills that lie in a west-east line a few miles to the north of the river Aisne. The Germans had held the crest along the Chemin des Dames for more than two years, and they had a complex system of underground defences.

Near the village of Craonne, the Winterberg tunnel ran for 300m from the north side of the crest - invisible to the French - and came out to supply the first line of German trenches on the south-facing slope.

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image copyright111 Reserve Infantry regiment
image captionA German wartime map shows the tunnel just outside Craonne
On 4 May 1917 the French launched an artillery bombardment targeting the two ends of the tunnel, sending up an observation balloon to get a sight on the north-facing slope.


For once their accuracy was formidable. A shell fired from a naval gun hit the entrance, triggering more explosions from ammunition that was stored there and sending a cloud of acrid fumes into the shaft. Another shell sealed the exit.

Inside, the men from the 10th and 11th companies of the 111th Reserve Regiment were trapped. Over the next six days, as oxygen ran out, they either suffocated or took their own lives. Some asked comrades to kill them.

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image copyrightPierre Malinowski
By a fluke of physiology, three men survived long enough to be brought out by rescuers, just a day before the crest was abandoned to the French. One of them, Karl Fisser, left an account for the regimental history:

"Everyone was calling for water, but it was in vain. Death laughed at its harvest and Death stood guard on the barricade, so nobody could escape. Some raved about rescue, others for water. One comrade lay on the ground next to me and croaked with a breaking voice for someone to load his pistol for him."

When the French took the ridge, the scene outside would have been of untold chaos and destruction. Digging into the tunnel would hardly have been a priority, so they left it. The Germans retook the Chemin des Dames in a later push, but at that point they had no time either to search for remains.

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By the end of the war no-one could say for sure where the Winterberg tunnel had actually been. They weren't French bodies inside, so it was decided to let them lie - as countless other bodies still lie unfound along the Western Front.


The woods grew back and the shell-holes became mere undulations in ground. Today the spot is popular with dog-walkers.

But a local man called Alain Malinowski could not get the tunnel out of his head. It was out there somewhere on the ridge.

Working on the Paris metro in the 1990s, he travelled daily to the capital and used his spare time to visit military archives in the Château de Vincennes. For 15 years he accumulated descriptions, maps and prisoner interrogations - but to no avail. The landscape had been too badly disfigured by bombardment to make any meaningful comparison.

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But then in 2009 he chanced on a contemporary map showing not just the tunnel but also a meeting of two paths that had survived till today. With painstaking care, he measured out the angle and distance and arrived at the spot, now just an anonymous bit of woodland.

"I felt it. I knew I was near. I knew the tunnel was there somewhere beneath my feet," Alain Malinowski told Le Monde.

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For 10 years nothing happened. He told the authorities of his find but they refused to follow it up, either because they did not believe him or because they had no desire to open up a mass war-grave.

Into the story stepped his son Pierre Malinowski, at 34 years old a maverick ex-soldier who once worked for Jean-Marie Le Pen and now runs a foundation in Moscow dedicated to tracing war-dead from the Napoleonic and other eras.

Angered by official obfuscation, Pierre decided to force the hand of the French and German governments by opening up the tunnel himself. This was illegal, but he thought it was worth the punishment.

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One night in January last year he led a team that brought a mechanical digger to the spot his father had identified. They dug down four metres, and what they found proved they were indeed at the entrance to the tunnel.

There was the bell that was used to sound the alarm; hundreds of gas-mask canisters; rails for transporting munitions; two machine-guns; a rifle; bayonets and the remains of two bodies.

"It was like Pompeii. Nothing had moved," said one of the team.

Pierre Malinowski then covered up the hole, leaving the place as anonymous as he had found it, and he contacted the authorities. Ten months later, again frustrated by the slowness of the official response, he went public and told the story to Le Monde.

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It is fair to say that Pierre Malinowski is not a popular figure in the archaeological and historical establishments.

They believe he has not only broken the law. Without any authority of his own, and overriding the argument that the dead are best off resting where they are, he has also twisted the arm of government, forcing it either to open the tunnel or at least protect it.

And by his example he has encouraged other go-it-alone excavations - most of which will be conducted for purely mercenary motives.

Official reluctance to proceed with an investigation is clear. Diane Tempel-Barnett, spokeswoman for the German War Graves Commission (VDK), told German radio "to be honest we are not very excited about the discovery. In fact we find it all most unfortunate".

It is hard to imagine the Commonwealth War Graves Commission taking a similar line if the bodies of 270 UK troops were found. But then World War One is often described in Germany as its "forgotten war".

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image copyrightPierre Malinowski
image captionThis picture of the Winterberg tunnel was taken under heavy artillery fire
In fact efforts are under way now to track descendants of those who died in the tunnel - and with some success. The 111th Regiment recruited men in the Baden region of the Swabian Alps, and nine soldiers have now been identified who died on 4 and 5 May 1917.

"If I can help just one family to trace an ancestor who died in the tunnel, it will have been worth it," says Mark Beirnaert, a genealogist and Great War researcher.

"What I hope is that the bodies can be brought out and identified by their dog-tags. Then what would be fitting is that they leave this cold eerie tomb and be buried together as comrades."

That is what happened to the more than 400 German soldiers who were found in 1973, having died in a similar tunnel at Mont Cornillet east of Reims.

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BBC
There will be photographs and letters they wrote in their dying moments to their mothers, fathers and wives. Because they will have hoped that their bodies would soon be found
Pierre Malinowski
Historian

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Pierre Malinowski also wishes that due honours be paid to the men. "These were farmers, hairdressers, bank-clerks who came willingly to fight this war, and then died in a way that we cannot begin to comprehend," he says.

He is scrupulous in his respect for human remains. The bodies he has found have been returned to the ground, and he will not let them be photographed. But alongside the soldier's solidarity, there is also the fascination.

"The bodies will be preserved, so they will be like mummies, with skin and hair and uniforms.

"Remember the tunnel was where these soldiers lived from day to day - so there will be all their normal possessions. Every soldier will have a story. It will be the biggest ever reserve of human material from the First World War."