The Solar Impulse 2 airplane sails over Egypt’s Great Pyramids. (Credit: Solar Impulse)
After a photo op with the Great Pyramids, the Solar Impulse 2 airplane touched down in Egypt for the last layover in its 16-month, round-the-world odyssey.
Solar Impulse pilot and co-founder Andre Borschberg finished up his final turn at the controls with a sun-drenched landing at Cairo International Airport at 7:14 a.m. Wednesday (10:14 p.m. PT Tuesday), almost 49 hours after he took off from Seville in Spain.
“It’s fantastic to have this team, and to be able to do what we do with this spirit – it’s super,” Borschberg told the mission control team in Monaco via a cockpit radio connection.
Now it’s up to his fellow founder, Swiss psychiatrist-adventurer Bertrand Piccard, to close the 22,000-mile loop and pilot the solar-powered plane to Abu Dhabi, the place where the journey began in March 2015.
Japanese radar expert Hirokatsu Watanabe scans the walls of King Tutankhamun’s burial chamber. (Credit: National Geographic Channel via YouTube)
Radar scans have turned up fresh evidence of hidden chambers beyond the walls of King Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities reported today.
The scans were supervised by Japanese radar specialist Hirokatsu Watanabe on Thursday and Friday. They add to the evidence from thermal infrared imaging and a close examination of the chamber’s northern and western walls. Egyptian officials gave the go-ahead for the scans to check out archaeologist Nicholas Reeves’ claimthat the 3,300-year-old tomb was originally meant for Tut’s stepmother, Nefertiti, and retrofitted after the boy-king’s untimely death.
In a Facebook posting, the ministry said the preliminary readings “reveal a vacancy behind the northern wall of the tomb, which strongly indicates the existence of a new burial chamber.” Further analysis will be required over the next month, but the ministry said there was hope that “an enormous archaeological discovery will be declared soon.”
A computer animation shows how infrared scanning can produce heat maps of the exteriors of Egypt’s pyramids (Credit: ScanPyramids.org)
Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities says thermal scanning has turned up anomalies inside the pyramids of Giza, including a “particularly impressive one” on the eastern side of the biggest monument. The report comes just days after the ministry said a similar scan found temperature anomalies in King Tutankhamun’s tomb, hundreds of miles to the south.
Empty space doesn’t hold heat as well as rock or soil, so heat anomalies provide clues to structural features beneath or beyond the surface being scanned. They could point to hidden chambers or passages at the ancient sites. However, the anomalies also could be due to less spectacular differences in structure or composition – for example, fractures in the underlying rock.
When infrared cameras scanned the interior of Tut’s burial chamber, in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, the ministry said anomalies were found along the northern and western walls. That meshes with other evidence suggesting that yet another burial chamber – perhaps that of Tut’s mother, Nefertiti – lies beyond the walls.
Meanwhile, just outside Cairo, the international Scan Pyramids team took infrared readings of the Giza pyramids’ exteriors at sunrise, when the morning sun was starting to heat up the monuments; and at sunset, when the pyramids were cooling down. The ministry said scientists found intriguing anomalies in the cycle of heating and cooling, and singled out a temperature variation at the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops).
Infrared imaging conducted inside King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt has raised hopes that it has a hidden chamber, which would be in line with archaeologist Nicholas Reeves’ recently published suggestions that another royal burial chamber could be discovered there. And there’s more to come.
Egyptian Antiquities Minister Mamdouh Eldamaty holds an infrared camera that can scan the walls of King Tutakhamun’s tomb for temperature differences. (Credit: MInistry of Antiquities via Facebook)
Could the chamber have been built for Queen Nefertiti, thought to be Tut’s mother? Or for Kiya, a lesser wife of Tut’s father, Akhenaten? Could there be intact remains and 3,300-year-old treasures inside, as there were when Tutakhamun was discovered almost exactly 93 years ago in 1922?
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: So far, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has said only that a preliminary analysis of the infrared scans “indicates the presence of an area different in its temperature than the other parts of the northern wall.”
Further scans will be needed to confirm the results and pinpoint the area of temperature difference, the ministry said. But if the effect is confirmed, it could be caused by an open space behind the wall, which wouldn’t hold heat as well as the solid rock or soil surrounding other parts of the tomb.
That would be consistent with Reeves’ claim that there’s a continuation of Tut’s tomb lying beyond the boy-king’s burial chamber as it’s seen today, a space “containing the undisturbed burial of the tomb’s original owner – Nefertiti.” He said another hidden storeroom may lie beyond the western wail.
Reeves, who’s director of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project and senior archaeologist with the University of Arizona Egyptian Expedition, made his claims on the basis ofFactum Arte’s recent high-resolution images of the chamber’s walls. He said the images appeared to show the “ghosts” of hitherto-unrecognized doorways that had been covered over. When he published his paper on the subject this summer, it sounded like the stuff of an Indiana Jones movie. But the infrared scanning project’s initial results add weight to Reeves’ hypothesis.
The Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, about 25 miles south of Cairo, is slated to be the first target for the Scan Pyramids project in Egypt. (Credit: Coralie Carlson / AP)
Indiana Jones, eat your heart out: The international project to scan Egypt’s pyramids for hidden chambers, using cosmic rays, is gearing up for its launch this weekend.
The scientists behind the Scan Pyramids effort will install sensitive detectors to map the pyramids’ structure by studying how the cosmic rays that continually zap our planet skitter through the stones. Similar techniques have been used recently to look inside ancient pyramids in Mexico and Belize, as well as theruined reactors at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear site.
“The survey will be implemented through invasive – though non-destructive – scanning techniques using cosmic rays in cooperation with scientists and experts from Japan, France and Canada,” Egypt’s antiquities minister, Mamdouh Eldamaty, told Ahram Online. Ahram Online and Le Figaro reportedthat Eldamaty would announce the project’s official launch on Sunday.
