User:Ithaca8/John Brandenburg

John E. Brandenburg Ph.D. is a plasma physicist who went somewhat off the rails in 2012 and started proclaiming that he saw clear evidence of a thermonuclear war on Mars in the distant past. This off-beat idea attracted the attention of woo-peddlars and gave a mighty boost to sales of his four non-fiction books. He has also written science fiction using the nom de plume Victor Norgarde.

Education
Brandenburg was born in Rochester MI but grew up in Medford OR. He obtained a BA in Physics from Southern Oregon University in Ashland OR. He obtained his MS in Applied Science at University of California at Davis and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Plasma Physics at the UC Davis extension campus at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore CA. The Title of his Thesis was A Theoretical Model of a Reversed Field Ion Layer Made of Monoenergetic Ions. Its topic was magnetic confinement of plasmas for controlled nuclear fusion.

Professional career
Brandenburg held positions in a variety of high-tech companies specializing in plasma physics: Mission Research Corporation, Sandia National Laboratories, Research Support Instruments (RSI), The Aerospace Corporation, Florida Space Institute, and Orbital Technologies in Madison WI. His work encompassed studies of the microwave electrothermal plasma thruster for space propulsion, rocket plume-regolith interactions on the Moon and Mars, vortex theory of rocket engine design, and Kaluza-Klein theory of field unification for purposes of space propulsion. He is now (2015) at Morningstar Applied Physics in Vienna VA.

That thermonuclear war
Brandenburg's first idea was that there was a natural nuclear reactor on Mars, analogous to the one discovered in Gabon in 1972. At the 2011 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference he published a poster on a local concentration of radioactive uranium, thorium and potassium, using data from the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter.

Later, he proposed that the elevated ratio of Xenon129 to Xenon132 in the atmosphere of Mars could only be explained as the aftersignature of a nuclear weapon. He suggests that massive explosions occurred in in Mare Acidalium at approximately 50°N 30°W,near Cydonia  Mensa and in Utopia Planum  at  approximately  50°N  120°W near Galaxias Chaos, both locations of possible archaeological artifacts.

This idea has been challenged by astronomers who have shown that there are many other more likely and more mundane explanations for the observed xenon isotope ratios.