A few days before launch, Glenn, right, watches as artist Cecilia “Cece” Bibby paints the name “Friendship 7” on his capsule. Credit: NASA
In February 1962, the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing. Both nations had developed spacecraft to send humans into space and selected a group of pilots to fly those spacecraft. The Soviets leaped ahead by placing the first man, Yuri A. Gagarin, in space on April 12, 1961, on a one-orbit flight around the Earth aboard his Vostok spaceship. The United States responded with two suborbital piloted Mercury missions, launched atop Redstone rockets. The Soviets next kept a cosmonaut in space for a full day. On February 20, 1962, astronaut John H. Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth during the three-orbit Mercury-Atlas 6 mission, aboard the spacecraft he named Friendship 7.
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Project Mercury was America’s first human space flight program. The Space Task Group at <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="
NASA
Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It's vision is "To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity."
” data-gt-translate-attributes=”["attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"]”>NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, under the direction of Robert R. Gilruth, initiated the project in October 1958 with three goals: orbiting a manned spacecraft, investigating man’s ability to function in space, and safely recovering both spacecraft and crew member. In April 1959, NASA announced the selection of seven astronauts who would undertake the Mercury missions. After some early launch failures, the first successful unpiloted test of the single-seat spacecraft took place in December 1960, launched into a suborbital flight atop a Redstone rocket. A similar flight a month later carried Ham, a chimpanzee. Astronaut Alan B. Shepard completed the first American spaceflight on May 5, 1961, a 15-minute suborbital mission aboard his Freedom 7 capsule. Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom flew a similar mission on July 21 aboard Liberty Bell 7. The first successful unpiloted orbital Mercury flight using the more powerful Atlas rocket flew in September 1961, followed by the two-orbit flight of chimpanzee Enos on November 29. The next step was to fly an astronaut on an orbital mission.
Friendship 7 astronaut John H. Glenn, left, leaving crew quarters with flight surgeon Dr. William K. Douglas and suit technician Joseph W. “Joe” Schmitt. Credit: NASA
On November 29, 1961, Gilruth, by then the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), now NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, announced the selection of astronaut John H. Glenn to fly the first orbital mission, with M. Scott Carpenter as his backup. Following months of training and preparations of the spacecraft and its Atlas launch vehicle, Glenn donned his spacesuit and boarded Friendship 7 for a launch attempt on January 27, 1962. The launch director halted the countdown at T-minus 13 minutes due to thick clouds that would have prevented observation of the rocket’s ascent. Officials rescheduled the launch, and mechanical and weather delays added further postponements. On February 20, after a steak-and-eggs breakfast, Glenn suited up once again in Hangar S, a facility leased by MSC’s Cape Operations from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, today’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. He boarded a transfer van that took him on the four-mile, 11-minute trip to Launch Complex 14.
At Launch Pad 14, astronaut John H. Glenn squeezes into the Friendship 7 capsule. Credit: NASA
Assisted by the pad crew led by Guenter F. Wendt, Glenn squeezed into the cramped capsule. They strapped him in and bolted the hatch cover in place. After several delays, resulting in Glenn spending nearly four hours in the capsule, the countdown finally reached zero at 9:47 a.m. EST and the Atlas rocket’s three main engines ignited. Four seconds later, the rocket rose from the launch pad on a pillar of fire. Two minutes and nine seconds later, the rocket’s two booster engines cut off as planned and were jettisoned, the Atlas continuing on the power of the single, center-mounted sustainer engine. At five minutes, one second into the flight, the sustainer engine cut-off and Friendship 7 separated two seconds later. Glenn was in orbit!
Liftoff of Friendship 7 with Glenn aboard atop an Atlas rocket from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Florida. Credit: NASA
A team of engineers monitored the countdown and the launch from the Mercury Control Center (MCC) located in Building 1385 at Cape Canaveral, led by Flight Director Christopher C. Kraft, who also served as chief of MSC’s Flight Operations. Carpenter served as capsule communicator, or capcom, the one person in MCC who communicated with the astronaut in orbit. A global network of tracking stations located along the spacecraft’s ground track supported the team in the MCC.
An automatic camera inside Friendship 7 records astronaut John H. Glenn during his orbital flight. Credit: NASA
Shortly after separating from the booster, Friendship 7 turned around, flying with its heatshield in the direction of flight. Looking out his window, Glenn observed the state of Florida, and photographed it with his Ansco Autoset camera. He tracked the booster for eight minutes as it slowly tumbled out of sight. He reported feeling fine in weightlessness, and checking his spacecraft’s systems reported that all were working as expected. During his first orbit, as he flew over the succeeding ground sites, Glenn continued reporting on his and the spacecraft’s condition, successfully controlling the capsule’s attitude. He observed his first orbital sunset over the Indian Ocean and sunrise over the Pacific Ocean, including the phenomenon of the “fireflies,” ice particles traveling with his spaceship illuminated by the rising Sun. He ate his only food during the mission, a tube of apple sauce, and took a xylitol pill as part of an experiment investigating digestion during spaceflight. With all systems operating well, through the tracking station in Guaymas, Mexico, MCC gave Glenn a “go” for his second orbit. When his spacecraft began drifting out of its normal attitude, Glenn easily steered it back to its proper orientation.
Glenn took this photograph of Florida shortly after launch. Credit: NASA
As he passed over Cape Canaveral at the start of his second orbit, controllers noticed a signal indicating that the spacecraft’s landing bag, used to cushion the impact at splashdown, had deployed, meaning that the heat shield required for reentry was no longer in place. Although engineers assumed the signal to be erroneous, they came up with the plan to keep the retrorocket pack on after retrofire, hoping the straps would be strong enough to keep the heatshield in place had the landing bag in fact been deployed. Although not told explicitly about the problem, Glenn was advised by all ground stations to make sure the landing-bag deploy switch was in the “off” position. Otherwise, Glenn’s second orbit around the Earth passed uneventfully, with the astronaut conducting experiments and photographing the planet as it sped by beneath him. As he passed over Hawaii, he received the “go” to proceed to his third and final orbit. Controllers instructed Glenn to place the landing-bag switch in the automatic position, and should a light come on, to keep the retropack in place after retrofire. Having now deduced what the issue was, Glenn reported he heard no bumping noises during attitude maneuvers that would indicate a deployed landing bag. Nearing the California coastline, the spacecraft fired its three retrorockets to slow its velocity, with Glenn reporting, “Boy, feels like I’m going halfway back to Hawaii!” Engineers closely monitored Friendship 7’s reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. The temporary radio blackout caused by the buildup of ionized gases around the spacecraft as it sped through the upper layers of the atmosphere occurred as planned, lasting four minutes, 20 seconds. Glenn described the reentry as “a real fireball outside,” as pieces of the retropack burned off and passed by his window. He manually controlled the spacecraft’s attitude during the entry, eventually exhausting his fuel supply. The drogue parachute deployed early at 28,000 feet to slow and stabilize the spacecraft, followed by the main 63-foot red and white main parachute at 10,800 feet.
Friendship 7, with astronaut John H. Glenn inside, a few minutes after splashdown. Credit: NASA
Friendship 7 splashed down at 2:43 p.m. EST about 800 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral in the vicinity of Grand Turk Island in the Turks and Caicos Islands, after a flight lasting 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds. The U.S. Navy designated the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Randolph (CVS-15) as the prime recovery ship, but because Friendship 7 landed 41 miles west and 19 miles north of the planned splashdown target, the closest vessel, the destroyer U.S.S. Noa (DD-841), completed the retrieval from the water. Sailors aboard Noa spotted Friendship 7 descending on its parachute from an altitude of 5,000 feet and at a distance of about six miles. The Noa pulled up alongside the capsule, maintaining radio contact with Glenn throughout the recovery operation that took 21 minutes from splashdown to placing the capsule on the ship’s side deck. Sitting in the hot capsule, Glenn blew the side hatch, preferring that route of egress over the more difficult overhead hatch. After his egress, a team of doctors escorted Glenn to the ship’s sick bay where he removed his spacesuit, took a much-needed shower, and underwent a brief medical exam that showed him to be slightly dehydrated but otherwise in excellent physical condition. He ate his first food, other than the infight tube of applesauce, since breakfast early that morning. Wearing flight overalls, Glenn returned to inspect his spacecraft and awaited a helicopter to fly him to the Randolph.
Astronaut John H. Glenn relaxes aboard the U.S.S. Noa awaiting his helicopter ride to the U.S.S. Randolph. Credit: NASA
The helicopter from the Randolph hovered over the Noa’s deck and hoisted Glenn aboard. The helicopter delivered Glenn to the carrier where he received a more thorough physical examination by a team of Navy doctors, who also declared him fit and healthy. Glenn was then flown to Grand Turk Island, arriving there about five hours after splashdown. After another medical exam, Glenn finally went to sleep, more than 23 hours after awakening that morning for his historic day.
Astronaut John H. Glenn being hoisted onto a helicopter for the short flight from the U.S.S. Noa to the prime recovery ship, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Randolph. Credit: NASA
Glenn spent the next two days on Grand Turk Island, undergoing more thorough medical examinations by the same team of physicians who examined him before flight. He also began his postflight engineering debriefings. Five of his fellow Mercury astronauts joined him on Grand Turk Island. In the predawn hours of February 23, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson arrived to pick up Glenn for the flight back to the United States. Despite the early hour, a large part of the local population turned out to see Johnson and Glenn. They arrived at Patrick Air Force Base (AFB), near Cape Canaveral, later in the morning. Glenn’s wife Annie and their two children, David and Lynn, met him at Patrick.
Astronaut John H. Glenn, center, being welcomed aboard the U.S.S. Randolph. Credit: NASA
From Patrick AFB, the Glenns and Vice President Johnson motorcaded up the coast to Cape Canaveral, participating in a parade through Cocoa Beach. At Cape Canaveral’s Skid Strip, they met President John F. Kennedy who had just arrived. Glenn now rode in the Presidential limousine to Hangar S, where President Kennedy presented him with the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Glenn responded with his usual humility, “I would like to consider I was a figurehead for this whole big, tremendous effort, and I am very proud of the medal I have on my lapel.” They then visited the MCC, where Flight Director Kraft and astronaut Shepard provided a tour, and LC-14, where Glenn presented the President with a hard hat worn by the launch pad workers.
Friendship 7 astronaut John H. Glenn, right, rides in a motorcade through Cocoa Beach, Florida, with his wife Annie and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Credit: NASA
The Friendship 7 capsule also returned to Cape Canaveral. The U.S.S. Noa brought it to the shores of Grand Turk Island, placing it on a small boat that delivered it to a dock at the port. From there, workers trucked it to the airport and placed it on a U.S. Air Force cargo plane that flew it to the Skid Strip. Glenn and Friendship 7 were reunited at the event at Hangar S, where President Kennedy had a chance to peer into the recently-returned spacecraft.
President John F. Kennedy peers inside Friendship 7 as astronaut John H. Glenn looks on. Credit: NASA
On February 26, Glenn and his family traveled to Washington, D.C., where they attended a reception at the White House hosted by President Kennedy. Despite the rain, thousands turned out to see them as they rode in a motorcade with Vice President Johnson to the U.S. Capitol, where Glenn addressed a Joint Session of Congress. Later in the day, they attended a dinner in their honor at the State Department, where dessert featured Mercury ice cream.
Friendship 7 astronaut John H. Glenn, accompanied by his wife Annie and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, during the ticker tape parade in New York City. Credit: NASA
On March 1, accompanied by Vice President Johnson, the Glenns took part in a parade in New York City, where police estimated four million people turned out to see them, throwing a record amount of ticker tape. Glenn gave a speech at City Hall, attended several receptions, and received several awards including the City of New York Medal of Honor. He addressed an informal session of the United Nations. Two days later, the Glenns’ hometown of Concord City, Ohio, welcomed them with a parade and several special events.
Three months after its Earth orbital flight, the Friendship 7 capsule began its next mission, popularly known as its “fourth-orbit tour.” The U.S. Information Agency and NASA organized a three-month round-the-world tour that took it to more than 20 countries, including all that hosted a NASA tracking station. An estimated four million people saw it in person and 20 million more on local television programs. A U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo plane emblazoned with the words “Around the world with Friendship 7” transported the spacecraft to the various locations, beginning in Hamilton, Bermuda, on April 20, 1962, through Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Following its fourth-orbit tour, on August 6, 1962, the famous spacecraft went on temporary display in the NASA exhibit hall at the Century 21 Exposition, also known as the World’s Fair, in Seattle.
The Friendship 7 spacecraft is currently on display at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Chantilly, Virginia. Credit: Courtesy of NASM
On February 23, 1963, NASA formally turned the spacecraft, along with Glenn’s spacesuit and other artifacts, over to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it has resided ever since. It is currently on display at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia. As far as Cape Canaveral’s MCC, although the building housing it was demolished in 2010, the control room was removed, relocated, and painstakingly restored, and is on display in the Kurt Debus Conference Center at the Visitors Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A full-size replica of Friendship 7 is on display at the entrance to Jags McCartney International Airport on Grand Turk Island, where officials renamed the main entrance road John Glenn Drive.
Enjoy a video of the Friendship 7 mission. (Produced 10 years ago for the 50th anniversary.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
