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‘It came alive:’ NASA astronauts describe experiencing splashdown in SpaceX Dragon – WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando

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NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken described in detail what it felt like and sounded like when SpaceX’s spacecraft came roaring back down to Earth for a successful splash down in the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend.

The astronauts said they were surprised by how similar the experience was to what SpaceX had prepared them for.

The astronauts answered questions from NASA’s Johnson Space Center on Tuesday for the first time since they landed back on their home planet.

Hurley and Behnken launched on the SpaceX Dragon capsule, nicknamed Endeavour, from Kennedy Space Center on May 30, arriving on the International Space Station the next day. The launch marked the first human spaceflight from Florida’s coast in nearly nine years.

After more than two months in space, the duo journeyed back to Earth in Dragon Endeavour in about 19 hours, sleeping overnight in the spacecraft before the splashdown.

[MORE COVERAGE: What needs to happen before SpaceX’s Dragon Endeavour flies astronauts again? | Private boaters swarmed SpaceX spacecraft landing site]

The landing Sunday went smoothly by all accounts as the spacecraft slowly descended into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola all while Tropical Storm Isaias was barreling up Florida’s Atlantic coast. The event marked the first spacecraft splashdown in 45 years.

Behnken and Hurley both said the videos SpaceX showed them of what they would see and hear and when they would experience it were very accurate. The videos were recorded when the SpaceX Crew Dragon made its first trip to the ISS but without astronauts on board last year.

Behnken walked through every step describing the descent to Earth.

Support teams and curious recreational boaters arrive at the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley onboard in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020. The Demo-2 test flight for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program was the first to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station and return them safely to Earth onboard a commercially built and operated spacecraft. Behnken and Hurley returned after spending 64 days in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls) ((NASA/Bill Ingalls)rrFor copyright and restrictions refer to -�http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html)

The first part of the de-orbit events happened when the spacecraft separated from the trunk while Dragon was still in low-Earth orbit.

“All the separation events from the trunk separation through the parachute firings were very much like getting hit in the back of the chair with a baseball bat, you know, just a crack,” Behnken said.

Next, as the Dragon began its deorbit burn the capsule began coming back down to Earth.

“As we kind of descended through the atmosphere, I personally was surprised at just how quickly all the events all transpired. It seemed like just a couple minutes later after the burn was complete, we could look out the windows and see the clouds rushing by at a much accelerated rate,” Behnken said.

Behnken said the two continued to talk to each other even while experiencing 4.2 G-forces, even cracking a few jokes.

While the spacecraft heat shield protects the capsule and the astronauts, Behnken described a “warming of the capsule on the inside,” as it descended through Earth’s atmosphere.

Behnken said next, before the parachutes deployed, they could feel Crew Dragon maneuver itself for re-entry using its thrusters.

“It came alive. It started to fire thrusters and keep us pointed in the appropriate direction, the atmosphere starts to make noise, you can hear that rumble outside the vehicle,” Behnken said. “It doesn’t sound like a machine. It sounds like an animal coming through the atmosphere.”

The astronauts could feel the parachutes, first the drogue chutes, then the main parachutes deploy as the spacecraft slowed from 350 mph to near 15 mph for splashdown.

Behnken said “it was a pretty significant jolt” when the parachutes deployed.

Hurley and Behnken both complimented the teams at SpaceX that built the spacecraft.

“The vehicle was rock solid right up until the nominal drogue (parachute) deploy,” Hurley said, later adding, “My compliments to SpaceX and the Commercial Crew Program, the vehicle performed exactly how it was supposed to.”

The launch, docking and splashdown marked the final test flight for SpaceX’s astronaut capsule before NASA can issue a certification for regular flights for its astronauts. The spacecraft will be thoroughly inspected and refurbished before it flies another astronaut crew as early as next year.

After landing in the Gulf, the astronauts had to wait about an hour before the hatch was opened and they were helped out. That wait was partially due to some curious boaters who approached despite the Coast Guard attempting to warn them off and then because of a potential fume hazard.

While they waited, the astronauts used the satellite phone to make a few calls. The called any numbers they could remember, according to Hurley, including the flight director in Houston.

NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley, holds the hand of his wife Karen Nyberg as their son Jack, 10 looks on, after Hurley and astronaut Robert Behnken walked out of the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building on their way to Pad 39-A, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, May 30, 2020. The two astronauts will fly on a SpaceX test flight to the International Space Station. For the first time in nearly a decade, astronauts will blast into orbit aboard an American rocket from American soil, a first for a private company. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley, holds the hand of his wife Karen Nyberg as their son Jack, 10 looks on, after Hurley and astronaut Robert Behnken walked out of the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building on their way to Pad 39-A, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, May 30, 2020. The two astronauts will fly on a SpaceX test flight to the International Space Station. For the first time in nearly a decade, astronauts will blast into orbit aboard an American rocket from American soil, a first for a private company. (AP Photo/John Raoux) (Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

“‘Hi, this is Bob and Doug, we’re in the ocean,‘” Hurley said they told the flight director.

The astronauts then called their wives, who were together in Houston, to tell them they had a safe landing.

“Having gone through this as a family member, you’re kind of helpless until you hear the voice of your loved one on the other end and this was a great chance to reassure them that we were in the water. We were OK. We were feeling good,” Hurley said.

After getting out of the spacecraft, the astronauts were taken by helicopter back to land. Then by jet back to Houston where they enjoyed some pizza, their first meal on Earth in more than 60 days.

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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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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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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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.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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