This week, Americans celebrated the successful delivery of NASA’s Perseverance rover to its destination on the Martian surface, marking the dawn of a new era of interplanetary exploration. However, when it comes to searching the solar system around us, the US has not always led from the front. During the Reagan administration, for example, the agency saw its budget pared down in favor of building up arms ahead of an anticipated Cold War faceoff with the Soviet Union, as we see in this excerpt from David W Brown’s latest work, The Mission.
For planetary scientists, the Jimmy Carter–Ronald Reagan years were in retrospect like the Dark Ages, and they, the monks tending in enclaves to the embers of civilization. For a solid decade starting in late 1978, NASA launched no planetary science missions, and pretty much the only space science data trickling back to Earth came from the Voyager 1 and 2 flybys of the farthest planets of the solar system, where you’d get three weeks of data and then three to five years of silence—hardly enough to sustain an entire field of scientific inquiry. The Voyager findings at Jupiter fueled a desire by the careworn planetary science community to return there, but that required Reagan to fund the spacecraft Galileo—something his administration worked diligently to avoid doing upon assuming power in 1981. The new president believed he had a mandate to slash nondefense spending, and he was following through, and if you weren’t building bombs, battleships, or Black Hawk helicopters, your budget was up for grabs—and grab they did. While NASA’s top line fared well overall, that money was directed largely to the space shuttle program, which had become something of a flying Statue of Liberty in the public imagination. Anyway, the shuttle had military applications, including the deployment of spy satellites and, on paper at least, stealing satellites from foreign governments. The supply-side marauders would still get their squeeze from the agency, however, and that meant science. Before the toner was dry on new presidential letterhead, the White House told NASA that of Galileo, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the joint NASA–European Space Agency International Solar Polar Mission to study the sun, it could keep two (for now). And just like that, Solar Polar was gone. The Europeans had invested in it more than one hundred million dollars, and America thanked them for the trouble by withdrawing without warning, leaving the Europeans seething. The slaughter continued with the spacecraft VOIR, the Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar: vaporized. This cancelation, too, went over poorly. If the Solar Polar abandonment was an uninvited concupiscence thrust upon America’s allies abroad, the Venus cancelation was at least a rude gesture suggesting the same to planetary scientists at home.
But that Galileo mission—how it vexed and annoyed the White House. How the administration wanted this half-billion-dollar monstrosity slain! This expedition to Jupiter . . . we—we’d just been there with Voyager! Why were we even talking about this? So the Office of Management and Budget zeroed out Galileo in its tentative plan for the agency. As for those twin spacecraft Voyager: What, exactly, was there to learn about planets past Saturn, anyway? Uranus! Neptune! Did it matter? I mean, come on! Just issue the shutdown command, and we could also switch off this devil-begotten Deep Space Network as well, those gigantic, twenty-story radio dishes required to talk to them. That’s two hundred twenty-two million dollars saved overnight. Between Galileo and Voyager, we could cut costs by a half billion.
To somehow save what was becoming even to outsiders a sinking ship, the public started pitching in. In one instance, Stan Kent, a California engineer, created what he called the Viking Fund—a private, pass-the-hat effort to cover costs for Deep Space Network downlink time for Viking 1, the last surviving spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Donate now to feed a starving robot—send checks to 3033 Moore Park Ave. #27, San Jose, CA 95128. The Viking program had once been the zenith of NASA space science, the most ambitious agency endeavor since the Apollo program, and, when conceived, a prospective precursor to Apollo’s obvious heir: human missions to planet Mars.
Between 1965 and 1976, NASA had sustained a steady sequence of sophisticated Mars probes. Mariner 4, a flyby in 1965, was humanity’s first successful encounter with the Red Planet. Mariners 6 and 7 followed four years later, imaging up close the entire Martian disc, and those images, stitched together, revealed a real rotating planet—just like Earth. Mariner 9 in 1971 was the first spacecraft to enter orbit around another planet, mapping Mars in high resolution and capturing dust storms and weather patterns. Like elapsing lines in the book of Genesis, each spacecraft in succession made Mars a world as real as our own. By the time the Viking landers left launch pads at Cape Canaveral in 1975, no hope remained for extant alien civilizations, but flora and fauna of some form were still on the table. And the question remained—the ultimate question—the same that had fueled fiction and stirred scientists for centuries: What did that Martian wildlife look like?
The American space program has always marched inexorably toward Mars. Before the Eagle landed—before even the first naut—cosmo, taiko, or astro—before Sputnik—before even the formation of NASA itself—there was Das Marsprojekt, a work of speculative fiction by Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist relocated to the United States immediately after World War II. No mere thought experiment or flight of fancy—no ray guns, no saucermen—the plot was a thin veneer over How to Do It, and the author was the person most likely to make it happen. Von Braun wrote Das Marsprojekt in 1948 after finishing work reconstructing for his new American hosts the V-2 rocket, a ballistic missile he helped develop during the war. The book was later stripped of its fictional elements and repurposed as a nine-page article in the April 30, 1954, issue of Collier’s Weekly, then one of the most popular and prestigious magazines in the United States. The first serious study of how to get to Mars, von Braun’s plan involved a space station and a flotilla of reusable rockets and shuttles, and necessitated a crew of seventy strong for a Martian stay exceeding one Earth year. Upon arrival, astronauts (well, “spacemen”—astronauts had not yet been invented) would enter orbit and scout suitable set-down sites for the human beachhead. (He didn’t discuss robotic exploration because digital, programmable robots had not yet been invented, either.)
For von Braun, Mars was always the plan, the moon merely a waypoint, and fourteen years later, when Armstrong leapt from that bottom rung of the lunar lander ladder, it was von Braun’s Saturn V rocket that got him there. He (i.e., von Braun) was by then director of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, de facto “father of the American space program,” and a minor celebrity. He had made multiple appearances years earlier on a 1950s television show called Disneyland—hosted by Walt himself—selling to forty million Americans the notion of robust, reliable rockets, moon shots, and Mars colonies. When the shows aired, Yuri Gagarin was still an obscure pilot in the Soviet air force, and Alan Shepard a test pilot in Maryland. To the extent that Americans were even aware of U.S. space ambitions, it was von Braun soft selling Mars missions with Walt Disney. He had been working toward this for a very long time.
It was thus unsurprising that two weeks after American silicon soles pressed prints into fresh moondust, von Braun stepped into Spiro Agnew’s office and slapped onto the vice president’s desk the next natural frontier for American exploration: the Red Planet. The fifty-page presentation—the definitive plan to make mankind multiplanetary—represented the culmination of von Braun’s life’s work. His prescription involved many of the elements he had proposed decades earlier: the rockets, the shuttles, the station—even a nuclear-powered spaceship.
Unfortunately for von Braun, prevailing forces in Congress and the White House came quickly to see the Apollo program as the goal, rather than, as he had hoped, an early milestone of something much larger. You didn’t build Hoover Dam and then… build more Hoover Dams downriver, said the politicians. We set a goal, and by God we did it. Why even have a NASA? wondered the White House aloud. By Apollo 15 in 1971, opinion polls pegged public support of space spending at about twenty-three percent, with sixty-six percent saying that spending was too high. There would be no national political price for closing Cape Canaveral completely. Really, what were we doing up there?
Nevertheless, von Braun’s sequence of space missions culminating in Mars exploration had so defined NASA that it was almost hardwired into the system. Nixon, having zero interest in the space program but even zeroer interest in being the one who ended it, entertained only the space shuttle element as viable because it 1. had those spy satellite applications and 2. Could be a major construction project in Palmdale, California, keeping his home state in his column during the next presidential campaign. So the California-made, satellite-stealing space shuttle it was! NASA lived to flight another day.
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. ”
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.
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.”
