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Aided by Canadian hardware, lunar lander aims to make space history – The Globe and Mail

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Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander Odysseus separates from a SpaceX rocket’s upper stage before heading toward the moon on Feb. 15.The Associated Press

It took 10 years for Odysseus to complete his epic voyage from the Trojan war to his home on Ithaca.

For the lunar lander named after Homer’s mythical seafarer, a mere six days is enough to get from Earth to the moon. But now comes the real peril as the 1,900-kilogram uncrewed vehicle, developed by Intuitive Machines Inc. of Houston, tries to become the first commercially built spacecraft to safely touch down on the moon’s surface.

If the mechanical version of Odysseus succeeds at the attempt, expected no sooner than 5:49 p.m. ET on Thursday, it will mark a new chapter in commercial space exploration. It will also signal the long-awaited return to the moon for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which has several payloads aboard the lander. The U.S. space agency has not had a presence on the lunar surface since the final Apollo mission concluded in 1972.

Canadian know-how is also represented on Odysseus, with seven systems and components provided by Canadensys Aerospace Corporation of Bolton, Ont. While the company has an established track record in space, Odysseus represents its largest involvement to date in the race to commercialize lunar exploration.

“Our centre of expertise is exploration missions and there’s a big emphasis on lunar surface activities right now,” said the company’s president, Christian Sallaberger.

If all goes well, the lander will set down on a smooth patch of lunar topography near the crater Malapert A, about 300 kilometres from the moon’s south pole. The area is considered ripe for scientific investigation because of the possible presence of lunar ice in permanently shadowed craters in the region. Artemis III, NASA’s first crewed mission to the lunar surface since the Apollo era, is similarly aiming for a landing somewhere near the south pole when it sets out for the moon in 2026.

Odysseus was launched on a Space X rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 15 and has had an uneventful trip so far. On Wednesday morning, Intuitive Machines announced the spacecraft has entered lunar orbit on a circular trajectory about 92 kilometres above the moon’s crater-scarred surface.

In doing so, it has already achieved more than the first U.S. commercial lander sent to the moon. Dubbed Peregrine, that device was built by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology and launched on Jan. 8. However, the mission went awry a few hours after liftoff because of problems with the spacecraft’s propulsion system. Peregrine never left Earth’s orbit and was destroyed 10 days later in a controlled re-entry.

Both Odysseus and Peregrine are part of a NASA initiative known as Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS. Its ultimate goal is to hand off the task of ferrying material to the moon to the private sector. A similar effort involving flights to low Earth orbit was started in 2006 and opened the door to Space X and other private companies becoming the primary means of getting people and supplies to the International Space Station.

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Christian Sallaberger, president and CEO of Canadensys Aerospace, stands inside the company’s lunar test environment in Stratford, Ont. on Aug. 15, 2022.Patrick Dell/The Globe and Mail

As part of CLPS, Odysseus is meant to help create a more robust and routine pathway to the lunar surface. This will aid the science that is needed to support the Artemis program but could also end up serving customers that are willing to pay for access to the moon. Along the way, the program’s leaders hope the effort will draw the moon firmly into the sphere of activity that comprises today’s space economy.

“With a commercial industry comes a competitive environment,” said Sue Lederer, NASA’s CLPS project scientist for the Odysseus mission, during a teleconference with reporters last week. “Being risk tolerant allows for high yield and high reward.”

Certainly the risk side of the equation will be front and centre during Odysseus’s descent to the moon.

Since 1966, four countries, the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India, have successfully soft-landed machines onto the lunar surface. On Jan. 19, Japan became the fifth with the caveat that its SLIM lander is thought to have rolled down a slope, ending up in an upside-down position.

That and other recent mishaps underscore how challenging the moon remains. So far, landing on the surface is a goal that has eluded every privately funded effort or company that has tried.

But each failure adds to a growing expectation that at some point, someone will succeed.

“We’re all cheering for all the missions,” said Dr. Sallaberger, whose company has worked with a number of lunar lander teams, including the one that built Japan’s upside-down craft. “The lessons learned by one also benefit others.”

In total, he said, Canadensys has worked with three customers to provide various elements for the Odysseus payload.

One that is particularly groundbreaking is a telescope built in Canada as a proof-of-concept test for the International Lunar Observatory Association, a Hawaii-based organization that aims to turn the moon into a remote, airless platform for astronomical studies of the distant universe.

If it survives Thursday’s landing intact, the telescope carried on board Odysseus will attempt to take the first images of the Milky Way’s galactic centre as seen from the moon.

While the view may not compare to the dazzling releases lately seen from the James Webb Space Telescope, the project’s aim is to see whether the moon can play host to many more telescopes that can perform large-scale surveys that Webb and other space observatories would never have the time to conduct on their own.

As Homer might say, it is a quest worthy of the gods.

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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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