MONTREAL — Less than a year away from a historic trip around the moon, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen says humankind’s upcoming missions to further explore deep space will inspire future generations, just as NASA’s Apollo expeditions sparked his passion.
Hansen will be on board Artemis II, slated to launch in November 2024, the first crewed voyage to lunar space since the final Apollo mission more than half a century ago.
“That picture is still burned in my brain. I went back to that page so many times as a kid to look at it, and the realization that humans had left Earth and walked on the moon was a big deal to me. I turned my tree house into a spaceship and started exploring space in my imagination and just never really gave up on that dream of one day flying out there,” Hansen said in a recent interview.
“Now that I’m here and on the cusp of going into deep space, I see a direct benefit to our youth with this Artemis generation … and I think reminding youth today that we can do big things, we can collaborate, is just so important for them.”
Hansen, of London, Ont., will be the first non-American to travel beyond the lower Earth orbit. His mission involves a lunar flyby, performing a figure-eight manoeuvre around the far side of the moon before returning to Earth. It will serve as a precursor to a mission expected to land the first woman and the first person of colour on the moon in December 2025 or later.
“We probably have more question marks than you would imagine, and that’s because this is a test and development program. You sort of go as fast as you can,” Hansen said. “We don’t kind of have it all done and then we just sit around and wait for a launch date.”
Hansen’s mission will be the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft, and the most acute risks — as with any space mission — are during launch and re-entry. Unlike being aboard the International Space Station, which has a shuttle at the ready to return people to Earth, there’s no way to abort the Artemis mission if something goes wrong.
“If you do have an issue, you are a long way from home,” Hansen said. “Potentially once you’ve left to go to the moon, you’re pretty much committed to that eight-day trip. So there are some risks, but they’re really from the point of view of distance.”
Jenni Gibbons, 35, of Calgary, was appointed in November to fill in if Hansen is unable to make the voyage. Her understudy role will give her experience that’s going to position the Canadian space program well for future missions, said Mathieu Caron, director of the Canadian Space Agency’s astronauts, life sciences, and space medicine division.
Gibbons agreed that her role in the moon mission — learning of everything from launch to splashdown — is an investment for future missions. “I certainly think if Canada chooses to invest in boots on the moon, I will be ready, as will everyone at our corps,” she said in an interview.
Fellow Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk, 41, of Fort Saskatchewan, Alta., is slated to travel to the space station in early 2025 on the first mission of the Boeing-built spacecraft Starliner-1. He will spend six months in space
All told, it means a busy few years for the country’s astronaut corps, but Caron said that is a nice problem to have.
“We’re very happy that we as a space agency are confronted with a beautiful problem where we have exciting missions that we have to support almost simultaneously,” said Caron.
There are no plans to add more astronauts, Caron said, and all four current members are medically and technically cleared for a future space mission.
“Our objective is to make sure that our astronauts will be flying,” Caron said. In addition to the two announced missions there will be another Canadian going to the International Space Station before 2030 and one to the Lunar Gateway outpost, a small space station that will orbit the moon.
Canada is contributing Canadarm 3 to the lunar station. It is also helping to build a small lunar rover designed for use on the moon’s South Pole as well as a larger utility lunar rover, said Lisa Campbell, CSA president.
“We’re really excited about both human space flight, but also leveraging the benefits of space for Canada,” Campbell said.
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.
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. ”
___
Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate
___
Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
___
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.
The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
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.
Chrystia Freeland says carbon rebate for small businesses will be tax-free
FACT FOCUS: Election officials knock down Starlink vote rigging conspiracy theories
Nova Scotia election promise tracker: What has been promised by three main parties?
Former B.C. premier John Horgan, who connected with people, dies at 65
Suncor Energy earnings rise to $2.02 billion in third quarter
Swearing-in ceremonies at B.C. legislature mark start of new political season
New Brunswick premier confirms her Liberal government will draft carbon pricing plan
B.C. teen with bird flu is in critical care, infection source unknown: health officer
