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Company sending mini-museum of humanity to the moon for future explorers – The Loop

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Earth is giving a gift to the moon that will land on the lunar surface next year.

The nine-ounce MoonArk — a tiny time capsule-esque artifact of humanity — will be attached to a small lunar rover. This is in the hopes that one day it may be picked up by lunar explorers — hundreds or thousands of years in the future.

The MoonArk was designed to capture humanity’s view of Earth, the moon, the space between the two, and the greater universe. Fittingly, these complex narratives are shared through various types of art — not unlike the way ancient humans left their mark on Earth for us to understand the past.

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It’s not a traditional time capsule because it’s not organized chronologically and doesn’t encapsulate everything a future human or other species would need to know. That would be impossible. But the MoonArk team has achieved their own kind of impossible feat over the course of 10 long, determined years. They have turned a vision into a reality that will sit on lunar soil.

MoonArk will hitch a ride with with a new lunar rover set to launch next year. Originally known as the Moon Arts Project, MoonArk was designed in response to the 2007 Google Lunar XPRIZE competition. The competition and its US$30 million prize expired in 2018 when teams around the globe failed to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon.

But the Andy lunar rover — developed by William “Red” Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon University professor and director of the Field Robotics Center — is go for launch in 2021. The tiny rover will be one of the first American robots to explore the moon’s surface and transmit video back to Earth.

Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander will deliver the rover to the near side of the moon, landing by the Lake of Death. This region contains a large scientifically intriguing pit that the rover can image. Whittaker co-founded Astrobotics, a Carnegie Mellon spin-off company that plans to send payloads to the moon and eventually elsewhere.

The rover will drive at a few centimeters per second and its major capabilities include autonomously choosing where to go, taking pictures, calling home and staying out of trouble, Whittaker said.

“It is about the size of a shoebox with four wheels, and it is ultra lightweight, with a camera in forward and rear,” Whittaker said. “MoonArk is attached underneath the deck of the lander, like a skirt that protrudes from the body. Our approach is to attach it underneath that lander deck and when the time comes to release it and have it float to the ground. That’s never been done before.”

Andy and the MoonArk will part ways after the rover releases its cultural payload and leaves it behind to explore the Lake of Death. For MoonArk, it’s just the beginning.

 

Inside the ark

Lowry Burgess, NASA space artist and professor emeritus at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Art, came up with the original concept for MoonArk.

Burgess, along with Carnegie Mellon faculty members Mark Baskinger, Matt Zywica, Dylan Vitone and James Madison University professor Mark Rooker, have been on a journey together ever since. They’re not just creators of the MoonArk, but caregivers as well.

Initially driven by determining factors like weight, scale and cost, the project took on a greater purpose.

“We had a larger narrative in mind,” said Baskinger, project co-lead and associate professor at CMU’s School of Design. “We thought about ‘What does it mean to be human?’ ‘What are the elements and dimensions of being human?’ ‘And how does the moon factor into that?’ “

The fundamentals of living on Earth and seeing space through human eyes are there, arranged in a stack of small chambers representing Earth, the moon and various regions of space.

They decided on four chambers, starting with Earth at the bottom, followed by the metasphere where our communications satellites exist, then the moon chamber and finally, the ether chamber exploring the “more existential and abstract conceptions of the universe beyond what we know.”

The team wanted to create a literal context for humanity, showcasing humans as they are today on Earth, how the moon has acted as our muse for art and the ether above it all, causing us to ponder where we are in the grand scheme of things.

The chambers are each only about two inches in both height and diameter. But each one contains a nanoscale world within, including hundreds of examples of poetry, music, sounds, drawing, symbols, dance, art, artifacts and tiny samples.

Each chamber is the result of collaborating with a team of 60 people and more than 250 artists, scientists, designers and educators.

The inventory contained within is long and varied, a mix of concrete and abstract.

Songs are laser-etched on disks alongside perfume to evoke the idea of moving through a city and catching fragments of music. There are impossibly tiny samples of plankton, ocean water, flower pollen and resin. Multiple languages and translations share slices of the varied cultures found across Earth.

There’s a stunning visual of the FOXP2 genome structure, the gene that allows songbirds to make songs and humans to put words in order, said Dylan Vitone, professor of photography at CMU. The “out of Africa” concept explaining the spread of humanity is given a modern update, showing the light population and density over Egypt. It represents the growth of light and electrification to show the spread of humanity from the fertile crescent.

Smartphone messages sent between Vitone and his wife over the course of five years reveal how humans express affection through images.

In the moon chamber, there are artistic tributes: the representation of a ballet composed in honor of the moon, 108 poems to the moon across the years and 9,000 drawings people wanted to send to the moon.

When Baskinger found out one of his friends was going to Hawaii, he asked him to bring back a sandwich bag of sand. For two weeks, he sifted through the sand under a microscope, picking out shells and organism structures. They reflect the various microscosms on Earth in contrast to the human scale.

One ring contains infinities, combinations of things that are represented in one tiny item. Burgess put together the “metal of metals” by taking all of the metals from the periodic table, melting them down and fusing them together.

Each chamber includes murals representative of the theme, designed to degrade over time on the moon’s harsh surface and reveal other details. The ether chamber ends with a musical score and an image of the Andromeda galaxy, which our galaxy will collide with in about four billion years.

The MoonArk wasn’t designed to capture the doomsday aspect of humanity ending, however. You won’t find any seed catalogs or an upload of Wikipedia entries. It’s not reflective of politics or current affairs. Instead, like a miniature museum, MoonArk was designed to be timeless and open to interpretation.

“The world is divisive,” Baskinger said. “This cuts through all of that artifice and touches on fundamental and core aspects of humanity. What does it mean to be a human in this experience that we can look at an object and begin to see a reflection of ourselves in, and not one that aligns with any particular mold or model? It’s a a very raw mirror. It’s not our voice we’re trying to project, but the result of an organic process of cooperation and collaboration with people in 18 countries.”

 

Creating a gift for to the future

The MoonArk itself is a testament to technology and design, pushing the limits of what’s possible now to create an object for the future.

Platinum-engraved sapphire disks, nano sculptures, millimeter-sized silicon chips and metal murals are enclosed in an elaborate exoskeleton.

“It’s a cutting-edge object in so many ways, like bleeding-edge technology,” Zywica said. “It involved 3D printing and the machining of wafer-thin sapphire disks that really pushed our capacity.”

Rooker, a metalsmith professor, was in charge of the final assembly. He controlled the process of engraving the various disks down to the nanometer.

“He worked tirelessly to make this a beautiful object tipped in diamonds and gold,” Vitone said. “It has the elegance of a Faberge egg. So we can leave behind a gift that’s functional and beautiful.”

The object is both lightweight and strong, built to last on the moon.

There’s a twin copy of the MoonArk that will remain on Earth, touring as an exhibit so people can interact with it.

“Hopefully the one on Earth allows conversations to happen,” Vitone said. “We’re so fast paced. When we do step back, it’s a chance analyze our own life and find meaning. An artifact can make you turn internally.”

Whoever picks up the MoonArk in the future will bring their own context to it, with no knowledge of the world that created this object at this particular time in history. To the creators, that makes the prospect even more exciting.

“What makes a piece of art work for me is when an artist or designer has made an experience that the viewer can enter into,” Vitone said. “It’s not complete, it needs the viewer to complete the narrative. “

“Cultures are known for their creative practice that endures, from an archaeological standpoint,” Baskinger said. “So this object is an honest, emergent creative practice that can bring a reflection of humanity for the folks of tomorrow. “

More on this story from CTVNews.ca

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NASA to launch sounding rockets into moon's shadow during solar eclipse – Phys.org

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This photo shows the three APEP sounding rockets and the support team after successful assembly. The team lead, Aroh Barjatya, is at the top center, standing next to the guardrails on the second floor. Credit: NASA/Berit Bland

NASA will launch three sounding rockets during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, to study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet.

The Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) sounding rockets will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to study the disturbances in the created when the moon eclipses the sun. The sounding rockets had been previously launched and successfully recovered from White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, during the October 2023 .

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They have been refurbished with new instrumentation and will be relaunched in April 2024. The mission is led by Aroh Barjatya, a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where he directs the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab.

The sounding rockets will launch at three different times: 45 minutes before, during, and 45 minutes after the peak local eclipse. These intervals are important to collect data on how the sun’s sudden disappearance affects the ionosphere, creating disturbances that have the potential to interfere with our communications.

The ionosphere is a region of Earth’s atmosphere that is between 55 to 310 miles (90 to 500 kilometers) above the ground. “It’s an electrified region that reflects and refracts and also impacts as the signals pass through,” said Barjatya. “Understanding the ionosphere and developing models to help us predict disturbances is crucial to making sure our increasingly communication-dependent world operates smoothly.”

A sounding rocket is able to carry science instruments between 30 and 300 miles above Earth’s surface. These altitudes are typically too high for science balloons and too low for satellites to access safely, making sounding rockets the only platforms that can carry out direct measurements in these regions. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The ionosphere forms the boundary between Earth’s lower atmosphere—where we live and breathe—and the vacuum of space. It is made up of a sea of particles that become ionized, or electrically charged, from the sun’s energy or .

When night falls, the ionosphere thins out as previously ionized particles relax and recombine back into neutral particles. However, Earth’s terrestrial weather and space weather can impact these particles, making it a dynamic region and difficult to know what the ionosphere will be like at a given time.

It’s often difficult to study short-term changes in the ionosphere during an eclipse with satellites because they may not be at the right place or time to cross the eclipse path. Since the exact date and times of the are known, NASA can launch targeted sounding rockets to study the effects of the eclipse at the right time and at all altitudes of the ionosphere.

As the eclipse shadow races through the atmosphere, it creates a rapid, localized sunset that triggers large-scale atmospheric waves and small-scale disturbances or perturbations. These perturbations affect different radio communication frequencies. Gathering the data on these perturbations will help scientists validate and improve current models that help predict potential disturbances to our communications, especially high-frequency communication.

This conceptual animation is an example of what observers might expect to see during a total solar eclipse, like the one happening over the United States on April 8, 2024. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The APEP rockets are expected to reach a maximum altitude of 260 miles (420 kilometers). Each rocket will measure charged and neutral particle density and surrounding electric and magnetic fields. “Each rocket will eject four secondary instruments the size of a two-liter soda bottle that also measure the same data points, so it’s similar to results from fifteen rockets while only launching three,” explained Barjatya. Embry-Riddle built three secondary instruments on each rocket, and the fourth one was built at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

In addition to the rockets, several teams across the U.S. will also be taking measurements of the ionosphere by various means. A team of students from Embry-Riddle will deploy a series of high-altitude balloons. Co-investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts and the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico will operate a variety of ground-based radars taking measurements.

Using this data, a team of scientists from Embry-Riddle and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are refining existing models. Together, these various investigations will help provide the puzzle pieces needed to see the bigger picture of ionospheric dynamics.

The animation depicts the waves created by ionized particles during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Credit: MIT Haystack Observatory/Shun-rong Zhang. Zhang, S.-R., Erickson, P. J., Goncharenko, L. P., Coster, A. J., Rideout, W. & Vierinen, J. (2017). Ionospheric Bow Waves and Perturbations Induced by the 21 August 2017 Solar Eclipse. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(24), 12,067-12,073. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076054

When the APEP- launched during the 2023 annular solar eclipse, scientists saw a sharp reduction in the density of charged particles as the annular eclipse shadow passed over the atmosphere.

“We saw the perturbations capable of affecting radio communications in the second and third rockets, but not during the first rocket that was before peak local eclipse,” said Barjatya. “We are super excited to relaunch them during the total eclipse to see if the perturbations start at the same altitude and if their magnitude and scale remain the same.”

The next total solar eclipse over the contiguous U.S. is not until 2044, so these experiments are a rare opportunity for scientists to collect crucial data.

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Royal Sask. Museum research finds insect changes may have set stage for dinosaurs' extinction – CTV News Regina

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Research by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) shows that ecological changes were occurring in insects at least a million years before dinosaur extinction.

Papers published in the scientific journal, Current Biology, describe the first insect fossils found in amber from Saskatchewan and the unearthing of three new ant species from an amber deposit in North Carolina, according to a release from the province.

The amber deposit from in the Big Muddy Badlands of Saskatchewan, which was formed about 67 million years ago, preserved insects that lived in a swampy redwood forest about one million years before the extinction of dinosaurs.

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“Fossils in the amber deposit seem to show that common Cretaceous insects may have been replaced on the landscape by their more modern relatives, particularly in groups such as ants, before the extinction event,” Elyssa Loewen, curatorial assistant, said.

The research team was led by Loewen and Dr. Ryan McKellar, the RSM’s curator of paleontology.

“These new fossil records are closer than anyone has gotten to sampling a diverse set of insects near the extinction event, and they help researchers fill in a 17-million-year gap in the fossil record of insects around that time,” Dr. McKellar said.

The three ant species discovered in North Carolina also belonged to extinct groups that didn’t survive past the Cretaceous period.

“When combined with the work in Saskatchewan, the two recent papers show that there was a dramatic change in ant diversity sometime between 77 and 67 million years ago,” Dr. McKellar said in the release.

“Our analyses of body shapes in the fossils suggests that the turnover was not related to major differences in ecology, but it may have been related to something like the size and complexity of ant colonies. More work is needed to confirm this.”

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Meteors, UFOs or something else? Dawson City, Yukon, residents puzzled by recent sightings in night sky – CBC.ca

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Some residents in Dawson City, Yukon, say they’ve been seeing unusual things in the night sky lately — and it’s not the Northern Lights. 

But some might say it’s equally as fascinating.

Over the past few weeks, some residents have taken to social media to report seeing what they described as a fireball or meteor overhead. And last week, two residents said they both saw something similar.

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Naomi Gladish lives in Henderson Corner, a subdivision approximately 20 kilometres from downtown Dawson City. She told CBC News she saw something while walking her dog Friday morning.

“I looked up and saw a bright star,” Gladish said. “Or what I thought was a star.” 

“Within a fraction of a second, I realized it was actually moving quickly. And then as I watched it, a second later it grew a long tail.”

Dawson City resident Naomi Gladish said she saw something similar to the fireball shown in this image from the American Meteor Society. (American Meteor Society)

Gladish said the unknown object started to change into a pale blue colour, like a gas flame. Then, a few seconds later, it appeared to burn out.

“I could see fire, or coal,” Gladish said. “Like red glowing bits, breaking off of it. And then that was it. I tried watching to see if I could see any dark chunks falling from that spot, or carrying on from that spot, but the sky was dark.”

A minute or two after Gladish saw what she thought was a meteor, she heard a boom in the distance.

“My dog and I both turned our head to that exact direction that I had just seen it,” she said.”I figured it was related.”

Two women walking through snowy mountain terrain.
Naomi Gladish hiking with her sister at Tombstone Park. (Submitted by Naomi Gladish)

Dawson resident Jeff Delisle reported seeing something similar at about the same time. He then took to social media to ask if anyone else had seen it. Two people responded saying they had. 

“It flew right above me,” Delisle wrote.

“Pretty cool looking…. What is it?”

Likely not a meteor, says astronomer

Christa Van Laerhoven, president of the Yukon Astronomical Society, came across Delisle’s post and got in touch. She asked about what he’d seen, such as how long it was in the sky and the colour.

Van Laerhoven told CBC News that based on descriptions from both Delisle and Gladish, she doesn’t believe it could have been a meteor.

She says a meteor would have been moving much faster, and the colouring would have appeared differently. 

“Meteors can be any colour but … as a rule, are a consistent colour. What these people were describing had different colours. So the head looked blue and then the tail was more of an orange,” van Laerhoven said.

“That’s just something that doesn’t happen with meteors.”

a meteor
This zoomed-in still from a dashcam video captured in 2020 by Louise Cooke from Mount Lorne, Yukon, shows what one space science expert said appears to be an unusually-bright meteor travelling across the sky. (Submitted by: Louise Cooke)

Van Laehoven believes there may be another explanation for the recent unusual sightings: space junk, falling to earth.

“Space junk, when it comes in … comes through the atmosphere and starts glowing that can be more irregular, because of the variety of materials that go into a spacecraft.”

Van Laerhoven also suggested it could a very fast plane, or someone playing with rockets.

Gladish, however, doesn’t think anyone in Dawson was playing with rockets on Friday morning.

“Unless they’re talking about someone in China, or like a distant land playing with very high, powerful rockets … then sure,” she said.

“This was not something that someone in Dawson was doing … This came from much, much higher and it was much, much different to anything that would be locally caused.”

Van Laerhoven also dismissed another possibility: alien visitors.

“If aliens were coming to Earth, we would know,” she said.

“Simply because it would take them so much effort to get here that it would be very hard to imagine them getting here and not doing something dramatic enough that we would actually know about it.”

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