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Free space projects for kids (and adults) stuck at home during the coronavirus outbreak – Space.com

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With most of us stuck at home for longer than usual as much of the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic, now is a good time to get caught up on space exploration — no matter what your age or focus. 

NASA’s website has a plethora of opportunities for kids and adults alike to learn more about astronomy and spaceflight. Whether you want to be an astronaut, kill some time learning about the universe or help the agency work on future space exploration activities, there’s no lack of things to do.

So, if you’re looking for a little out-of-this-world escape while you’re stuck at home, here is a list of free space-themed activities from NASA to keep you occupied. 

Related: ‘Space Racers’ goes full STEAM ahead with free activities for kids

Get involved at NASA

NASA astronaut applications remain open for U.S. citizens interested in the chance to go to space. NASA is recruiting astronauts who may have the chance to land on the moon as a part of the forthcoming Artemis program. You have until March 31 to get your applications ready. NASA aims to put boots on the moon again in 2024, as long as the equipment is ready, the funding is there and the current flight schedule holds.

Explore Opportunities allows you, as a citizen scientist or engineer, to submit innovative ideas that could be used on future space exploration missions, or to participate in current missions. Example projects on the front page include making requests for the Juno spacecraft’s JunoCam at Jupiter, creating a sensor for a possible Venus rover mission, and (if you’re a student) participating in challenges related to NASA’s Artemis moon program.

Observe the night sky

The International Space Station streaks across the New Jersey sky. (Image credit: Gowrishankar L. )

Spot the Station is a tracking tool that allows you to look up your location from anywhere on Earth, and find out when, where and how you can see the International Space Station (ISS) pass overhead. Sign up for email or text alerts to know when to stick your nose out the door. The ISS will appear like a bright star or planet slowly passing across the sky. There are currently three crew members on board the station doing science activities for Expedition 62, including NASA’s Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan, and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka.

Stargaze (safely). While many cities are asking residents to remain indoors, if you are able to step outside (while practicing safe social distancing), you can see plenty of planets and constellations. Venus will be out in the evenings, while Jupiter, Saturn and Mars are visible at dawn. For sky maps and information about skywatching events, check out NASA’s guide, “What’s Up: Skywatching Tips from NASA.”

Slooh will livestream an astronomy lesson and live telescope views from around the world on Thursday, March 19. The webcast, which is geared toward K-12 students, will begin at 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT). “Slooh’s live lesson will be educational, inspiring and soothing,” Slooh officials said in a statement. “During the program, students will learn how to explore space by following in the footsteps of famous astronomers to make their own personal discoveries using Slooh’s Quest curriculum.”

Listen to podcasts

NASA podcasts let you catch up on the latest news, even if your hands are full doing chores or other activities around the house. Some of the listed podcasts on the front page include:

Read e-books

NASA e-books allow you to dive in-depth into a lot of space and aerospace topics, all for free. Some of the most popular downloads (all on the front page of the link) include a book about Hubble’s galaxy discoveries, learning about how humans and animals light up the night, a photo-essay from NASA’s Earth science division, a chronicle of the Cassini spacecraft’s exploration of Saturn, and a discussion of robotic spacecraft that flew across the solar system and into interstellar space. Some of NASA’s most popular free e-books include:

  • “Earth at Night” (Dec. 2019): This gorgeous photobook features glittering satellite images of Earth’s city lights by night. In this e-book, NASA scientists explore “how humans and natural phenomena light up the darkness, and how and why scientists have observed Earth’s nightlights for more than four decades using both their own eyes and spaceborne instruments,” NASA said in the book’s description.
  • “Hubble Focus: Galaxies Through Space and Time” (Aug. 2019): The second in a series of e-books, this book details Hubble’s recent discoveries about galaxies, and the latest research on galaxy evolution.
  • “The Saturn System Through the Eyes of Cassini” (Sept. 2017): Over a period of 13 years, NASA’s Cassini mission captured about 450,000 images of Saturn and its moons. See some of Cassini’s most amazing images and find out what the mission has taught scientists in this photo-filled book. 

STEM activities

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NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s “teachable moments” for students, ranging from Pi Day discussions, some information about Mercury’s transit across the sun, a retrospective about the Apollo program during the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, and citing the ever-popular “Star Wars” links to real-life science.

Explore NASA STEM gives home activities for students ranging from kindergarten to Grade 12th grade. There are pages tailored for students who would like to work on their own, and other pages for educators (and parents) who are looking for activities for kids, preteens and teenagers. The K- to 4 page for students, for example, has activities on airplanes, weather and climate, stars, Earth and the International Space Station.

The Space Foundation partnered with “Peanuts” to create 10 lesson plans, all of which are available as free downloadable PDF files here. (Image credit: The Space Foundation/Peanuts)

Learn STEM with Snoopy in space! The Space Foundation has partnered with the makers of “Peanuts” to create 10 downloadable Snoopy-themed lesson plans for K-8 students. “Containing projects that utilize commonly available materials, students join Snoopy to learn about constellations, space suits, rocketry, microgravity, and the various missions of the Apollo Program,” Space Foundation officials said in a statement. “Working through lesson plans that integrate subjects like Earth and space sciences, mathematics and more, students exercise skills like problem solving, performing investigations, constructing explanations, and information literacy.”

Space Racers,” an animated kids’ TV series produced in collaboration with NASA experts, has released free educational content for students during school closures amid the coronavirus outbreak. Free episodes of the series, as well as educational science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM) activities and educator-approved lesson plans are available for download here

Mobile apps

The “lunar and planetARy” app from the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) lets smartphone users explore planets, moons and other solar system objects via augmented reality. By pointing your smartphone camera at one of six downloadable graphics, you’ll see 3D global maps of the moon, Mars, Pluto, Jupiter’s moon Europa, Saturn and seven of its moons. Get the app for free from the App Store and Google Play; the interactive posters are free to download from LPI. (You don’t actually need to print the posters; pointing your camera at the digital images on a computer screen works, too.)

NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover pays a virtual visit to someone’s living room via the agency’s free Spacecraft AR mobile app. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA’s “Spacecraft AR” app brings the agency’s many spacecraft right to your living room, so you can check them out with augmented reality. The educational app, which was developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will place interactive 3D models right in front of you. Download it for free from the App Store and Google Play

Smithsonian’s “Apollo’s Moon Shot AR” app is an immersive augmented reality (AR) experience that recreates the full timeline of the Apollo missions, allowing users to relive history for themselves. It is based on the channel’s six-part television series, “Apollo’s Moon Shot,” which follows the journey of the moon landing program. The free app is available for download at the App store and Google Play.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook

 

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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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