As people around the world rethink many aspects of their lives to combat the coronavirus pandemic, NASA experts say that knowledge and understanding of how to stay safe and healthy will help us prepare for landing on another planet.
After all, NASA’s robotic explorers are already on Mars paving the way for future astronaut-led missions to the Red Planet — and those expeditions will require a level of safety planning that would put a germophobe to shame.
Astronauts don’t want to carry Earth bacteria to the surface of Mars because it could contaminate the environment, or even show up as a false positive of life on the planet. And they also have to be careful to quarantine any samples returned.
It requires a level of care and caution we haven’t had to exercise in our daily lives — until now.
During the Apollo program, astronauts were quarantined before and after moon landings for weeks in case they encountered pathogens on the lunar surface. Samples returned from the moon were treated with the same level of care as biohazards.
Now we know that the astronauts didn’t pick up any diseases during their moon walks, and there’s no life that we know of on the moon. The surface is hit by micrometeorites and radiation, with no atmosphere to protect it.
But it was a smart move because humans were exploring the unknown and they wanted to protect the astronauts.
It’s also part of the reason why COSPAR, the global Committee on Space Research, exists. It was formed in 1958 to further research, exploration and the peaceful use of outer space through international cooperation, according to the COSPAR mission statement.
COSPAR has a planetary protection policy (PDF) ensuring that the world’s space agencies protect the safety of our planet as well as any that we explore.
“The Planetary Protection Requirements are an international NATO treaty, ratified by COSPAR,” said Moogega Cooper, Planetary Protection Lead Engineer for NASA’s Perseverance rover mission. “It’s an international policy that we have to abide by. Agencies around the world have to make sure their hardware and their spacecraft is clean enough.”
This governs the level of sterilization that spacecraft and robotic explorers endure before launch. The rovers and landers were assembled in NASA’s “cleanrooms,” where the only people allowed to enter are covered head-to-toe in white coveralls called “bunny suits,” complete with face shields.
And even more precautions will be taken when humans are sent to explore Mars.
Here’s how NASA prepares for safe exploration.
RETURNING SAMPLES FROM MARS
NASA’s next generation of Martian rover, named Perseverance, will land on Mars in Jezero Crater next year. The site is where a lake once existed 3.5 billion years ago. Perseverance will collect samples and seal them up to preserve them until they can be returned to Earth, hopefully sometime in the 2020s.
Cooper’s job is to “make sure that we don’t contaminate Mars with Earth germs when we go and explore that planet.”
In his lab, the team take samples that they collect from the spacecraft and grow them in Petri dishes to see how clean the spacecraft really is before launch. They look for evidence of spores that can attach to the spacecraft.
“We look for these seeds that certain microbes can produce, and those are the things that would survive the journey in deep space, the harsh environments — that’s why we look for those on our Petri dishes every single day when we swab the spacecraft,” Cooper said.
They also look for viable organisms, like E. coli, that can live on skin. Although something like this can’t survive without a host, if it was found on the Martian surface it could be confused with fossilized life, Cooper said.
The room where the rover is constructed is “cleaner than an operating room, cleaner than a lot of the things we interact with,” he said.
Parts of the spacecraft that will actually touch the Martian surface are sterilized, fired at 662 degrees Fahrenheit. “It’s just the cleanest thing you’re ever going to see,” Cooper said. This includes collection tubes for samples on Mars.
Perseverance will collect rock, mineral and soil samples — and those soil samples could even include microfossils from ancient organisms that may have once lived in the lake. The data it collects may be able to help scientists know if they’ve found a biosignature on Mars.
“On the science side, we’re really thinking about new discoveries we can make on the surface and how [that] will inform what we learn when we get the samples back,” said Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist for the rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Our job is to find the best samples, collect and store them, and place them on the surface.”
The rover will pick up the samples, put them inside its body and seal them in tight metal tubes that were designed to withstand the Martian environment — at least, that’s the hope of NASA engineers. The samples will be dropped at specific collection sites so they can be retrieved later.
“Combining an understanding of the composition of the rocks, but also the very fine detail that we see in the rocks and the textures, can make a powerful case for ancient signs of life,” Stack Morgan said.
“We know that ancient Mars was habitable. But we haven’t yet been able to show that we have signs, real signs, of ancient life yet. And with our instrument suite, we think we can make real advances towards that on the surface.”
Returning the samples is a challenge down the road, and NASA is already planning for it. The earliest mission that could go back to Mars to retrieve the samples is set for the 2026-2027 timeframe, Stack Morgan said.
“This is a huge endeavor for the human species, and it’ll take cooperation from more than just our own space program,” Stack Morgan said. “Once the resources are there, we can develop the technology. It’s getting the buy-in from international partners and from our own space administration and government to really make this happen.”
The new rover will also be on a mission to lay the groundwork for future human exploration.
“We’re very much thinking about how Mars could be inhabited, how humans could come to Mars and make use of the resources that we have there in the Martian environment today,” said Stack Morgan. “We send our robotic scouts first to learn about these other places, hopefully for us to prepare the way for us to go ourselves.”
Returning samples could also inform how, when and where we land humans on Mars.
When Martian samples are returned to Earth and searched for evidence of life, they will be sent to biosafety level 4 laboratories, which are used to research pathogens that cause fatal diseases like coronavirus, said Jim Green, NASA’s Chief Scientist.
If life, ancient or existing, is found on Mars through studying these samples, the discovery will cause COSPAR members tochange the COSPAR guidelines so we can “come up with a way to explore Mars,” Green said.
And frankly, it would change everything.
“It would mean that the possibilities now are endless for other potential civilizations or even microbial populations out there,” Cooper said. “It doesn’t have to be intelligent and complex. Microbes are actually quite intelligent and complex and should be admired. So if we found signs of life, it will shift our idea of being alone, or where we stand, in this universe.”
HUMANS ON MARS
In a conversation this week hosted by non-profit organization Explore Mars, Inc., Green and Penelope Boston, Director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, considered how humans can safely explore Mars.
Green’s idea of a Mars mission includes landing in one spot and separately living in another and setting up an “exploration zone.” It allows the astronauts to work in a confined area on Mars and perform scientific experiments. He suggests that future missions land and live in the same spots created by that first mission.
“It gives us a wonderful opportunity over several decades of going there, building and developing things at that site,” said Green. “We can gain a deep understanding of what Mars is all about.”
So far, robotic exploration has revealed that the similarities between soil on Earth and Mars is strong. But human exploration and experiments could reveal even more.
If life is found on Mars, Boston’s research has led her to believe that it will be deep beneath the surface. Recent studies have shown that life can exist in rock cracks below Earth’s ocean floor, and it could be the same in the Martian subsurface.
But care will need to be taken that any potential subsurface groundwater sourceson Mars aren’t contaminated by human exploration.
“I’d love to see boots on Mars, but I’m very aware of the deep ecology aspects of another biosphere,” Boston said. “How do we study and cohabit with it without doing damage? Luckily the surface environment is harsh. It’s not entirely self-sterilizing, but it will do a lot to reduce contaminants.”
Cooper’s job will evolve if humans land on Mars, as he’ll need to develop stringent safety rules — not unlike the ones we’re implementing today.
“We have to make sure if there are people living there, for example, that their crops stay intact,” he said. “A lot of the things they bring along need to not be contaminated by weird bugs.”
He compared it to flying from one country to another with certain restricted food items.
“We have to make sure there aren’t any weird fruits, bacteria, fungus — something that may contaminate the livelihood, the life supply that they have on Mars,” he said. “We want to make sure we do the best job at preserving whatever is native.”
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.”
