The future of Mars exploration will be greatly enhanced by humans that make the sojourn to the Red Planet. The work that could be performed by astronaut crews on that distant world would far outstrip what mechanized Mars machinery can attain – but certainly at a far greater cost.
To that end, NASA is blueprinting a moon-to-Mars strategy that identifies science as one of three pillars upon which the agency’s quest for a sustained human exploration throughout the solar system is built. What’s now being plotting out is the architecture for achieving that goal.
NASA moon-to-Mars architecture workshops are being held later this month, hosted by the Space Studies Board of the National Academies. According to a statement by Nujoud Merancy, Deputy Associate Administrator for NASA’s Strategy and Architecture Office within the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, the space agency is searching for views on science and technology investments that can help lead to a sustainable human return to the moon and dispatching crews to Mars.
“Our partnerships with industry, academia, and the international community are helping NASA define an architecture that empowers us to boldly explore the moon, Mars, and beyond,” Merancy explains.
Tale of the tiger team
Arguably, the science conducted on the surface of Mars by astronauts will have the most impact on the scope and scale of that architecture. Therefore, deciding on science priorities warrant early attention.
Recent history demonstrates the issue of shoe-horning in science tasks for astronauts too late.
That is a central message from a recent study for the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), one that suggests how and where on the Red Planet humans can maximize exploration and science output.
A MEPAG Tiger Team on Mars Human-Mission Science Objectives was led by Bruce Jakosky, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado. Their report was transmitted to NASA late last year.
Proactive, not reactive
“I think the real value of this report is if we can get NASA to pay attention,” Jakosky told Space.com in an exclusive interview. “We see a lot of work going on in planning the architecture for human Mars missions. But science isn’t on the table at all. My goal as chair of the Tiger Team is trying to get science into the discussion,” he said.
Fitting science in around the edges is not the way to do world class science, Jakosky said. NASA needs to be proactive, not reactive in incorporating science, he said.
NASA’s Apollo program of the 1960s into the early 1970s, noted Jakosky, had scientists, engineers, and astronauts working hand-in-hand, shoulder to shoulder to make sure science was done.
“And that’s something that I don’t think we see today in Artemis or in Mars,” Jakosky said. “It’s got to be an iterative process in order to make sure that the science and the engineering will work together,” he said.
Going deep! Drilling into the Red Planet is on tap in the future, sure to be a scientifically rewarding task. (Image credit: NASA)
Science-based landing sites
Jim Head, a noted planetary researcher at Brown University, was a member of the Tiger Team report group.
“NASA is currently updating the objectives for the Moon-to-Mars initiative with the strategy of ‘architect from the right/execute from the left,'” Head said. That translates into, he added, “work backwards from the defined goal to establish the complete set of elements that will be required for success. Execute development of all elements in regular fashion, integrating as you move right according to the established architecture.”
Head said that the MEPAG Tiger Team report was designed to be a part of NASA strategy, in that the group considered things like the optimum science-based Mars landing sites, the types of activities and stay-times required to accomplish goals and objectives, and potential robotic partnerships.
“These types of considerations provide significant insights into feed-forward for the lunar component of NASA’s Moon-to-Mars initiative, the Artemis phase,” Head said.
Real-time interaction and adaptability
Mars holds many clues to early solar system history and how terrestrial planets sustain habitats and life, said Bethany Ehlmann, a member the Tiger Team report group. She is a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and director of the Keck Institute for Space Studies in Pasadena, California.
For many types of geologic science, especially those involving lots of interaction with terrain like sample collection or deep coring, Ehlmann said that human capabilities are “uniquely enabling” because of real-time interaction and adaptability.
“Humans on an EVA activity can accomplish in a few hours data acquisitions and sample collections that have taken rovers years,” Ehlmann told Space.com. “With NASA’s Moon-Mars initiative underway, it is important to think about what supporting instruments and technologies need to be developed now to equip our astronauts for doing outstanding science at Mars.”
Ehlmann flags the reference missions called out in the study report that exemplify a range of possibilities, like astronauts investigating icy locales, accessing cliffs, exploring higher altitudes on Mars or having expeditions investigate caves.
Those example cases underscore how individual, specific missions can achieve high-value science.
Human explorers on Mars will expand their scientific reach by melding machine and muscle. Show here is a crew member operating an Ingenuity-like helicopter to expand the zone of study. (Image credit: NASA)
Catalyze discussion
Jakosky as the Tiger Team chair notes that the list of cases called out in the report do not represent all potential missions, but “should serve to catalyze discussions within and between the science and exploration communities.”
Missions suggested included projected astronaut treks to Utopia Planitia, Valles Marineris, as well as Cerberus Fossae.
“Any landing site is going to provide spectacular science results. I think that’s clear,” Jakosky said. “Mars is a very diverse, geologically complex planet. One site isn’t going to tell us everything we want to know about Mars.”
One scenario involves crews going au naturel on Mars. That is subsurface study of natural caves — with many Mars caves already previously spotted.
There’s need to characterize the habitability conditions of a cave environment, be it the availability of water, energy sources and chemical potential. But also to determine if signatures of life are present in the cave environment, the report adds.
Human explorers could land near a target cave and remain within the habitat for much or most of the mission. They would teleoperate sample retrieving robots deployed to a cave floor. Doing so would eliminate the operations time lag compared to running a robotic investigation from Earth, “a multiple orders of magnitude decrease in decision time,” says the report.
The huge canyon that is Valles Marineris is arguably Mars’ most dramatic landscape and offers a scientific bonanza for future expeditionary crews. (Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
Why humans on Mars?
The report spells out how humans can advance a valuable palette of science objectives at the Red Planet. Clearly, crews can conduct on-the-spot field measurements, execute local area mapping, and gain, below their boots, subsurface access.
Selection of the highest value samples for return from the surface, subsurface, and atmosphere and getting those specimens into labs on Earth is crucial, the report explains.
First of all, explorers on Mars can emplace local and regional networks of info-gathering devices to capture processes operating on Mars during and between missions.
From orbit or on the surface of Mars, teleoperating robotic assets as precursors to human struts across Mars can probe sites out-of-reach of a human landing site, or to assess a rich diversity of terrains and habitats.
Back here on Earth, there’s need for ground controllers to operate the infrastructure needed to ensure human safety and efficient operations at Mars. It’s also vital to loop in the enhanced capabilities for doing science thanks to teams of on-the-Earth specialists.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has experimented with virtual and mixed reality environments as ways to improve exploration of Mars. (Image credit: NASA/Human Centered Design Group at JPL)
High-priority science
One key signal from the study is site selection to do science with humans at Mars.
“Given the complexity of Mars’ evolutionary history and the tremendous diversity of environments on Mars, no single site can address all of the high-priority science goals,” the report stresses.
A central study finding is that vital science can be accomplished by humans on Mars “that would be much harder or impossible to do with robotic spacecraft; the capabilities of human missions have the potential to change both the objectives and the priorities — and can definitely accelerate the pace — for Mars scientific exploration.”
As for science work on Mars, the Tiger Team flagged a trio of high-level objectives:
“What sets Mars apart from the rest of the solar system is the potential for life, the history of water, and the nature of the geological processes and similarities to Earth,” said Jakosky. “Secondly, it is the relative closeness of Mars and the relative ease with which we can explore it,” he said.
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Very familiar with the report findings is Scott Hubbard, a former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, now an affiliate in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University.
Hubbard served as NASA’s first Mars exploration program director in 2000, earning him the title of “Mars Czar” as he restructured the space agency’s Mars program in the wake of several failures to explore the planet.
In Hubbard’s view, the MEPAG Tiger Team report is an “excellent example of science objectives-based human exploration goals for Mars,” Hubbard told Space.com.
Hubbard said it is his hope that both NASA and the forthcoming National Academies study will utilize the Tiger Team report as “important community input.”
The full text of the “Report Of MEPAG Tiger Team On Mars Human-Mission Science Objectives” can be read online.
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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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.”
