SpaceX successfully conducted an in-flight abort test of its Crew Dragon crew capsule on Sunday (Jan. 19) to test the emergency escape system, which would safely return astronauts to Earth in the event of a problem during launch. See photos of the test here!
During the in-flight abort test, the Crew Dragon fired its built-in SuperDraco thrusters to separate from the Falcon 9 rocket, as seen in this illustration. After the separation, the Falcon 9 rocket was destroyed.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is perched on a Falcon 9 rocket in preparation for an in-flight abort test on Jan. 18, 2020.
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(Image credit: NASA)
The Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft stand ready for launch on Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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(Image credit: NASA/SpaceX)
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon lift off from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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(Image credit: Tony Gray/NASA)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the Crew Dragon spacecraft on a major abort system test on Jan. 19, 2020 from Pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
The Falcon 9 rocket rises behind a SpaceX facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in this view from the launch of Crew Dragon’s in-flight abort test.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule are on their way to space.
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(Image credit: NASA/SpaceX)
Here, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon can be seen just after igniting its abort engine burn. Eight SuperDraco engines fired to rip the spacecraft free of its Falcon 9 rocket.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
The moment of separation as Crew Dragon fires its SuperDracos to separate from its Falcon 9 rocket during a successful in-flight abort test launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 19, 2020.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX’s in-flight abort test heats up.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule separates from the Falcon 9 rocket, which was intentionally destroyed as part of the in-flight abort test.
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(Image credit: NASA/SpaceX)
The Falcon 9 rocket, fully fueled for launch, appears to explode and break apart after Crew Dragon’s abort maneuver. This was expected and SpaceX warned viewers to expect the rocket’s fiery fate.
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(Image credit: NASA/SpaceX)
Crew Dragon’s “trunk” is seen here after separating from the crew capsule section. Crew Dragon was expected to reach a maximum altitude of about 25 miles (40 kilometers) during the launch.
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(Image credit: NASA/SpaceX)
The four Mark 3 main parachutes deploy to slow Crew Dragon during its descent back to Earth. The spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean about 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of the launch site.
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(Image credit: NASA)
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft sits on the recovery ship GO Searcher just minutes after being pulled from the Atlantic Ocean after a critical in-flight abort test on Jan. 19, 2020.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
The Dragon’s trunk surprisingly landed in the water in tact after being jettisoned during the launch abort test.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
NASA astronauts Bob Behknen (left) and Doug Hurley will be the first to fly on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft during the Demo-2 mission. It could launch in Spring 2020. Here, they walk through the access arm in a dress rehearsal for launch during SpaceX in-flight abort preparations.
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(Image credit: NASA)
The Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft stand ready for launch on Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
An artist’s illustration of the Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad.
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(Image credit: NASA)
The Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft stand ready for launch on Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
The Falcon 9 rocket, topped with the uncrewed Crew Dragon spacecraft, lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 19 at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT).
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
Smoke billows out from under SpaceX’s Falcon 9 during its successful launch abort test on Jan. 19, 2020.
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(Image credit: Glenn Benson/NASA)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the Crew Dragon spacecraft on a major abort system test on Jan. 19, 2020 from Pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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(Image credit: Tony Gray/NASA)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the Crew Dragon spacecraft on a major abort system test on Jan. 19, 2020 from Pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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(Image credit: Tony Gray/NASA)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the Crew Dragon spacecraft on a major abort system test on Jan. 19, 2020 from Pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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(Image credit: Tony Gray/NASA)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the Crew Dragon spacecraft on a major abort system test on Jan. 19, 2020 from Pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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(Image credit: Tony Gray/NASA)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the Crew Dragon spacecraft on a major abort system test on Jan. 19, 2020 from Pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
Precisely 84 seconds after liftoff, as the Falcon 9 rocket flew Mach 2.3, Crew Dragon fired its eight SuperDraco engines to rip itself free of the rocket’s second stage.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
Crew Dragon’s SuperDracos fired for 10 seconds, pulling the capsule free of the Falcon 9 and carrying the capsule upward on a suborbital trajectory.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
About 2.5 minutes after liftoff, Crew Dragon jettisoned its “trunk” service module. The cylindrical, finned module contains the solar arrays and other gear required to sustain Crew Dragon’s taxi flights to the International Space Station for NASA.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
Just after the 3-minute mark, Crew Dragon fired its regular Draco thrusters to orient the space capsule for entry and splashdown. Crew Dragon did not reach space on this launch; the highest altitude the capsule reached is about 24.8 miles (40 km).
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
About 5.5 minutes after liftoff, Crew Dragon began releasing parachutes to slow itself for splashdown. First came the release of two drogue chutes to stabilize the capsule and prepare it for the release of its four main parachutes.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
Shortly after the drogue chutes deployed, Crew Dragon released its four main parachutes to slow the spacecraft’s descent ahead of splashdown. The parachutes on this Crew Dragon were SpaceX’s newest version, the Mark 3 parachute design.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
About 10 minutes after launch, Crew Dragon splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. The drop zone was between 18 and 21 miles offshore (30-35 km). SpaceX’s recovery ship, the GO Searcher, tracked the Crew Dragon ahead of its splashdown, setting the stage for the final step of the mission: Recovery.
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(Image credit: SpaceX)
The GO Searcher was staged near the splashdown zone and was able to reach the Crew Dragon in a matter of minutes minutes. After recovering the Crew Dragon, the ship will return it to Cape Canaveral so it can be studied to see how it fared during the test.
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.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
The European Space Agency is fast-tracking a new mission called Ramses, which will fly to near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis and join the space rock in 2029 when it comes very close to our planet — closer even than the region where geosynchronous satellites sit.
Ramses is short for Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety and, as its name suggests, is the next phase in humanity’s efforts to learn more about near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) and how we might deflect them should one ever be discovered on a collision course with planet Earth.
In order to launch in time to rendezvous with Apophis in February 2029, scientists at the European Space Agency have been given permission to start planning Ramses even before the multinational space agency officially adopts the mission. The sanctioning and appropriation of funding for the Ramses mission will hopefully take place at ESA’s Ministerial Council meeting (involving representatives from each of ESA’s member states) in November of 2025. To arrive at Apophis in February 2029, launch would have to take place in April 2028, the agency says.
This is a big deal because large asteroids don’t come this close to Earth very often. It is thus scientifically precious that, on April 13, 2029, Apophis will pass within 19,794 miles (31,860 kilometers) of Earth. For comparison, geosynchronous orbit is 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth’s surface. Such close fly-bys by asteroids hundreds of meters across (Apophis is about 1,230 feet, or 375 meters, across) only occur on average once every 5,000 to 10,000 years. Miss this one, and we’ve got a long time to wait for the next.
When Apophis was discovered in 2004, it was for a short time the most dangerous asteroid known, being classified as having the potential to impact with Earth possibly in 2029, 2036, or 2068. Should an asteroid of its size strike Earth, it could gouge out a crater several kilometers across and devastate a country with shock waves, flash heating and earth tremors. If it crashed down in the ocean, it could send a towering tsunami to devastate coastlines in multiple countries.
Over time, as our knowledge of Apophis’ orbit became more refined, however, the risk of impact greatly went down. Radar observations of the asteroid in March of 2021 reduced the uncertainty in Apophis’ orbit from hundreds of kilometers to just a few kilometers, finally removing any lingering worries about an impact — at least for the next 100 years. (Beyond 100 years, asteroid orbits can become too unpredictable to plot with any accuracy, but there’s currently no suggestion that an impact will occur after 100 years.) So, Earth is expected to be perfectly safe in 2029 when Apophis comes through. Still, scientists want to see how Apophis responds by coming so close to Earth and entering our planet’s gravitational field.
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“There is still so much we have yet to learn about asteroids but, until now, we have had to travel deep into the solar system to study them and perform experiments ourselves to interact with their surface,” said Patrick Michel, who is the Director of Research at CNRS at Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, in a statement. “Nature is bringing one to us and conducting the experiment itself. All we need to do is watch as Apophis is stretched and squeezed by strong tidal forces that may trigger landslides and other disturbances and reveal new material from beneath the surface.”
The Goldstone radar’s imagery of asteroid 99942 Apophis as it made its closest approach to Earth, in March 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/NSF/AUI/GBO)
By arriving at Apophis before the asteroid’s close encounter with Earth, and sticking with it throughout the flyby and beyond, Ramses will be in prime position to conduct before-and-after surveys to see how Apophis reacts to Earth. By looking for disturbances Earth’s gravitational tidal forces trigger on the asteroid’s surface, Ramses will be able to learn about Apophis’ internal structure, density, porosity and composition, all of which are characteristics that we would need to first understand before considering how best to deflect a similar asteroid were one ever found to be on a collision course with our world.
Besides assisting in protecting Earth, learning about Apophis will give scientists further insights into how similar asteroids formed in the early solar system, and, in the process, how planets (including Earth) formed out of the same material.
One way we already know Earth will affect Apophis is by changing its orbit. Currently, Apophis is categorized as an Aten-type asteroid, which is what we call the class of near-Earth objects that have a shorter orbit around the sun than Earth does. Apophis currently gets as far as 0.92 astronomical units (137.6 million km, or 85.5 million miles) from the sun. However, our planet will give Apophis a gravitational nudge that will enlarge its orbit to 1.1 astronomical units (164.6 million km, or 102 million miles), such that its orbital period becomes longer than Earth’s.
It will then be classed as an Apollo-type asteroid.
Ramses won’t be alone in tracking Apophis. NASA has repurposed their OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned a sample from another near-Earth asteroid, 101955 Bennu, in 2023. However, the spacecraft, renamed OSIRIS-APEX (Apophis Explorer), won’t arrive at the asteroid until April 23, 2029, ten days after the close encounter with Earth. OSIRIS-APEX will initially perform a flyby of Apophis at a distance of about 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from the object, then return in June that year to settle into orbit around Apophis for an 18-month mission.
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Furthermore, the European Space Agency still plans on launching its Hera spacecraft in October 2024 to follow-up on the DART mission to the double asteroid Didymos and Dimorphos. DART impacted the latter in a test of kinetic impactor capabilities for potentially changing a hazardous asteroid’s orbit around our planet. Hera will survey the binary asteroid system and observe the crater made by DART’s sacrifice to gain a better understanding of Dimorphos’ structure and composition post-impact, so that we can place the results in context.
The more near-Earth asteroids like Dimorphos and Apophis that we study, the greater that context becomes. Perhaps, one day, the understanding that we have gained from these missions will indeed save our planet.
