The new Mars rover boasts better instruments and a helicopter. ‘For the first time, we’re going to have HD video of a spacecraft landing on another planet’
Science
Ingenuity, MOXIE and Perseverance: Inside the technology NASA's sending to Mars – Mayerthorpe Freelancer
Take a look at Perseverance, the rover that NASA is sending to Mars on Thursday, and you may notice that it bears a striking similarity to Curiosity, which landed on the planet eight years ago and is still driving. But picture Curiosity as a 2012 Mercedes with a basic package of extras. In that scenario, Perseverance is a 2021 model with all the bells and whistles.
What does that upgrade get you? Here’s Matt Wallace, Deputy Project Manager, Mars 2020, whose work on Mars vehicles goes back to Sojourner, the Austin Mini of rovers that landed in 1997. “I’ve worked on five Mars missions and I can tell you this one’s pretty special,” he says.
Reached early this week, Wallace wasn’t particularly busy in the days leading up to the launch, with the rover already stowed inside the Atlas rocket that’s due to list off Thursday morning. “It’s a bit of a lull before the storm, or maybe the storm’s behind us,” he says. “We’re just watching the launch vehicle team go through their paces.”
He notes that Perseverance is about 126 kg heavier than Curiosity, topping out at 1,025 kg. That extra weight gets you some nice scientific add-ons as well as technology demonstrations.
The former includes upgraded cameras, ground-penetrating radar, spectrometers, laser scanners and sensors to measure local temperature, wind velocity, pressure and humidity. Mars has weather, and while daytime highs in the summer can crack 20 degrees Celsius, it generally falls to at least minus 80 C every night.
But it’s the technology components that will bring the most wow factor. “We have microphones on this rover which for the first time will give us the sounds of descent and landing, and the wheels turning over the surface,” says Wallace.
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Then there’s MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. The acronym needs some work, but MOXIE has moxie. “It ingests the Martian carbon dioxide atmosphere and using electrolysis it separates the oxygen out,” says Wallace. That means not just air for future explorers, but rocket fuel to bring them home. “MOXIE is a scaled demonstration of that capability that we’ll need in the future.”
The atmosphere is just one per cent as thick as the air on Earth, which makes Ingenuity an even more amazing add-on. Riding under the Perseverance chassis, Ingenuity is a tiny helicopter that will, after it’s dropped off, perform several test flights to become the first aircraft to operate on another world. Its metre-long twin rotors will spin at 2,400 r.p.m. (a typical Earth helicopter blade might do 500 r.p.m.) to generate lift.
“It’s a difficult endeavour,” says Wallace. “It’s a very aggressive, high-risk-high-reward experiment. We’re looking forward to getting it there and seeing it fly.”
Seeing is Perseverance’s forte. In addition to mounting 19 cameras on various parts of the rover, NASA has added cameras to the sky crane, a powered descent vehicle that will, after being slowed down by a massive parachute, lower the rover to the ground on a cable before flying away.
“For the first time, we’re going to have high-definition video of a spacecraft landing on another planet,” says Wallace. “We’re going to have some really exciting imagery.”
One of Perseverance’s final tricks will be years in the making. The rover has the capability to collect and store up to 40 rock and soil samples that can be returned to Earth on a future mission.
“That’s really the point of the sample return,” says Wallace. “Making a claim that there was once ancient life on a planet other than the Earth is a fairly profound statement, and it requires a pretty high bar when it comes to proof. And the community has come to the conclusion that it can’t get to that level of understanding without bringing the full power of terrestrial scientific elements to bear on samples. The signatures are just too faint and varied to do that with the limited set of instrumentation that you can take to the surface.”
To that end, the rover will collect its samples and leave them on the surface for a so-called “fetch rover,” currently in development, to collect later this decade.
Or, says Wallace, “if the rover stays healthy, one option is to have our vehicle take it to the next lander and drop off the samples right there. The lander will put them into what’s called a Mars Ascent Vehicle, which is a small rocket, and put them up into orbit around Mars, and then an orbiter would rendezvous with the samples in orbit and collect those and bring them back to the Earth.”
If Perseverance is a late-model automobile, consider that the ultimate in curbside pickup.
News
Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South
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 Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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Science
‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta
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.
News
The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair
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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