Science

John Glenn's 1962 Orbital Flight Put NASA Back In The Space Race – Forbes

Published

3 years ago

February 20, 2022

Sixty years hence, it’s hard to appreciate just how much of an impact a human astronaut actually orbiting our Earth had on those below in early 1962. True, the Soviets had already achieved this feat. But the U.S. had yet to send an astronaut into a full orbit around our fragile planet. Thus, astronaut John Glenn’s three orbits of Earth during NASA’s Mercury-Atlas 6 mission served as a wake-up call to the soviets that NASA was here to stay and that the U.S. would not go quietly in this new race to conquer space.

But it also served to inspire a whole generation of space watchers from the remote reaches of Perth, Australia to Hawaii, to the west coast of the U.S. to Florida to central Africa and beyond.

In early February 1962, when people in the northern hemisphere stepped out under a clear night sky and into the kind of bitter cold that can pierce one’s soul, the whole idea that Earth was round and rotating and orbiting its own star was something that many may have understood intellectually. But the reality of travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere was breathtakingly novel. As a result, it’s hard to fully grasp the importance of Glenn’s triumphant, nail-biting flight.

Twenty-one minutes after liftoff, Glenn passed over the Sahara and took shots of its dust storms. As Jeff Shesol, author of “Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War,” writes, one of Glenn’s key tasks was to find out how well a human could see from space; in terms of discerning detail and identifying lakes, rivers and mountain ranges; and gauging distances between objects in orbit. As Shesol notes, some of this mattered for science and future space missions but there were also military reconnaissance implications in this unique view from orbit.

What surprised Shesol most about the Mercury Frienship 7 spacecraft’s flight?

The fact that on the eve of his flight, Glenn was seriously at odds with NASA managers about the flight plan, Shesol told me. He believed they were making decisions — without even asking his opinion — that put him in even greater danger, he says.

“Though he never went public with his concerns, and always portrayed himself as completely confident in NASA’s decisions, he began to seriously reckon with the possibility that he would become the first man to die in space,” said Shesol.

One sticking point with all the Mercury 7 astronauts at the time was autonomy in the capsule; the ability of the astronaut pilot to make his own decisions when mission control seemed to prefer autopilot.

As a result, Shesol says that NASA made Glenn’s flight plan “more conservative” as the launch date approached. “That meant less opportunity for the astronaut to make his own decisions; the autopilot was king,” said Shesol.

A prime case in point was the fact that mission control initially kept Glenn out of the loop regarding a potential problem with Friendship 7’s heat shield.

“As [Glenn] passed over Cape Canaveral at the start of his second orbit, an engineer at the telemetry control console, William Saunders, noted that “segment 51,” an instrument providing data on the spacecraft landing system, was presenting a strange reading,” NASA reports. “According to the signal, the spacecraft heatshield and the compressed landing bag were no longer locked in position.”

Designed to protect the capsule on re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere, the heat shield was in fact supposed to come loose, as NASA notes, but not before it withstood temperatures of more than 3000 degrees F. So, if Friendship 7’s heatshield was loose, it might only be being held in place by straps of the capsule’s retrorocket firing package.

Thus, one can imagine Glenn’s shock when Mercury Control asked him if he heard “any banging noises.” “It was the sort of phrase Glenn might have expected to hear about his family station wagon, not a spacecraft that had cost $160 million to produce and been tested as rigorously as any machine ever made,” Shesol writes in “Mercury Rising.” “Negative,” Glenn replied; he didn’t hear any banging noises. Neither did he see any warning lights.”

“Glenn knew that any problem with the heat shield was going to reveal itself, at first, as heat along his spine; he also knew that if he felt heat along his spine it would all be over quickly,” Shesol notes in his book. But Friendship 7 successfully splashed down at 2:43 p.m. EST on this day sixty years ago; about 800 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral in the vicinity of Grand Turk Island in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Glenn’s flight had lasted 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds. And in the end, the reading that the heat shield might have come loose was deemed to be due to a faulty sensor.

(Original Caption) At sea aboard destroyer NOA as the sun sets, Lt. Col. John Glenn stands by as … [+] technician flown to the U.S.S. NOA from carrier Randolph prepares to remove important recording device from the Mercury capsule in which Glenn made his orbital flight.

Bettmann Archive

Veteran aerospace journalist and Perth native Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of airlineratings.com, was only 10 years-old at the time of Glenn’s flyover. But Thomas remembers the event vividly.

In the hundreds of thousands, Perth people turned every light on in their homes and even hung white sheets on clotheslines and lit them up with torches to produce as much light as possible, Thomas told me. Perth lit up like a beacon on the darkest night, says Thomas, prompting John Glenn to ask the Carnarvon tracking station what the bright light was below which led to the famous comment “Perth is the City of Lights.”

Within voice radio range of the Muchea, Australia, tracking station, Glenn reported that he could see a very bright light and what appeared to be the outline of a city, NASA notes.

We all stood in the street to watch Friendship 7 go overhead and we were in awe; so proud of what we had done, says Thomas. Being so remote we believe it put us on the map for the first time, he says. It made us so proud that we made a difference to that spaceflight and we, of all the people of the world, Thomas says, laid out a warm welcome hello to John Glenn.

But what if the flight had been a complete failure?

“It would have been a psychic shock almost as great as a political assassination,” said Shesol. “And it would have been a huge setback to the space program. There would have been calls for many more animal flights before anyone would have been willing to put another human being atop an Atlas rocket.”

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

Published

1 month ago

September 30, 2024

Anne Joseph

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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Science

‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

Published

1 month ago

September 25, 2024

Anne Joseph

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.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

Published

2 months ago

September 11, 2024

Anne Joseph

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.”

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