The launch of the ExoMars mission, featuring a rover named Rosalind Franklin, has been postponed from 2020 to 2022. (credit: ESA)
by Jeff Foust Monday, March 16, 2020
This year was supposed to be one of the biggest ever for the exploration of Mars. Four missions by four different space agencies were scheduled for launch this summer, arriving at Mars in early 2021. The missions ranged from an orbiter by an up-and-coming space power to a rover that is the beginning of a decade-long effort to collect samples of the Red Planet and return them to Earth.
“This is a very tough decision, but it’s I’m sure the right one,” said Wörner.
One of those four, though, won’t make it this year. The European Space Agency announced last Thursday that, in cooperation with the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos, it was delaying the launch of the ExoMars mission that had been scheduled for July on a Proton rocket. The mission will carry to the surface a lander, called Rosalind Franklin, whose missions includes the search for evidence of past or present life on the planet.
Technical issues, ESA leadership said, meant that the spacecraft could not be completed and fully tested in time to meet the narrow launch window this summer. “This is a very tough decision, but it’s I’m sure the right one,” Jan Wörner, director general of ESA, said in a media teleconference.
Among those technical problems was a long-standing concern with the spacecraft’s parachutes, which include parachutes 15 and 35 meters in diameter with accompanying drogue chutes. In one high-altitude deployment test in May in Sweden, both the 15- and 35-meter parachutes were damaged. In a second test in August, also in Sweden, the 35-meter parachute was damaged.
An investigation into the problems found that the parachutes were being torn while being extracted from their containers. ESA turned to NASA for help in redesigning that system and performing a series of ground tests at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That was to be followed by a pair of high-altitude deployment tests, this time in Oregon.
Those tests had been scheduled to be completed by now, but have been delayed. “There are some competing priorities over there” at that US test site, Wörner said, “so this will be a little bit later than we hoped.” He later said the tests would be postponed by weeks, rather than months.
In past briefings and interviews, ESA officials were optimistic that the parachute problem had been solved and that the testing could be completed in time for a 2020 launch. “My information is that we are now on a good side. This is not any obstacle for the flight in the summer of this year,” Wörner said at a January 15 press briefing.
One reason for that was that the parachutes could be installed on the spacecraft late in the overall integration process. “As long as we have proven that the parachute works, it can be integrated very late in the assembly sequence,” David Parker, ESA’s head of human and robotic exploration, said in an interview last October during the International Astronautical Congress in Washington.
In addition to the parachutes, Wörner said there were problems with four electronics boxes on the spacecraft that required them to be replaced, although he did not elaborate on the specific problems they suffered.
Those problems, in turn, delayed the completion and testing of software for ExoMars. “There is not enough time left to fully test it before a 2020 launch and gain the confidence we need,” he said. “We could launch, but that would mean we are not doing all the tests and, from the experience we had with Beagle and Schiaparelli, and the clear messages we got, I got as director general, was a very harsh, clear message: do all the tests before you launch.”
“We’ve been keeping pushing up to, let’s say, one month ago,” said Francois Spoto, ExoMars team leader.
Beagle is a reference to Beagle 2, a British-built Mars lander flown with ESA’s Mars Express mission in 2003 that failed to make contact after landing. Imagery taken of the landing site suggests the spacecraft did land, but could not deploy its solar panels and thus never made contact. Schiaparelli was an experimental spacecraft flown with the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission in 2016, which crashed when a software problem caused the lander’s computer to shut off its thrusters while still several kilometers above the surface.
“We cannot really cut corners,” Wörner said. “Launching this year would mean sacrificing essential remaining tests.”
“The learning curve should be at the maximum” by the time ExoMars arrives at Mars, he said later. “We would like to be as sure as possible, as certain as possible, when we go to Mars that we at least have done all the tests to show that it is possible to land on Mars. It really is a hard thing.”
The announcement confirmed growing speculation that the mission would be delayed, and ESA officials acknowledged that, despite the optimistic talk as recently as January, they shortly thereafter realized that the 2020 launch could not take place. “We’ve been keeping pushing up to, let’s say, one month ago,” said Francois Spoto, ExoMars team leader.
Once the parachute tests, electronics work, and software testing are all completed, the spacecraft will go into storage until the next launch window, between August and October of 2022. ESA hasn’t determined the cost of the delay, Parker said in last week’s teleconference, but noted there is a “risk mitigation budget” for the mission as part of the broader Mars exploration program funded at last year’s ministerial meeting (see “Funding Europe’s space ambitions”, The Space Review, December 2, 2019).
There was another complicating factor in the decision to delay ExoMars: the spread of the coronavirus disease COVID-19, which the World Health Organization declared a pandemic last Wednesday. In ESA’s press release about the launch delay, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, cited “force majeure circumstances related to exacerbation of the epidemiological situation in Europe which left our experts practically no possibility to proceed with travels to partner industries.”
Wörner said in the media teleconference that the pandemic had affected launch preparations, but wasn’t the main reason for the delay. “To say the coronavirus is the one and only reason would not at all be fair, but in this situation we see that the coronavirus has also an impact on the preparations” because of travel restrictions, he said. “I would not like to say the coronavirus is the one and only reason.” (It did have an effect on the briefing, which was originally scheduled to be a joint ESA-Roscosmos press conference in Moscow. Instead, it was held as a video teleconference at ESA headquarters in Paris, with reporters emailing their questions.)
He declined to speculate whether, had everything else with ExoMars been going well, the launch would have been delayed anyway because of the pandemic. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s ridiculous to look back at history. Let’s look forward.”
It’s not a hypothetical concern, though, for the other three missions being prepared for launch to Mars this summer. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, with a rover recently named Perseverance, is undergoing preparations at the Kennedy Space Center for a launch on an Atlas 5 in July.
An illustration of Perseverance, the Mars 2020 rover, still on schedule for launch in July. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
“We are green across the board,” Jim Watzin, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, said of Mars 2020 at a March 9 meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee. “The team is working hard and they’re on schedule, and we’re still carrying significant schedule reserve to our launch date on July 17.”
“If we can no longer travel across the United States, if basically people need to be isolated, how do we prioritize the mission work that needs to be done? What are the things that are absolutely urgent that need to go forward?” said Zurbuchen.
However, uncertainty about the length and severity of the pandemic, and its effect on various industries, weighs on all of NASA’s programs. Two of the agency’s centers, Ames in California and Marshall in Alabama, have moved to “mandatory telework” after employees were diagnosed with COVID-19, although “mission-essential” personnel can still work on site. NASA is encouraging telework at other centers, and it may be only a matter of time—days, perhaps—before other centers adopt similar mandatory telework requirements to combat the spread of the disease.
“At this moment in time, I would say that is the biggest risk, how the impact of that affects some of these missions,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said of the pandemic during a virtual meeting last Thursday of the NASA Advisory Council’s science committee. He said teams at JPL and KSC were planning various scenarios “to make sure that we can, in fact, keep this on track.”
“We have a lot of ambiguity at this moment” about the effects of the pandemic, he said later in the meeting. “If we can no longer travel across the United States, if basically people need to be isolated, how do we prioritize the mission work that needs to be done? What are the things that are absolutely urgent that need to go forward?”
He said missions like Mars 2020 that have narrow launch windows would likely be prioritized. That would also include Lucy, an asteroid mission with a complex trajectory that requires a launch in October 2021, and Psyche, another asteroid mission in 2022. That would be followed missions in advanced stages of integration and testing, including the James Webb Space Telescope and Landsat-9.
There’s less information about the status of two other Mars missions. China’s space program, like the rest of the country, has been slowed by the coronavirus outbreak that started there. The Xinhua news service reported last week that the Beijing Aerospace Control Center completed a test to confirm that mission control could communicate with and operate its Mars mission, which includes an orbiter, lander, and rover.
“According to the center, the test has not been affected by the novel coronavirus epidemic, and the technical staff is working hard to ensure the success of the mission,” Xinhua reported. That mission is scheduled for launch on a Long March 5 rocket—which returned to flight last December nearly two and a half years after a launch failure—this summer. (That could be in jeopardy after the failure, as this article was being prepared for publication, of a Long March 7A rocket, which shares some components with the Long March 5.)
The United Arab Emirates Space Agency has provided few recent updates on its Hope Mars mission. That spacecraft is an orbiter built in the UAE and recently tested in Colorado. It is scheduled for launch in July on an H-2 rocket in Japan, a date the agency confirmed in a March 16 tweet.
Travel restrictions in response to the pandemic could make it difficult for the spacecraft and personnel to get to Japan for the launch this summer. However, the UAE would like to see the mission launch this summer so it can arrive in early 2021, the 50th anniversary of the UAE’s founding. And, right now, the world could use a little hope.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.
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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.”
