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NASA certifies SpaceX's Crew Dragon for astronaut flights, gives 'go' for Nov. 14 launch – Space.com

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SpaceX’s next astronaut flight for NASA is “go” for launch this weekend, agency officials announced Tuesday (Nov. 10), followed by the news that SpaceX has been certified for regular flights to and from the International Space Station.

NASA and SpaceX completed a critical flight readiness review (FRR) for the Crew-1 mission Tuesday afternoon, putting the company’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft on track to launch four astronauts to the International Space Station on Saturday (Nov. 14). The mission is scheduled to lift off at 7:49 p.m. EST (0049 GMT Sunday, Nov. 15) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, weather permitting.

After the FRR, NASA completed the signing of the Human Rating Certification Plan for SpaceX’s crew transportation system, which includes Crew Dragon, Falcon 9 and their associated ground systems. This means SpaceX is now certified to regularly launch astronauts to and from the ISS for NASA. Crew Dragon will be the first NASA-certified crew spacecraft to launch since the space shuttle program ended in 2011.

“This is a big day,” NASA’s human spaceflight chief Kathy Lueders said in a news conference after the FRR. “But the next few days are going to be big days, too, and we’re going to have to be stepping carefully through our final readiness for the flight. This thorough review today and everyone’s approval to move forward was a great first step towards flight.”

Video: SpaceX crew transport system certified by NASA
In photos: SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station

NASA and SpaceX officials participate in a flight readiness review for the SpaceX Crew-1 mission at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on Nov. 9, 2020.  (Image credit: Kim Shiflett/NASA)

Crew-1 will not only be the first mission to launch astronauts on a NASA-certified, commercial spacecraft; it’s also the first time the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued a launch license for a crewed space mission. 

“So we in the FAA look forward to this historic event,” Randy Repcheck, the FAA’s acting director of operational safety, said in the news conference. “We’ve licensed suborbital launches with flight crew, but not not orbital launches, and certainly none with NASA.”

Launching on board the Crew Dragon spacecraft will be NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins and Shannon Walker and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi. The four-person crew will spend about 8.5 hours flying to the International Space Station (ISS), where they will spend the next six months as members of the Expedition 64 crew.

The Crew-1 astronauts, including NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi, pose in front of their Dragon capsule, “Resilience,” at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.  (Image credit: SpaceX)

Although the Crew-1 mission will be the first operational flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, it’s not the first time astronauts have flown on a Crew Dragon. The first Crew Dragon passengers were NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who spent about two months at the ISS earlier this year as part of the Crew Dragon Demo-2 test flight. 

Starting with the Crew-1 mission, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon will be making regular trips to and from the ISS, providing an alternative to the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that has transported NASA astronauts for the last decade. (NASA has also contracted Boeing to fly astronauts to the ISS on its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, which has not yet successfully completed a demonstration mission and is scheduled to take a second stab at an uncrewed test flight in 2021.)

“For the next 15 months, we will fly seven crew and cargo Dragon missions for NASA. That means that, starting with Crew-1, there will be a continuous presence of SpaceX Dragons on orbit,” Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight at SpaceX, said in the post-FRR news conference. “And starting with the cargo mission CRS-21, every time we launch a Dragon, there will be two Dragons in space simultaneously for extended periods of time.”

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 rocket are pictured in the hangar at Launch Complex 39A, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ahead of the planned launch of the Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station. (Image credit: SpaceX/Twitter)

“We are honored to be the nation’s launch provider for crew missions and take seriously the responsibility that NASA has entrusted to us to carry American astronauts to and from the space station,” Reed added. “Honestly, we couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve already accomplished together.” 

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her on Twitter @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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

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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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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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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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

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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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