NASA announced Thursday that it plans to purchase lunar soil from a commercial company, and the agency’s chief official said it was an effort to set a precedent for the transfer of ownership of alien material and stimulate markets to harvest resources from corpses throughout the solar system. .
The initiative started small, but NASA manager Jim Bridenstine said Thursday that companies will be able to mine water ice, precious metals and other resources from the lunar soil.
“We are interested in buying lunar soil commercially,” Bridenstine said in a virtual presentation at the Secure World Foundation’s Space Sustainability Summit on Thursday. “So we want a commercial company to go to the moon and harvest the lunar soil so that NASA can own it.”
“We’re buying Legolis, but we’re actually doing it to prove that the resources extracted from the moon are actually owned by those who invested sweat and treasure. I try,” said Bridenstine.
NASA’s efforts to buy lunar soil from commercial companies are rooted in a law passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2015, Bridenstine said. The law allows private organizations to extract, own and use water, minerals and other substances harvested from the moon.
Bridenstine said NASA’s goal of fostering a commercial market for mining the moon is in compliance with the 1967 Space Treaty, an international agreement ratified by 110 countries including the United States, Britain, China and Russia.
The space treaty states that “space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by sovereignty, use, occupation or other means.”
Bridenstine said NASA believes in space treaties, but NASA wants to “activate the normalization process” to show it can mine and own extraterrestrial resources.
“We are… I believe we can’t make the moon fit for national sovereignty,” he said. “And that’s absolutely not what we’re trying to do.
“But we believe we can extract and utilize resources from the moon just as we can extract and utilize tuna from the sea,” Bridenstine said. “We do not own the sea. However, if you invest your hard work and effort and in harvesting tuna from the sea, you can own tuna in the sea, which is a very valuable resource for mankind.”
“So the question is, we can have property rights over the extracted resources without using the moon or other celestial bodies as national sovereignty. And I believe the answer is overwhelmingly yes.”
Through the Artemis program, NASA plans to land astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972. The Trump administration last year ordered NASA to land its crew near the lunar Antarctica by the end of 2024, four years before NASA’s previous schedule. Send the astronaut back to the lunar surface.
NASA wants the Artemis program to lead to a longer-lasting human existence on the moon than the Apollo program that ended in the 1970s. To make the Artemis program last, NASA says crews or robots should extract and utilize resources such as ice from the Moon instead of bringing all the materials they need from Earth.
“How do we make a sustainable program? We have to utilize the hundreds of millions of tons of water ice on the moon,” said Bridenstine. “Air to breathe and water to drink,” he said, and can also be converted to rocket fuel.
“Therefore, all this is possible with hundreds of millions of tons in the lunar South Pole. We have to be able to use it as a resource,” he said.
Precious metals can also be mined from the moon along with helium-3, which can be used as an energy source.
Bridenstine declared the problem of extraterrestrial mining as non-partisan, but the use of resources from other planets raised concerns.
Planetary Association’s Emily Lakdawalla tweeted, “It’s a way to repeat our shameful and environmentally destructive history without explicitly stating that we plan to make the future in space different from the past on Earth.” .
Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame, has expressed support for the new NASA lunar soil initiative. However, he tweeted that the Environmental Impact Statement, a standard part of many construction projects in the United States, should be an early stage for proposals to extract and use lunar resources.
“The Moon doesn’t have any valuable resources to sell on Earth, so there’s no risk of companies mining and ruining the Moon until it’s close to 2100,” tweeted Phil Metzger, planetary scientist at the University of the University. Central Florida, including planetary soil sampling in research expertise. “You can get everything on the planet a million times cheaper.
“Second, we don’t have the technology to mine the moon on a large scale,” Metzger added. “Technology development *alone* will take 30 to 40 years to make a large lunar mining venture economically viable. The key is to reduce the need for humans to repair broken robots.”
NASA Manager Jim Bridenstine. Credit: Isis Valencia/Spaceflight Now
President Trump signed an executive order in April outlining a policy that the United States does not view space as a’global commons’. The order strengthened the 2015 law, signed by President Obama, giving U.S. citizens and businesses the right to mine and use resources harvested from other institutions in space.
This policy violates the 1979 lunar treaty that the moon and its natural resources are “common heritage of mankind”. The Lunar Treaty added that an international framework is needed to control the exploitation of lunar resources “when such exploitation becomes possible.”
However, only 18 parties to the 1979 Lunar Treaty have not been signed or ratified by the United States, China and Russia.
Bridenstine said Friday that NASA wants to have a “strong legal framework based on international law” that allows individuals and businesses to pursue private interests on the moon.
“What we’re trying to do is make sure we have a code of conduct that says we can extract resources and we’re doing it in a space treaty compliant way,” Bridenstine said. “And we’re doing it in a way that people can’t interfere with your efforts to extract those resources.”
Earlier this year, NASA summarized the Artemis Accords, a principle that the organization’s international partners are expected to follow in lunar exploration. Principles include peaceful exploration of the moon, transparency, interoperability, emergency support pledges, registration of space objects, and scientific data disclosure.
“These codes of conduct eventually became binding international law,” said Bridenstine. “This is a burning road. I think America should lead here. Then these codes of conduct will ultimately affect international laws that ensure that spaces are sustainable in the long run. .”
Some scientists have questioned how NASA will implement planetary protection guidelines in an era of mining and other loosely regulated commercial activity in space. Planetary protection is focused on preventing spacecraft and ultimately humans from interfering with areas where extraterrestrial life may be present. The guidelines are stricter in a world like Mars than on the Moon.
In July, NASA announced the end of planetary protection requirements for missions landing at most locations on the lunar surface. Areas around the poles with water ice and the historic Apollo landing sites would fall into the category of higher levels of planetary protection.
Bridenstine said Thursday that NASA is not a regulator but could set expectations for private companies.
“If you want to be with us when we go to the moon, if you want to be a private company that can have NASA as a customer, or if you want to join us when we go to Mars, there are specific actions, such as: You have to comply,” said Bridenstine.
The request for proposals announced by NASA on Thursday will be open to US and international companies. According to agency spokesman Stephanie Schierholz, the offer closes on October 9th, and NASA may award more than one award.
The award-winning company collects lunar soil or rocks from any location on the moon, and provides NASA an image of the collected material along with the data that was collected and data identifying where the material was captured. The company then transfers ownership of the sample to NASA on the moon.
Bridenstine said Thursday that NASA expects to pay $15,000 to $25,000 for 50 to 500 grams of lunar soil. The final price, according to Schierholz, is determined by the outcome of the competition.
If a company collects more than 500 grams, the rest can be sold to other countries, companies or individuals, Bridenstine said. And there may be further competition for companies to collect lunar soil and sell it to NASA.
In 2018, NASA created the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program to set up a series of competitions where companies bid for contracts to transport scientific instruments to the moon. NASA has selected 14 U.S. companies eligible for CLPS contract awards and has been awarded four robotic lunar lander missions to date.
The first CLPS missions under development by Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are expected to launch in the month of 2021.
Eligibility for the Lunar Soil Challenge announced Thursday is not limited to CLPS providers. Other US companies and international organizations could also bid, Bridenstine said.
“What we’re trying to do is establish a code of conduct to create regulatory certainty so that outside companies can take advantage of these programs and move forward,” said Bridenstine. “We are trying to prove the concept that resources can be extracted and traded. And it can be traded not only between companies or individuals, but also across countries and across borders.
“I would like to say that the starting point is ice water,” he said. “Many private companies are going to go and get that water ice and then sell it to us as an agency or other private business that uses the month as a destination for all sorts of different functions.”
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.”
