Artist’s illustration of an Orion spacecraft with the upper stage of its Space Launch System rocket firing its RL10 engine. Credit: NASA
Astronauts will likely perform a previously-unplanned demonstration of the Orion spacecraft’s deep space rendezvous capabilities in a high-altitude orbit around Earth on the crew capsule’s first piloted test flight, now scheduled for 2023.
The new objective on the first piloted Orion test flight would allow astronauts and engineers to evaluate the capsule’s ability to approach another spacecraft, demonstrating the rendezvous system before it’s needed on future missions to dock with a lunar lander and the planned Gateway mini-space station in orbit around the moon.
The astronauts on the first crewed Orion flight, named Artemis 2, will oversee the ship’s ability to operate in close proximity to another object in space, likely either the upper stage of the Orion’s rocket or a satellite carried as a piggyback payload, NASA officials said last week.
“In order to go ahead and buy down risks for future dockings of Orion, on the Artemis 2 mission, we are planning to do a rendezvous and proximity operations demonstration,” said Doug Loverro, head of NASA’s human spaceflight directorate, in a May 13 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee.
Adding the new test to the Artemis 2 mission will help engineers “understand the handling characteristics of Orion, (and) make sure that we have the simulators correct on Earth so we can get that actual real-time feedback in orbit,” Loverro said.
The rendezvous maneuvers will also verify the performance of the Orion spacecraft’s laser and imaging sensors used to navigate around other objects in space, Loverro said.
Under the scenario being studied by NASA, the Orion spacecraft would not actually perform a docking on the Artemis 2 mission. That would wait until the following flight, named Artemis 3, when NASA hopes to send astronauts to the moon for the first time since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.
Adding the rendezvous demonstration to the Artemis 2 mission would be a “benefit to us in understanding how the Orion system moves and operates in space,” said Marshall Smith, director of NASA’s human lunar exploration programs.
Smith said modifying hardware and developing a target for the Orion spacecraft to perform an actual docking demonstration on Artemis 2 would be too costly. He said such a change would not offer a significant benefit to NASA because a similar docking system to Orion’s will be tested at the International Space Station.
While Loverro said NASA is planning a rendezvous test on Artemis 2, Smith said details have not been finalized.
“The bottom line is we will probably will go and do a rendezvous and prox ops (proximity operations) activity on Artemis 2,” Smith said. “We haven’t finalized that yet, but we’ve now narrowed it down to a couple of options we think are doable.”
This chart presented to the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee shows the flight plan for the Artemis 2 mission, the first Orion flight with astronauts. Credit: NASA
The Orion spacecraft — built by Lockheed Martin — will launch on top of NASA’s Space Launch System, a heavy-lift rocket comprised of core stage with four leftover engines from the space shuttle program, and two side-mounted solid-fueled boosters. On the first version of the SLS, named Block 1, a modified upper stage originally designed for United Launch Alliance’s Delta 4-Heavy rocket will send the Orion capsule into orbit.
The Artemis 2 flight plan has been in the works for several years. The SLS upper stage — known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS — will place the Orion spacecraft into an elliptical, or egg-shaped, orbit stretching more than 21,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) from Earth.
The high-altitude orbit will allow the Orion astronauts to test the craft’s life support systems for a couple of days before heading on a trip around the moon and back to Earth. The Orion spacecraft could perform the rendezvous demonstration in that phase of the mission, when the capsule is thousands of miles from Earth but not yet on the way to the moon.
“One of the things that I think we all learned from Apollo, and that I think we need to make sure we learn here, is that missions build upon one another,” Loverro said. “We don’t need to take the giant leap all at one time.”
Smith said NASA is evaluating whether to use the SLS upper stage or a satellite carried on the same rocket with with the Orion spacecraft. He added that there are “schedule reasons” why NASA may not want to modify the SLS upper stage to fill the role of the docking target, but the agency has made no final decisions on the matter.
Adding the rendezvous demonstration is “one change that we’re probably going to make,” Smith said. “At least I’m going to recommend.”
The Artemis 2 mission will follow the Artemis 1 test flight, in which an unpiloted Orion spacecraft will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center on the inaugural SLS launch. The mission will last 26 to 42 days, depending on when the launch occurs, and the Orion spacecraft will enter a distant orbit around the moon for a series of checkouts before coming back to Earth for re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
The Artemis 1 launch is now scheduled for November 2021, around four years later than NASA envisioned when the SLS program was conceived in 2011. And that schedule does not account for schedule slips stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced NASA to pause preparations for a test-firing of the first SLS core stage at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
The Artemis 2 mission — the first SLS/Orion flight with astronauts — is scheduled for launch from the Kennedy Space Center in 2023, according to Kathryn Hambleton, a NASA spokesperson.
The White House directed NASA last year to land astronauts on the moon’s south pole before the end of 2024. NASA renamed its moon program Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, and laid out an accelerated timeline to bring the next crewed lunar landing mission from 2028 to 2024.
Under NASA’s current plan, the moon landing could occur on the Artemis 3 mission in 2024, but the schedule is aggressive. The development of a human-rated lunar lander is in the critical path for a 2024 moon landing.
NASA selected industry teams led by Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX last month to mature their concepts for a crewed lunar lander. The space agency and contractor teams will refine requirements and mission architecture choices over the next 10 months, then NASA is likely to select two landers to proceed into full-scale development.
Loverro, who joined NASA as the agency’s top human spaceflight manager late last year, spent the first several months of his tenure overseeing a review of the Artemis program’s schedule. The reviewers concluded NASA should reorganize parts of the agency’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, and establish a systems engineering and integration authority responsible for orchestrating end-to-end mission analysis for the Artemis program.
NASA should also identify programs managers for all phases of the Artemis program, which both aims to get astronauts to the moon in 2024 and develop a “sustainable” human presence around the moon by 2028, Loverro said.
The Gateway, a mini-space station to be assembled in lunar orbit, is needed to achieve an enduring lunar program, according to NASA officials. Agency managers say the Gateway will eventually be used as a staging point for astronauts on the way to the surface of the moon, accommodating reusable lunar landers and contributions from international partners. The Gateway outpost will also host a range of science experiments.
But NASA has decided not to use the Gateway for Artemis 3, the program’s first human landing attempt, in order to alleviate schedule pressure, Loverro said. Instead, astronauts on the Orion capsule will directly link up with a lunar lander in an elliptical halo orbit around the moon, then proceed to the surface.
According to NASA’s current plan, the landing vehicle will launch on a commercial rocket without anyone on-board, then maneuver into lunar orbit to await the arrival of the Orion crew.
Artist’s illustration of the Gateway space station in lunar orbit. Credit: NASA
Loverro told Spaceflight Now last month that NASA still wants to use the Gateway for subsequent Artemis landing missions, beginning with Artemis 4. The first elements of the Gateway could still be in position around the moon in time to provide communications relay support for Artemis 3, he said.
Another major change to the Artemis architecture in the last few months involves how NASA plans to launch the first two Gateway modules. The Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element, or PPE, and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, or HALO, were originally to launch on separate commercial rockets, then autonomously rendezvous and dock in the vicinity of the moon.
NASA last year announced its selection of Maxar to build the PPE, which provides power generation and solar-electric propulsion for the Gateway. Northrop Grumman will supply the HALO module, which is based on the pressurized section of the company’s Cygnus space station supply ship.
Loverro said launching the two elements on the same rocket would save money and reduce the risks of something going wrong during the docking near the moon.
“What we had was a Power and Propulsion Element that had its own launch on a Falcon Heavy, and we had a HALO with its own launch on a Falcon Heavy, and they were then going to have to have independent propulsion systems, and independent docking systems, and independent power and guidance and control systems,” Loverro said last month. “They were both going to have to independently get their way to the moon and then (autonomously) dock with each other.
“And then the complexity of routing all of the power for the long-term for the Gateway through that docking mechanism, and fluids and other things that we needed to do, all made that system quite complex,” Loverro said. “We realized that if we could put it all together on the ground, we got rid of all that risk and reduced the cost, not just because we saved a launch vehicle but because we got rid of a whole bunch of added complexity in the system.”
The combined launch of the PPE and HALO modules will require a rocket with a longer payload fairing. It turns out the U.S. military needs a rocket with a similar payload envelope, so companies are already working on extended fairings to satisfy national security requirements.
The Space Force plans to select two providers as soon as next month to be eligible to win national security launch contracts in competitions held between 2020 and 2024 for missions launching through 2027.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is the only rocket in the ongoing military launch competition that is currently operational. United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman are also competing in the ongoing launch service procurement, and each has proposed new rockets still in development.
Dan Hartman, NASA’s Gateway program manager, said May 13 that the PPE and HALO elements will be connected together with an adapter on the ground, allowing engineers to route power and data connections before launch.
“That offers some significant advantages,” Hartman said. “We will eliminate one launch vehicle, so we’re effectively eliminating the launch vehicle that we had on contract with Maxar (for the PPE). We’re eliminating the service module that we had as part of HALO.
“And then the docking systems, this inter-element adapter will take care of the structural, mechanical, power and fluids interfaces for us,” Hartman said.
The Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element and HALO habitation module will now launch together inside an extended payload fairing. Credit: NASA
Northrop Grumman will manage work to perform the connections between the PPE and HALO modules at the Kennedy Space Center in 2023, Hartman said. The elements are scheduled for launch in November 2023, according to NASA.
NASA released a draft request for launch services proposals May 6 to lay out the performance requirements for the mission. NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy, which oversees launch procurement for the agency’s robotic science missions, plans to select a rocket for the Gateway launch by “late fall” of this year, Hartman said.
Before deciding to go for the tandem launch, NASA officials said they confirmed at least one company will have the ability to launch the modules together on the same rocket.
“We’ll see what we get,” Hartman said. “There could be options out there when we get the proposals back in, but we did check with one, and we think we’re in good shape there.”
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.”
