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Northrop Grumman launches Cygnus cargo ship to space station for NASA – Space.com

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Northrop Grumman launched a Cygnus spacecraft filled with NASA supplies (and some tasty treats) to the International Space Station Saturday (Feb. 15) in an afternoon liftoff that had some impeccable timing. 

An Antares rocket (also built by Northrop Grumman) launched the uncrewed Cygnus NG-13 spacecraft at 3:21 p.m. EST (2043 GMT) — that’s “3-2-1” for a liftoff time — from Pad-0A of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility

“Awesome launch today,” Joel Montalbano, NASA’s deputy program manager for the International Space Station, said just after launch during live commentary. 

Related: Bacteria & bone: Here’s the science launching on Cygnus NG-13
More: How Northrop Grumman’s Antares rockets & Cygnus ships work

NASA initially tried to launch the mission on Sunday (Feb. 9), but aborted the attempt in the final minutes due to a ground equipment sensor glitch. Dismal weather throughout the week prompted more delays.

A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket launches the uncrewed Cygnus NG-13 cargo ship to the International Space Station from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Feb. 15, 2020.  (Image credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

Cygnus NG-13 will arrive at the space station Tuesday (Feb. 18) deliver more than 7,500 lbs. (3,400 kilograms) of science experiments, supplies and other vital gear for the astronauts of Expedition 62. Packed among those supplies are some treats, including fresh fruit, choice candy selections just in time for Valentine’s Day weekend, as well as and one extra special request from the astronauts.

“For the first time ever, we’re sending some conditioned cheese in a small amount of space that we have left over,” NASA’s Ven Feng, manager of the International Space Station Transportation Integration Office, said in a press conference here on Saturday (Feb. 8). 

The cargo ship is delivering wedges of Wisconsin cheddar, Parmesan and Fontina hard cheeses in a cold bag for the station’s  three-person Expedition 62 crew to enjoy. That crew includes commander Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos and NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan.

Space pioneer honored

U.S. Air Force Maj. Robert H. Lawrence, Jr., the first African-American ever selected as an astronaut, stands next to an F-104 Starfighter supersonic jet in this photo. The Cygnus NG-13 spacecraft is named the “S.S. Robert H. Lawrence” to honor the astronaut, who died in a training accident in 1967 before he could launch.  (Image credit: U.S. Air Force)

Northrop Grumman named the Cygnus NG-13 spacecraft the “S.S. Robert H. Lawrence” in honor of U.S. Air Force Maj. Robert H. Lawrence, Jr., who became the first African American ever selected to be an astronaut in 1967. The U.S. Air Force picked Lawrence as an astronaut for its Manned Orbiting Laboratory — a planned military space station — in June 1967, but he was killed in a training flight accident later that year before he could reach space.

Frank DeMauro, Northrop Grumman vice president and general manager for Tactical Space Systems, said Saturday that his team was honored to name Cygnus NG-13 in honor of Lawrence. The mission is launching during Black History Month, with NASA and others celebrating the contributions of African-American space pioneers.

“Although his career was cut short in a tragic accident, he paved the way for future aerospace pioneers of all races and enabled increased diversity and inclusion across the industry,” DeMauro said Saturday. “While Major Lawrence never flew into space, we are proud that Cygnus will carry his name on this mission.”

Related: Manned Orbiting Laboratory: Inside a US military space station

Another view of the Northrop Grumman Antares rocket launching Cygnus NG-13 on Feb. 15, 2020.  (Image credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

A science ride

Of the nearly 4 tons of cargo on Cygnus, 2,129 lbs. (966 kg) of it is made up of equipment for 20 different science experiments on the station. Those experiments include studies into bone loss from prolonged exposure to weightlessness, bacteria-targeting viruses that could lead to new medications, as well as some cowpeas to be grown as part of a space food experiment. 

Heidi Parris, NASA’s assistant program scientist for the International Space Station program’s science office, said those experiments aim to use the weightless environment on the station to learn more about how to live off Earth, including on the moon and Mars. 

“Taking that fundamental gravity out of the equation gives a fundamental understanding of how things work,” Parris said.

The Cygnus NG-13 spacecraft is prepared for launch. (Image credit: Northrop Grumman)

One novel experiment is Mochii, a small scanning electron microscope about the size of a breadbox that can help astronauts quickly identify the composition of small particles, such as debris or contamination in spacesuits. 

“Currently the ISS has a blind spot, in that we can’t perform this kind of analysis on orbit,” James Martinez, a materials scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center participating in the experiment. 

Mochii was built by the Seattle-based company Voxa. It will be installed in the station’s Japanese Kibo laboratory and serve as a new platform and tool for astronauts and scientists. 

“It’s the first portable scanning electron microscope in the world,” Christopher Own, Voxa CEO, said in a science briefing Saturday.  And now, it’s the first scanning electron microscope in space. 

Another key experiment on Cygnus is the Spacecraft Fire Experiment IV, or Saffire-IV. As its name suggests, Saffire-IV is the fourth experiment to study how fire behaves in space aboard a Cygnus spacecraft after it leaves the space station. 

Cygnus NG-13 is due to leave the station in May. Once it’s a safe distance from the station, the fire experiment will be activated to see how materials like Nomex and plastic panels — which are used in spacesuits and spacecraft — burn inside a meter-long container. 

“Fire safety has been a big concern ever since we started flying crewed vehicles into space,” said Gary Ruff, Saffire-IV project manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The new study will use high-speed cameras to capture different views of space under different oxygen levels, he added.

Related: Watch NASA’s Fire-in-Space Experiments Ignite in a Blazing Success

Here’s a breakdown of the cargo flying on Cygnus NG-13:

  • Crew supplies: 1,570 lbs. (712 kg);
  • Science gear: 2,129 lbs. (966 kg);
  • Spacewalk equipment: 179 lbs. (81 kg);
  • Vehicle hardware: 3,501 lbs. (1,588 kg);
  • Computer resources: 66 lbs (30 kg). 

A flock of Cygnus

Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus is one of two private spacecraft (SpaceX’s Dragon capsules are the other) that currently haul cargo to the International Space Station for NASA. NG-13 is the 13th Cygnus mission to reach space for NASA by Northrop Grumman as part of the agency’s Commercial Resupply Services. That count doesn’t include one failed launch in 2014.

On Jan. 31, Cygnus NG-13’s predecessor NG-12 left the space station. Northrop Grumman launched the Cygnus NG-12 vehicle in early November while an even earlier vehicle, NG-11, was still in orbit. Friday’s launch marks the second dual-Cygnus flight for Northrop Grumman.   

Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus NG-13 spacecraft will arrive at the International Space Station and be captured by a robotic arm on Tuesday, Feb. 18, at 4 a.m. EST (0900 GMT). NASA’s live webcast of the rendezvous will begin at 2:30 a.m. EST (0730 GMT) and run through spacecraft capture. After a pause, NASA TV coverage will resume at 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT) to show Cygnus NG-13’s installation on the station.

Visit Space.com Tuesday for complete coverage of Cygnus NG-13’s arrival and installation on the station. 

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.

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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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