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SpaceX carries NASA astronaut mission home with safe water landing – Kathimerini English Edition

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Four astronauts inside a capsule built by SpaceX streaked across the Florida night sky like a meteor before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday night. The water landing capped an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station.

The space travelers were part of a mission called Crew-2: Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur of NASA; Akihiko Hoshide of JAXA, Japan’s space agency; and Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency.

“It’s great to be back to planet Earth,” Kimbrough, Crew-2’s commander, said to SpaceX mission control from inside the capsule after it and four large parachutes fluttered down into still waters near Pensacola, Florida. He and his fellow astronauts left the space station at 2.05 p.m. Eastern time Monday afternoon, and returned to Earth at 10:33 p.m.

Two parachutes deployed as planned to brake the capsule’s speed, then four more replaced them, with one remaining scrunched for nearly a minute before inflating. All chutes eventually deployed, plunking Crew Dragon into calm waters.

“The return looked spotless,” Kathy Lueders, NASA’s space operations chief, said in remarks on the agency’s livestream. She said engineering teams will examine the one “laggy” chute that did not immediately unfurl, adding that it was “behavior we’ve seen multiple times in other tests.”

The capsule, nicknamed Endeavour, bobbed in the ocean as recovery teams swarmed around and lifted it onto a recovery ship. Within about an hour of the spacecraft’s landing, crews helped the smiling astronauts out of the capsule one by one and onto stretchers as they started reacclimating to Earth’s gravity.

The trip was the fourth safe return to Earth for Crew Dragon, a gumdrop-shaped astronaut capsule developed by SpaceX as a replacement for the space shuttle with roughly $3 billion in funding from NASA. The spacecraft is expected to save the agency money, as NASA is no longer required to buy expensive seats for its astronauts on Russia’s Soyuz rockets.

The journey was not without difficulties. Last week, NASA ordered the crew not to use the capsule’s toilet for the duration of their time on board. Engineers on the ground first detected a leaking toilet tube in another SpaceX capsule in September. The malfunction was confined to a compartment within the spacecraft’s floor, and did not affect the cabin.

But NASA declared the toilet of the Crew Dragon at the space station to be off-limits until it could be fixed. That meant that the crew either had to hold it, or use astronaut-grade diapers built into their flight suits as a contingency.

“Of course that’s suboptimal, but we are prepared to manage that in the time that we’re onboard Dragon on the way home,” McArthur, the Crew-2 mission pilot, said during a news conference Friday.

The crew managed many other challenges and responsibilities during their time in orbit.

Shortly after Crew-2 launched in April, SpaceX mission control alerted them that a piece of space debris was projected to whiz by the capsule. The astronauts were instructed to “immediately” get back in their flight suits and lower their helmet visors.

Nothing ever came close to the capsule, and the crew safely reached the space station on April 24.

Days later, US Space Command, which tracks objects in orbit, determined that the alert was the result of a “reporting error” and “that there was never a collision threat because there was no object at risk of colliding with the capsule.” Still, the incident renewed discussion about the growing threat of space debris and other clutter in low-Earth orbit.

In July, Russia launched a new science module to be attached to the space station’s Russian segment. Just after it docked, the module, named Nauka, erroneously fired a set of thrusters for roughly 15 minutes, spinning the football-field-size laboratory 1 1/2 revolutions before coming to a stop upside down.

The accident sent mission control teams in Houston and Moscow scrambling to get the station back in its normal position. The Crew-2 astronauts rushed back into their Crew Dragon capsule in case they needed to escape.

“In case something really bad did happen, we were ready to go and undock, if that was necessary,” Kimbrough said during Friday’s news conference. “Of course it wasn’t, thank goodness.”

A similar incident occurred in October involving another Russian spacecraft attached to the space station, although it seemed less severe than the first one.

While Crew-2 and its fellow space station occupants encountered hazards in orbit, they also kept busy with their typical duties of research and maintenance.

One component of their work even included some play: a taco night spiced up with freshly harvested chiles. The peppers were leftovers from a study examining crop cultivation in space. McArthur, who combined the chiles with fajita beef, rehydrated tomatoes and artichokes, called them the “best space tacos yet.”

The astronauts worked on hundreds of scientific investigations during their six-month stay aboard the orbital laboratory, from ultrasonic tweezers, which use sound to move small objects, to exploring real-time protein crystal growth under a microscope as part of a study into new drugs that can treat diseases.

The Crew-2 astronauts also witnessed the making of a feature length movie backed by Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos. A Russian actress and a director launched to the space station on Oct. 5 for a 12-day shoot aboard the station for their movie, “The Challenge.” The film is about a mission to rescue an ailing astronaut, who was played by Oleg Novitsky, an actual Russian astronaut on the station.

When the Crew-2 astronauts departed Monday, only a single crew of three astronauts remained on the space station. It’s a small head count for the orbital lab, which has had as many as 13 astronauts aboard at once, but usually has seven crew members aboard these days. The last time the space station held just three astronauts was in April 2020.

Mark Vande Hei, a NASA astronaut, and two Russian astronauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, will hold down the fort for at least four days until four more astronauts from NASA and SpaceX’s Crew-3 mission arrive Thursday at 7.10 p.m. Eastern time. Their arrival has been delayed by weather as well as what NASA described as one astronaut’s “minor medical issue,” which it said was unrelated to Covid-19.

[This article originally appeared in The New York Times.]

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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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