CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX kicked off what is expected to be another launch-packed year by delivering a Turkish communications satellite to orbit tonight (Jan. 7).
A 230-ft-tall (70 m) Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Space Launch Complex 40 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 9:15 p.m. EST (0215 GMT on Jan. 8), about 45 minutes into a planned four-hour window, carrying the Turksat 5A satellite into space. The brief delay was due to a downrange tracking issue, SpaceX said during its live launch broadcast.
Going into the launch tonight, forecasters at the U.S. Space Force’s 45th Space Wing predicted a 70% chance of favorable conditions for launch, with the main concerns being cumulus and thick clouds, along with upper-level wind shear. These conditions aren’t always ideal for onlookers but can allow interesting acoustics as the roar of the Falcon sounds extra loud.
The two-stage Falcon 9 lit up the night sky as it leapt off the launch pad tonight. The glow of the rocket’s nine first-stage engines turned night into day as the rocket climbed into the clouds hanging over the Space Coast. The rumble of the engines could be heard long after the rocket disappeared from sight.
Tonight’s mission marked the first launch of the year here at the Cape, and 8.5 minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s first stage landed on one of SpaceX’s two massive drone ships, “Just Read the Instructions,” which was stationed out in the Atlantic Ocean.
Today’s flight was the fourth launch for this particular Falcon 9 first stage. The booster, designated B1060, previously lofted an upgraded GPS III satellite for the U.S. Space Force in June 2020, followed by launches of SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites in September and October.
The Falcon 9 went vertical on the pad this morning. SpaceX did not conduct a static fire test of this particular rocket before flight. Typically, the company holds the rocket down on the pad and briefly fires its nine first-stage engines to make sure their systems are working as expected prior to liftoff. It’s rare that SpaceX skips this routine test, but it’s not unheard of. In fact, SpaceX skipped the static fire test on its previous mission as well, which launched a spy satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office in December.
Powered by more than 1.7 million pounds of thrust from its nine first-stage Merlin 1D engines, the Falcon 9 deposited the 7,700-lb. (3,500 kilograms) Turksat 5A satellite into orbit about 33 minutes after liftoff. The spacecraft is designed to operate for approximately 15 years, providing broadband coverage to Turkey, the Middle East, Europe and portions of Africa.
SpaceX will also launch the spacecraft’s counterpart, Turksat 5B, later this year. The Turksats are part of an effort to expand Turkey’s presence in space, which hasn’t been without controversy. In October, activists began pressuring SpaceX to stop the Turksat 5A launch. They protested outside SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, citing Turkey’s role in a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan as the reason the mission shouldn’t fly. Their attempt was unsuccessful.
About 8.5 minutes after Falcon 9 leapt off the pad, the rocket’s first stage landed on the drone ship, marking the third successful launch and landing for this particular booster. The landing also marked the 71st successful touchdown for a returning SpaceX booster overall and the 21st in a row. (In 2019, SpaceX lost two first-stage boosters in back-to-back missions as the vehicles failed to hit their mark.)
Built by Airbus, the Turksat 5A spacecraft separated from the Falcon’s upper stage approximately 30 minutes after liftoff. From its orbital perch, more than 22,000 miles (36,00 kilometers) above Earth, the satellite will beam down broadband coverage, thanks to its 42 Ku-band transponders.
It will take the satellite nearly four months to reach its final altitude. Turksat 5A will make the trek using its onboard plasma thrusters, which rely on electrical energy from the spacecraft’s solar panels rather than traditional fuel. These thrusters are more energy efficient but produce less thrust, so it takes a bit longer to reach its orbital parking spot.
“We are very pleased to welcome Turksat as a new Eurostar customer for the most powerful satellites of their fleet. We were the first to demonstrate full electric propulsion technology for satellites of this size and capacity, and this will enable the Turksat spacecraft to be launched in the most cost-efficient manner,” Nicolas Chamussy, head of space systems at Airbus, said in a company statement.
Turksat 5B, which is slated to launch later this year, is a bit heavier than its predecessor. Weighing in at more than 9,000 lbs. (4,500 kg), the satellite will operate in both the Ku and Ka bands, providing more than 50 gigabits per second of capacity, according to Airbus. That satellite is expected to enter service later this year, if all goes as planned.
An artist’s illustration of the Turksat 5A satellite in orbit. (Image credit: Airbus)
Stick it to the drone ship
The Turksat 5A mission is SpaceX’s 50th reflight of a Falcon 9 since the company recovered a booster for the first time in 2015.
To stick the landing, the booster separated from its upper stage and conducted a series of orbital ballet moves, to reorient itself for landing. Then it performed a series of three engine burns to slow itself enough to gently touch down on its designated landing spot, the deck of “Just Read the Instructions.”
To facilitate reuse, SpaceX employs two massive drone ships, the second of which is named “Of Course I Still Love You.” The floating platforms are stationed in the Atlantic prior to launches from the Space Coast and return to Port Canaveral with the booster in tow following a successful catch. These two vessels have enabled SpaceX to launch and subsequently land more rockets.
“Of Course I Still Love You” is now receiving some TLC after a busy year last year. In total OCISLY has caught 40 returning boosters, 13 of which landed in 2020. The ship will soon return to service, ready to catch many more boosters with SpaceX’s busy schedule for this year.
“Just Read the Instructions” received its own upgrades and renovations at the beginning of 2020.
Reusability efforts
The current iteration of the Falcon 9 debuted in 2018. Known as the Block 5, it features 1.7 million pounds of first-stage thrust as well as some other upgrades that make it capable of rapid reuse. According to SpaceX, each of these first-stage boosters can fly as many as 10 times with minor refurbishments in between, and potentially as many as 100 times before retirement.
To date, SpaceX has launched and landed the same booster a maximum of seven times. So far we have yet to see one fly 10 times, but that could happen this year.
Company founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that he wants his rockets to help facilitate access to space, and the Block 5 Falcon 9 was created to do that. Thanks to the launcher’s capabilities, it has enabled smaller countries and organizations to reach space through dedicated missions and “rideshares.”
With this flight, Turkey has become the latest country to take advantage of that opportunity. A little over two years ago, Bangladesh sent its first-ever communications satellite into space atop a SpaceX rocket; last July, South Korea launched its first dedicated military satellite from Florida’s Space Coast; and in 2018, Israel launched a spacecraft to the moon as part of a rideshare mission. These are just a few examples of the growing number of countries and entities that are reaching for the stars thanks to reduced launch costs.
Fairing recovery
Ahead of today’s launch, SpaceX deployed its dynamic duo — GO Ms. Tree and GO Ms. Chief — in an effort to fetch the two falling pieces of the Falcon 9’s payload fairing, or nose cone.
Ms. Tree had been working solo for the final few missions of 2020, getting an assist from a boat named GO Navigator.
Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief serve as giant, mobile catcher’s mitts, snagging payload fairings in their attached nets as they fall back down to Earth. (The boats are also capable of retrieving fairing halves rom the water after they splash down.)
Each fairing piece is equipped with parachutes and special software to guide itself to a predetermined recovery zone where the boats are waiting with their outstretched nets.
Once returned to port, the fairings are refurbished and used again. Typically, SpaceX flies used fairing pieces on its own Starlink missions, but the company has been branching out and using more reused hardware on all its missions. In December, the company flew a veteran fairing on its Sirius XM-7 mission, the first external mission to feature a refurbished shroud.
Today’s mission marks the beginning of a busy launch year for the Cape. More than 40 missions are on the schedule, with SpaceX hoping to launch 40 rockets this year between its California and Florida launch sites.
Those launches include two astronaut missions to the International Space Station, more Starlink flights, and one liftoff of SpaceX’s powerful Falcon Heavy.
Up next for SpaceX is the Transporter-1 mission, which is slated to transport 72 small satellites along with four additional payloads into space as part of SpaceX’s latest rideshare endeavor. Transporter-1’s liftoff is scheduled for no earlier than Jan. 14.
Follow Amy Thompson on Twitter @astrogingersnap. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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.”
