For the last decade or so, there seem to have been serious efforts by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the scientific community in other countries to explore Mars and determine whether it can be liveable.
Known popularly as the ‘Red Planet’ on account of the colour its iron-oxide rich surface, Mars is roughly half the size of the Earth and has been a constant source of curiosity for scientists over the years. This is reflected in the amount of exploration and research that has gone towards the planet to ascertain whether it is possible to establish life there. Projects like the Mars Foundation based in the Netherlands and the Mars Space Mission project based in New York are composed of scientists and aerospace companies exploring how Mars can be liveable in the first half of 21st century.
After Venus, Mars is our closet planetary neighbour. In 2003, Mars was closest to earth with a distance of 56 million kilometres. If Mars and Earth are farthest from the sun, the two planets can be 401 million kilometres apart. Travel time between the two planets in a spacecraft with a speed of 58,000 kilometres per hour that uses the closest approach will take 39 days and with farthest approach with 289 days. On average, travel time between Mars and Earth will be 162 days. With these facts in mind, scientists engaged with NASA and elsewhere are researching the characteristics of Mars that can provide a ray of hope to those dreaming of colonising the Red Planet. It may be a wishful thinking and a utopian concept to send spaceships carrying humans to Mars, but human curiosity and innovation has no boundaries.
Mars can certainly be a source of anxiety for those who realise how in the last 200 hundred years scientific innovation and discoveries made it possible to drastically cut travel time from one continent to another, and enabled people to connect each other from telephone, telex, fax, e-mail and then online sources. But while it may seem an uphill task to develop a planet with a faint possibility of having water and oxygen, our history does lead one to expect scientific miracles.
In a 2014 conference at the NASA Ames Research Centre, Dr Chris McKay, a planetary scientist and founding member of ‘The Mars Society’, presented a list of Mars’ most important resources that early Martian colonists would exploit to make the planet habitable. According to him, under atmospheric CO2 is Mars’ most easily accessible resource, providing feedstock for manufacturing methane propellant. The chemistry involved in separating it is simple, low power, and has been employed on Earth for more than a century. Referring to H2O from the atmosphere and polar ice he further argued, “Mars is a dry planet compared to the Earth, but compared to other celestial bodies like the moon and asteroids, its water budget is quite generous. Mars has a polar cap composed of a mixture of water-ice and CO2 dry ice, and even at non-polar latitudes, water-ice is known to exist a few meters under the surface regolith. This water can be purified and consumed, or electrolyzed to produce O2 and hydrogen, which can be further combined with atmospheric CO2 to produce a range of useful plastics”.
Traces of glaciers, lakes and water in some of the regions of Mars and human ability to make use of minimum resources necessary for colonising the Red Planet is perhaps a single most important source of hope for NASA and the world’s scientists. If they are persistent, a day will come when human settlement in Mars be not be a dream but a reality. Instincts of lust for resources and power have remained two major characteristics among human beings that gave an impetus to the colonisation of Americas, Australia, Africa and parts of Asia. Similar instincts motivate human beings from scientifically developed nations to sustain their efforts to transform Mars as the second world for human beings. People may term the vision of some scientists that Mars can be liveable as weird but science has no limit and can strive to transform unthinkable as unthinkable. Life on moon was ruled out because it has neither air nor water, but in the case of Mars the scientific results of exploration done so far tend to make scientists and explorers double-minded about the possibility of life on Mars.
There are technical and various scientific terms, which are used to judge whether there can be life on Mars? According to Robin Wordsworth in his blog (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/can-mars-be-made-habitable-in-our-lifetime/ February 14, 2020) “It’s a very poorly kept secret in planetary science that many of us first got inspired to join the field by reading science fiction. For many of us who study Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990s Mars trilogy, which describes the colonisation and eventual transforming of the Red Planet, was particularly influential. But rereading these books in 2019, I noted that much of what he imagined looks pretty far-fetched—we’re still a long way from landing the first human on Mars, and transforming the planet to make it habitable seems like a very distant dream”. Reinforcing his arguments about establishing life in Mars he further states that, “serious scientific ideas for transforming Mars into an Earth-like planet have been put forward before, but they require vast industrial capabilities and make assumptions about the total amount of accessible carbon dioxide (CO2) on the planet that have been criticised as unrealistic. When we started thinking about this problem a few years ago, therefore, we decided to take a different approach. One thing you learn quickly when you study Mars’s past climate, as we do in our usual research, is that while it was intermittently habitable in the past, it was never really like Earth—it has always been a unique and alien world. So when we’re thinking about how to make Mars habitable in the future, perhaps we should also be taking inspiration from the Red Planet itself”.
Human quest for knowledge, exploration and discovery has no parallel. The West, on account of its edge in science and technology in the last four hundred years wouldn’t like to give up hope to make use of the opportunity to colonise Mars provided there are chances of some success. Investment on scientific missions to be sent to Mars will pay off as the West, particularly the United States will be first one to put its flag on the Red Planet and unleash the process of colonising Mars.
In his paper “A way to make Mars habitable” Robert Woodsworth in Harvard Gazette (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/07/making-mars-habitable/) argues that “people have long dreamed of altering the Martian climate to make it liveable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside the realm of science fiction to propose terraforming. In a 1971 paper, Sagan suggested that vaporizing the northern polar ice caps would result in “yield ~103g cm-2 of atmosphere over the planet, higher global temperatures through the greenhouse effect, and a greatly increased likelihood of liquid water.”Based on the results of a pair of NASA-funded researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Northern Arizona University in 2018 found that processing all the sources available on Mars would only increase atmospheric pressure to about seven per cent that of Earth — far short of what is needed to make the planet habitable,scientists are now exploring the possibility of colonising not the entire Mars but some of its regions. Quoted by Robert Woodsworth, “the researchers suggest that regions of the Martian surface could be made habitable with a material — silica aerogel — that would mimic Earth’s atmospheric greenhouse effect. Through modeling and experiments, the researchers show that a two to three-centimetre thick shield of silica aerogel could transmit enough visible light for photosynthesis, block hazardous ultraviolet radiation, and raise temperatures underneath permanently above the melting point of water, all without the need for any internal heat source”.
Scientists are going an extra mile to probe how even a small percentage of available ice and CO2 can help start colonization process in Mars. Therefore, they agreed upon selecting some of the parts of mars so as to conduct engineering of environment that can at least lead to life in the red planet. According to Robin Wordsworth, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Earth and Planetary Science “this regional approach to making Mars habitable is much more achievable than global atmospheric modification,” “Unlike the previous ideas to make Mars habitable, this is something that can be developed and tested systematically with materials and technology we already have.” “Mars is the most habitable planet in our solar system besides Earth,” said Laura Kerber, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But it remains a hostile world for many kinds of life. A system for creating small islands of habitability would allow us to transform Mars in a controlled and scalable way.”Unlike Earth’s polar ice caps, which are made of frozen water, the ones on Mars are a combination of water ice and frozen CO2. Like its gaseous form, frozen CO2 allows sunlight to penetrate while trapping heat. In the summer, this solid-state greenhouse effect creates pockets of warming under the ice. “We started thinking about this solid-state greenhouse effect and how it could be invoked for creating habitable environments on Mars in the future,” Wordsworth said. “We started thinking about what kinds of materials could minimize thermal conductivity but still transmit as much light as possible.”
According to Chelsea Gohd in her paper, “Can we Terraform Mars to Make It Earth-Lie? Not anytime Soon” (https://www.space.com/41318-we-cant-terraform-mars.html) “while many researchers have devised ways we might use Mars’ carbon dioxide to terraform the planet and make it habitable, one new study suggests that the Red Planet simply doesn’t have enough carbon dioxide for this to be possible. Could we make Mars Earth-like? Not with existing technologies, one new paper suggests. For many years, Mars has existed as a hopeful “Planet B” — a secondary option if Earth can no longer support us as a species. From science-fiction stories to scientific investigations, humans have considered the possibilities of living on Mars for a long time. A main staple of many Mars-colonisation concepts is terraforming — a hypothetical process of changing the conditions on a planet to make it habitable for life that exists on Earth, including humans, without a need for life-support systems. Unfortunately, according to a new paper, with existing technologies, terraforming Mars is simply not possible”.
Scientists researching on Mars point out that several million years ago Mars was warm and wet and at that there was a large blue fresh water lake. Huge underground aquifers of liquid water exist, according to a group of scientists, who say they have found convincing evidence. The underground lake hasn’t been seen directly, but if it’s real, it’s a discovery that substantially increases the likelihood that the Red Planet might host life. Researchers detected the possible reservoir with the Mars Express Orbiter, a European spacecraft that’s been orbiting Mars since 2003. While scanning the ice cap at Mars’ south pole, the probe’s radar instrument, called MARSIS, detected a feature about a mile underneath the surface that was about 12.4 miles wide. The structure has a radar signature that matches that of buried liquid water here on Earth, leading the team to conclude that there’s a lake under the glacier. The researchers say they’ve ruled out all other possibilities for what they’re seeing.
According to Loren Grush, in her article “Scientists detect giant underground aquifer on Mars, raising hope of life on the planet” (https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17606966/mars-liquid-water-reservoir-) “in 2015, the space agency announced that a bunch of bizarre dark streaks seen on Mars were likely made up of salty water. That was the first big confirmation that water exists as a liquid on Mars, which is remarkable when you consider that the planet has an average temperature of -80 degrees Fahrenheit. Salt in the water lowers its freezing point, allowing it to stay liquid in frigid conditions; scientists believe the salt probably comes from Martian rocks”.
Other players for exploring Mars like China and United Arab Emirates (UAE) are also active with a resolve to seek the possibility of starting human life on the red planet. Drive to colonize Mars will further get an impetus because of over population, diminishing food and energy resources and worsening of global environment which will make human living on earth very difficult.
(The writer is Meritorious Professor of International Relations and former Dean Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Karachi. E.Mail: [email protected]).
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.”
