On Wednesday morning during the quiet hours of twilight, a 32-story rocket blasted into space from a launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. In a burst of flames and smoke, the citrus-colored vessel brightened the dark sky with a synthetic sunset as it propelled a little white spacecraft toward none other than Earth’s glowing companion, the moon.
At last, the Artemis I lunar mission has lifted off.
Initially, Artemis I’s launch had been planned for Aug. 29, but an engine issue forced the attempt to be scrubbed — try No. 2 on Sept. 2 was also a no-go, but lucky No. 3 appears to be a tremendous success. With space missions, however, the future is never really quite certain, and liftoff really was only the beginning of Artemis I’s journey. Nonetheless, after years of delays and wads of extra money, Artemis I’s starry excursion has begun, and the launch was a sight for the ages.
Thousands at Kennedy Space Center watched Artemis I hit the sky.
Keegan Barber/NASA
Though the vehicle that was commissioned for this endeavor — formally named the Space Launch System and also renowned as the most powerful rocket in the world — didn’t usher astronauts to the moon’s surface this time around, Artemis I is kind of NASA’s golden ticket to new adventures in outer space.
Showing off the brilliant orange hue of its insulated spray-on coating, Artemis I’s SLS helped carry instruments to lunar orbit that’ll soon gather vital information for the Artemis II mission, which will bring humans along, to orbit the lunar sphere. Then, Artemis II will pave the way for Artemis III, a 2025 mission that may, at last, add more boot prints to the powdery gray soil, alongside those imprinted decades ago by Apollo astronauts. And that’s just an overview of the first three steps of NASA’s Artemis odyssey.
Eventually, this program is poised to let NASA accomplish thrilling feats like landing the first woman and the first person of color on the moon, building a lunar base camp, constructing a spaceship in lunar orbit, connecting an off-world internet, and even laying the groundwork for a future in which humankind settles Mars.
“When we think about Artemis, we focus a lot on the moon,” Reid Wiseman, chief astronaut at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said in an Aug. 5 press conference. “But I just want everybody in the room and everybody watching to remember our sights are not set on the moon. Our sights are set clearly on Mars.”
Earth’s moon is seen rising behind the SLS rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard.
Aubrey Gemignani/NASA
All things considered, Artemis I is such a big deal because the success of this mission will dictate the timeline for NASA’s sci-fi moon objectives.
You can think of Artemis I as an extremely high-stakes precursor to everything that comes next for American lunar exploration, founded on everything that came before.
Before launching into space, the SLS even got situated for its big day on launchpad 39B, poetically standing where NASA’s Saturn V once stood for Apollo 10. Not only did Apollo 10 christen 39B, but it also illuminated the way for Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s historic landing on the glowing orb (with Michael Collins orbiting patiently in the Command Module).
“To all of us that gaze up at the moon, dreaming of the day humankind returns to the lunar surface,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a press conference, “folks, we’re here — we are going back. And our journey begins with Artemis I.”
Now let’s talk about some Artemis I specifics.
Artemis and Apollo: How NASA’s SLS Moon Rocket Stacks Up to Saturn V
There are two major components to the Artemis I space explorer: an apricot-colored SLS rocket and a conical, white spacecraft dubbed Orion. Prior to launch, Orion topped the SLS like the spire of a castle tower.
And within Orion, there’s a lot going on. It’s basically the cabin car of Artemis I.
Ultimately, the goal was for the superpowerful SLS to propel Orion toward lunar orbit. So far, everything seems to be going swell. Orion is on its way.
NASA’s depiction of the Orion spacecraft leaving Earth’s vicinity and heading to lunar orbit.
NASA
And during its trip, all the fun bric-a-brac will be baptized into the extraterrestrial club, science mechanisms will detail what the trajectory looks and feels like, and the humanlike mannequins will react to dangerous aspects of space travel, like radiation absorption, for assessment on the ground. Once complete, Orion is expected to safely splash down off the coast of San Diego.
“Orion will venture farther than any spacecraft built for humans has ever flown,” Nelson said. “And after its long flight test, Orion will come home faster and hotter than any spacecraft has before. It’s going to hit the Earth’s atmosphere at 32 times the speed of sound.”
This bit might be especially important if, as the agency hopes, the SLS and Orion design supports future missions written to one day access Mars, and maybe even deep space. According to Nelson, if Orion were to return to Earth from a Martian expedition, it might reach velocities around 36 times the speed of sound.
Lucky for us spacegazers (yes, I meant to not say stargazers), Orion also has cameras installed so we can watch what’s happening as it pursues its expedition. “We’re going to try and catch the Earthrise,” Rick LaBrode, lead flight director at Johnson Space Center, said excitedly in a press conference. “That’s a spectacular image.”
Earthrise, taken during Apollo 8, the first crewed voyage to the moon’s environs.
Bill Anders/NASA
Even as Orion began ascending from our planet, NASA started to broadcast a livestream of its perspective. “We intend to bring each and every one of you along throughout the course of the mission,” Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, said during the press conference. “We will share imagery both from the ground as well as the launch vehicle on the spacecraft throughout.”
A screenshot of the Orion livestream broadcast at 12:51 p.m. ET on Nov. 16.
Could there’ve been an international space station orbiting the moon? Might there have been lunar settlements? Or perhaps astronauts could’ve ridden from crater to crater in ATVs? Well, in a way, we might be about to find out. Artemis is sort of picking up where its Greek-namesake twin, Apollo, left off. (Apollo was a god, Artemis a goddess.) “This is now the Artemis generation,” Nelson said.
I mean, assuming everything goes to plan with all stages of Artemis, here are some things to look forward to in the coming decade or so. (OK, but to reiterate, a lot has to go to plan for any of this to happen.)
The Lunar Gateway With the help of international space agencies from at least 18 other countries, NASA signed the Artemis Accords, which basically underscore principles required for peaceful space cooperation. Part of this agreement gave rise to an idea called the Lunar Gateway. The Lunar Gateway is a planned small space station that’ll sit in lunar orbit and serve as a solar-powered communication hub, science laboratory, habitation module for astronauts, holding center for rovers or robots and other such things. It’s like a moon ISS.
A full-view rendering of the Lunar Gateway, which includes elements from international partners. Built with commercial and international partners, the Gateway will be critical to sustainable lunar exploration and will serve as a model for future missions to Mars, NASA says.
“Gateway’s capabilities for supporting sustained exploration and research in deep space include docking ports for a variety of visiting spacecraft, space for crew to live and work, and on-board science investigations to study heliophysics, human health, and life sciences, among other areas,” NASA said.
The LunaNet We’ve also got the prospect of the LunaNet, which’ll serve the navigation, networking and other communication responsibilities of Artemis astronauts. “Astronaut safety and wellbeing are key concerns of the Artemis missions,” NASA’s search and rescue office mission manager for national affairs, Cody Kelly, said in a statement. “Using LunaNet’s navigation services, LunaSAR will provide location data to NASA distress beacons should contingencies arise.”
Here’s what it might look like when astronauts have access to the LunaNet.
NASA
LTVs Lunar terrain vehicles, or LTVs, are also planned for the future. These sort of roofless Jeep-like rovers will transport Artemis astronauts around the lunar South Pole when they get there. This invention is still very much in progress — understandably.
“Most people do a lot of research before buying a car,” Nathan Howard, project manager for the LTV at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said in a statement. “We’re doing extensive research for a modern space vehicle that will be provided by industry. As we plan for long-term exploration of the Moon, the LTV won’t be your grandfather’s Moon Buggy used during the Apollo missions.”
A NASA rendering of what the LTVs could look like on the moon one day.
NASA
Moon Base Camp Perhaps the most exhilarating part of all of this is that if Artemis works out, we’ll have a legitimate base camp on the moon.
An illustration of NASA astronauts at the lunar South Pole.
NASA
“To give astronauts a place to live and work on the Moon, the agency’s Artemis Base Camp concept includes a modern lunar cabin, a rover and even a mobile home,” NASA said. “Early missions will include short surface stays, but as the base camp evolves, the goal is to allow crew to stay at the lunar surface for up to two months at a time.”
Two months at a time, the agency said. It’s simply surreal to consider that the next many years could be filled with the level of lunar exploration that NASA believes the Artemis program can achieve. It might be why the punchy motto of these missions inspires goose bumps.
“We are going.” Well, now, I guess it’s more accurate to say “We’re on our way.”
During the dark hours early Wednesday morning, NASA’s Artemis I rocket touched the sky, at last.
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.”
