NASA’s Artemis II Mission

 Start of Artemis II mission around the moon

A giant rocket’s tower of flame lifted three Americans and one Canadian at 6:35 p.m. Eastern on the first crewed journey which will go around the moon. Nasa's Artemis II mission, the first around the Moon in more than 50 years, has taken off and the spacecraft is now in orbit around the Earth. It will remain in orbit for the next 24 hours as the crew carries out checks, if all goes well it will get the green light to head to the Moon. The crew are "safe, secure and in great spirits", a NASA official says during a post-launch press conference. "Great view," says astronaut Reid Wiseman shortly after take-off. "We have got a great Moonrise". A towering orange-and-white NASA rocket blasted off from Florida, lifting four astronauts toward space and transporting spectators’ imaginations to a future in which Americans may again set foot on the moon.

The flight aboard a spacecraft named Integrity is taking Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen on what is expected to be a round trip of more than 695,000 miles to clear a path for more exploration, and eventually a new lunar landing. As they did during the heyday of the Apollo program, which first put men on the lunar surface, spectators squeezed onto the beaches along Central Florida’s Space Coast. The crowds cheered when the powerful vehicle launched into the clear, twilight sky at 6:35 p.m. Eastern time. It traveled eastward, over the Atlantic Ocean, on a journey that is to go around the moon but not land there. The mission, known as Artemis II, is the 21st century equivalent of Apollo 8, when NASA astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders captured the rapt attention of the world. When they launched in December 1968, it was the first time that astronauts rode on top of NASA’s mighty Saturn V rocket. For that mission, instead of just a short test flight around Earth, the space agency audaciously decided to send the crew all the way to the moon and back, the first time that another celestial body became a destination that humans could reach.

In the 1960s, NASA was racing to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. This time, NASA does not want to fall behind the space ambitions of China, which is aiming to land its astronauts on the moon by the end of 2030. But the goal is not to win the sprint. It is to establish a continuing presence on the lunar surface, building an outpost over the next decade. Like Apollo 8, Artemis II aims to similarly check that the spacecraft can safely make the journey and keep its crew alive during the 10 days it is expected to take to go to the moon and return. Under those plans, the trip will conclude with a splash in the Pacific Ocean on April 10. Unlike the Apollo astronauts, who were all white men, this mission sets a number of firsts: Mr. Glover of NASA will be the first Black man to venture into deep space and Ms. Koch of NASA will be the first woman to do so, while Mr. Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency will be the first person on a moon mission who is not an American. Mr. Wiseman of NASA is the commander of Artemis II. The launch was just spectacular and you could feel the force of the rocket lifting off passing through your body. 

Problems that have snarled scheduled launch attempts in the past, like hydrogen leaks and helium leaks, did not recur. But there were other issues. First, NASA engineers resolved a problem with the rocket’s flight termination system, which destroys the rocket in the event that the crew capsule is ejected during flight. Then, around 5:30 p.m. Eastern, NASA said it was working on a problem with a battery in that crew capsule ejection system. Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who became NASA administrator in December, has announced major revisions to the Artemis program and rallied a work force that was battered by uncertainty and downsizing last year to focus on putting new footprints on the moon by the end of 2028. The rocket was filled with propellants and the astronauts were seen seated in the capsule well ahead of the launch. Forecasters predicted an 80% chance of favorable conditions during the two-hour launch window, which was set to start at 6:24 p.m. The window allowed wiggle room to resolve last-minute glitches or wait for a threatening cloud to pass by.

The crew on the 10-day mission won't land on the Moon, but plan to circle it, while travelling further from Earth than anyone has ever been before. The astronauts will get to space aboard the Space Launch System. The rocket is the equivalent of the Saturn V that NASA used during the Apollo moon landings. The S.L.S. is 322 feet tall and weighs 5.75 million pounds when filled with propellants. Once in space, the crew will separate from the rocket and travel toward the moon in the Orion capsule. It has the interior volume of about two minivans. The path of Artemis II is unlike any moon mission in the past and probably unlike any moon mission in the future. During the crew’s first few hours in space, they will test Orion’s systems while swinging out to about 43,000 miles above the Earth. This will set them up to begin their journey around the moon. The astronauts are expected to set a record for the farthest anyone has ever been from Earth, surpassing the distance reached by Apollo 13 in 1970 when the astronauts had to abort their mission and return back to Earth.

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Octopus

 Amazing Octopus

Mineral Rich Antarctica

 As Antarctica’s ice recedes, Mineral resources exposed

Mining is banned on the frozen continent. But new research suggests, it could change as ice melts and land and valuable minerals are exposed. The Transantarctic Mountains, which, along with sites on the Antarctic Peninsula, hold the most promising mineral deposits in Antarctica. Prospectors are scouring the Pacific Ocean seafloor and Greenland’s vast landscape for valuable minerals to run the world’s economy. Melting ice, rebounding land and rising seas will change what resources are available in Antarctica. A new analysis projects that as much as 120,610 square km's of new, ice-free land could emerge in Antarctica by 2300. A warming climate could expose a Pennsylvania-sized chunk of ice-free land in Antarctica, which could drastically reshape Antarctic geopolitics as well as the continent’s geography.

A new study finds that, as the climate continues to warm over the next decades, tens of thousands of square miles of Antarctica will lose their protective covering of ice, exposing valuable deposits of copper, iron, gold, silver, platinum and cobalt. A study published in Nature Climate Change is the first to incorporate glacial isostatic adjustment, how land beneath heavy ice sheets uplifts after the ice retreats, into projections of ice-free land emergence in Antarctica. The results reveal that climate change could expose potentially valuable mineral resources which may spur renegotiations of the international treaties that currently govern Antarctica. As more ice-free land emerges in Antarctica, said Erica Lucas, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, countries may become more interested in its mineral resource potential. Beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet lies a varied landscape with mountains, canyons, valleys and even volcanoes. As the climate warms, the ice sheet is slowly retreating, uncovering some of that land. But until now, projections of ice-free land emergence had considered only changes to ice margins, how the spatial extent of ice cover will shift. Simulations of Antarctica’s future accessible land hadn’t considered how land would uplift once uncovered by ice or how different sea level scenarios would affect the amount of ice-free land that might emerge.

Geologists have been exploring the frozen continent for more than a century, and climate scientists now have a better idea about which parts of Antarctica might be easier to access in the future. Nearly all of the continent is covered by either ice sheets or glaciers; however, some regions of Antarctica are warming twice as fast as the global average. “We are projecting how much ice-free land is going to emerge, and the relation of that ice-free land to the known mineral occurrences,” said Erica Lucas. Lucas’s projections included these factors by incorporating expected sea level changes, information about the thickness of Earth’s lithosphere and estimates of how the absence of the gravitational pull of an ice sheet would affect land uplift. The study estimated that 120,610 square km's (46,578 square miles), 36,381 square km's (14,047 square miles), and 149 square km's (58 square miles) of land would emerge by 2300 under high–, medium–, and low–ice melt conditions, respectively. “We know we’ve had ice retreat and grounding line retreat over the past couple of decades,” so the ranges of projected ice-free land emergence were not surprising, Lucas said.

An international treaty bans mining in Antarctica; however, nations can propose changes beginning in 2048. Dr. Lucas said that the study could help researchers understand the calls for mining which might arise in the future. Currently, less than 0.6% of Antarctica is estimated to be free of ice cover, including coastlines, mountain ranges, valleys and cliffs. Global warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, is changing that. Antarctic ice and glaciers have undergone rapid thinning and retreat over the past few decades, and that will continue, the study said. “We made these projections because we want to better understand if there’s going to be future calls for mineral resource development,” Dr. Lucas said. Within the area that Lucas and the research team projected would be ice-free by 2300 lie known or suspected deposits of critical minerals used in manufacturing and valuable metals in and of themselves. In particular, the study found the largest land emergence in Antarctica is likely to occur over territories claimed by Argentina, Chile and the UK and contains a range of mineral deposits.

Two regions of Antarctica hold the most promising mineral deposits: the 810-mile-long Antarctic Peninsula, which sticks up from the continent like a thumb toward the southern tip of South America; and the 2,000-mile-long Transantarctic Mountains that separate East and West Antarctica. The peninsula mountain range is claimed by Australia and New Zealand. All territorial claims on Antarctica were suspended by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and are not recognized by other nations. Currently, commercial mineral extraction is not allowed in Antarctica, though the Antarctic Treaty does allow for activities related to mineral resources if they are conducted strictly for scientific purposes. If mineral resources become simpler to extract, countries with territorial claims in Antarctica would have an incentive to renegotiate those terms. The first window for renegotiation is in 2048, when parties to the Antarctic Treaty are permitted to call for a review of the treaty’s environmental protocol. “The continent will still remain a very challenging environment for mineral resource extraction.” The changes to Antarctic land could put pressure on the region’s legal framework surrounding mineral resource activities. “That’s a fair assessment,” wrote Tim Stephens, a professor of  international law at the University of Sydney Law School who was not involved in the new study. “However, the ice-free land emergence projected by the new study is unlikely to trigger a major change to Antarctic governance on its own,” he wrote. “The continent will still remain a very challenging environment for mineral resource extraction,” he wrote, adding that the transformation of the Antarctic environment could also spur greater cooperation and focus on the environmental protection objectives of the Antarctic Treaty.

However, the study’s authors predict that as more land is exposed, countries will begin to advocate mining. The study examined several future scenarios to determine how much land would become free from ice, weighing global temperatures, rising sea levels along the coast and how much the land could rise once the ice melts and the weight of glaciers is removed. Under a moderate ice-melting scenario, about 14,000 square miles of Antarctica would be exposed by the year 2300, a figure which might increases to about 46,600 square miles under a high ice-melting scenario. The amount of ice that retreats depends on future greenhouse gas emissions, Dr. Lucas said. But she cautioned that there was uncertainty in some projections of ice melting beyond 2100. Average global temperatures are predicted to rise by 2.6 degrees Celsius, or 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels by 2100, according to Climate Action Tracker. The authors examined existing studies of mineral deposits and regions where, 180 million years ago, Antarctica was connected to Australia, Africa and South America as part of the supercontinent Gondwana. “We know that all of the other continents that bordered Antarctica during this time period have large mineral deposits,” Dr. Lucas said. “Because Antarctica is geologically similar to those continents, we can assume that there is likely also similar mineral deposits in Antarctica.” Rising global temperatures and retreating ice sheets would expose between 12 and 25 million metric tons of copper deposits on the Antarctic Peninsula. 

Global copper demand is currently at 28 million metric tons and is expected to jump to 42 million metric tons by 2040 as demand for electricity grows, according to a January report by S&P Global in New York. Tony Press, adjunct professor at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, said the methodology of the new study was “really interesting, and there’s going to be new areas of bare ground, which may or may not provide places for people to explore for minerals.” Dr. Press also cautioned that prospecting for minerals on a continent without seaports or roads would be difficult. Commercial mining requires cold weather to move mining vehicles across the land and over rivers, according to Dr. Press. “Climate change is going to change that, but you can’t actually predict how that’s going to be at the moment,” he said. Dr. Press also noted that global warming was causing more icebergs to break off from glaciers along the Antarctic coast, making the Southern Ocean more hazardous for ships. For now, Antarctica is protected from commercial development and open only to scientists and tourists. Current study was conducted to better understand the calls for mining which might arise in the future, not that the study could be used to guide future decisions about mining.

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