The two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station since June welcomed their new ride home with Sunday’s arrival of a SpaceX capsule.

SpaceX launched the rescue mission on Saturday with a downsized crew of two astronauts and two empty seats reserved for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will return next year. The Dragon capsule docked in darkness as the two craft soared 265 miles (426 kilometers) above Botswana.

NASA switched Wilmore and Williams to SpaceX following concerns over the safety of their Boeing Starliner capsule. It was the first Starliner test flight with a crew, and NASA decided the thruster failures and helium leaks that cropped up after liftoff were too serious and poorly understood to risk the test pilots’ return. So Starliner returned to Earth empty earlier this month.

The Dragon carrying NASA’s Nick Hague and the Russian Space Agency’s Alexander Gorbunov will remain at the space station until February, turning what should have been a weeklong trip for Wilmore and Williams into a mission lasting more than eight months.

Two NASA astronauts were pulled from the mission to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return leg.

“I just want to say welcome to our new compadres,” Williams, the space station commander, said once Hague and Gorbunov floated inside and were embraced by the nine astronauts awaiting them.

Hague said it was a smooth flight up. “Coming through the hatch and seeing all the smiles, and as much as I’ve laughed and cried in the last 10 minutes, I know it’s going to be an amazing expedition,” he said.

NASA likes to replace its station crews every six months or so. SpaceX has provided the taxi service since the company’s first astronaut flight in 2020. NASA also hired Boeing for ferry flights after the space shuttles were retired, but flawed software and other Starliner issues led to years of delays and more than $1 billion in repairs.

Starliner inspections are underway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, with post-flight reviews of data set to begin this week.

“We’re a long way from saying, ‘Hey, we’re writing off Boeing,'” NASA’s associate administrator Jim Free said at a pre-launch briefing.

The arrival of two fresh astronauts means the four who have been up there since March can now return to Earth in their own SpaceX capsule in just over a week, bringing the station’s crew size back down to the normal seven. Their stay was extended a month because of the Starliner turmoil.

Although Saturday’s liftoff went well, SpaceX said the rocket’s spent upper stage ended up outside its targeted impact zone in the Pacific because of a bad engine firing. The company has halted all Falcon launches until it figures out what went wrong.was extended a month because of the Starliner turmoil.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

A new study published in the journal Science suggests that an ordinary old log could help refine strategies to tackle climate change.

A team of researchers led by University of Maryland Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Professor Ning Zeng analyzed a 3,775-year-old log and the soil it was excavated from. Their analysis, published on September 27, 2024, revealed that the log had lost less than 5% carbon dioxide from its original state thanks to the low-permeability clay soil that covered it.

“The wood is nice and solid—you could probably make a piece of furniture out of it,” Zeng noted.

Understanding the unique environmental factors that kept that ancient log in mint condition could help researchers perfect an emerging climate solution known as “wood vaulting,” which involves taking wood that is not commercially viable—such as trees destroyed by disease or wildfires, old furniture or unused construction materials—and burying it to stop its decomposition.

Trees naturally sequester carbon dioxide—a potent planet-warming gas—for as long as they live, making tree-planting projects a popular method of mitigating climate change. But on the flip side, when trees die and decompose, that greenhouse gas is released back into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

“People tend to think, ‘Who doesn’t know how to dig a hole and bury some wood?'” Zeng said. “But think about how many wooden coffins were buried in human history. How many of them survived? For a timescale of hundreds or thousands of years, we need the right conditions.”

In 2013, while conducting a wood vaulting pilot project in Quebec, Canada, Zeng discovered the 3,775-year-old log that became the focus of the study—a chance encounter that for Zeng felt “kind of miraculous.” While digging a trench to bury fresh wood, Zeng and other researchers spotted the log about 6.5 feet below the surface.

“When the excavator pulled a log out of the ground and threw it over to us, the three ecologists that I had invited from McGill University immediately identified it as Eastern red cedar,” Zeng recalled. “You could tell how well it was preserved. I remember standing there thinking, ‘Wow, here’s the evidence that we need.'”

While past studies have analyzed old samples of preserved wood, they tended to overlook the surrounding soil conditions, according to Zeng.

“There is a lot of geological and archaeological evidence of preserved wood from hundreds to millions of years ago, but the focus of those studies was not ‘How can we engineer a wood vault to preserve that wood?'” Zeng said. “And the problem with designing a new experiment is that we can’t wait 100 years for the results.”

Shortly after the Quebec dig, UMD’s collaborators at MAPAQ, a government ministry in Montreal, conducted carbon dating to determine the log’s age. Then, in 2021, Distinguished University Professor Liangbing Hu in UMD’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering helped Zeng analyze the 3,775-year-old sample’s microscopic structure, chemical composition, mechanical strength and density. They then compared those results to that of a freshly cut Eastern red cedar log, which revealed that the older sample had lost very little carbon dioxide.

The type of soil covering the log was the key reason for its remarkable preservation. The clay soil in that part of Quebec had an especially low permeability, meaning that it prevented or drastically slowed oxygen from reaching the log while also keeping out fungi and insects, the decomposers typically found in soil.

Because clay soil is common, wood vaulting could become a viable and low-cost option in many parts of the world. As a climate solution, Zeng noted that wood vaulting is best paired with other tactics to slow global warming, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

As he and his colleagues continue to optimize wood vaulting, he looks forward to putting what they’ve learned into practice to help curb climate change.

“It’s quite an exciting discovery,” Zeng said of this latest study. “The urgency of climate change has become such a prominent issue, so there was even more motivation to get this analysis going.”

Europe’s physics lab CERN said Sunday that some 500 scientists linked to Russian institutes will be affected when it stops cooperation with Russia in late November as planned.

CERN’s decision-making body agreed in June 2022 to terminate cooperation agreements with Russia and its ally Belarus over the war in Ukraine.

Thus, Belarus’s five-year agreement was not renewed when it expired last June 27, and Russia’s will not be extended when it ends on November 30, CERN said.

This has already reportedly left around 15 Belarusian scientists cut off from cooperating with CERN, and hundreds of Russian scientists will soon face the same fate.

“This applies to scientists affiliated with Russian institutes—less than 500 today—who will have to stop such cooperation,” CERN spokesman Arnaud Marsollier told AFP, confirming reports.

Those scientists have until now figured among a community of around 17,000 researchers worldwide, mostly working from their own host institute or laboratory as they participate in CERN-linked work, including experiments and data analysis.

When CERN’s decision-making council finalized the decision to halt cooperation with Russia last December, it stressed that it would “not affect the relationship with scientists of Russian nationality affiliated with other institutes”.

Marsollier estimated that around 90 Russians had moved to other labs and would be able to continue their collaboration.

The decision also does not impact employees at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), based in Dubna, around 110 kilometers north of Moscow.

It is considered “an international organization”, Marsollier explained.

The exclusion of Russia also means CERN will lose out on significant financial contributions.

Russia had been pitching in around 4.5 percent towards the annual operational costs of the experiments run in the lab’s giant particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, or around 2.3 million Swiss francs ($2.7 million).

And it had vowed to pitch in 40 million francs towards the dramatic upgrade underway of the LHC, set to come online in 2029 and increase the number of detectable events by a factor of 10.

Other member states will step in to cover Russia’s budget contribution, and Marsollier said CERN would fill the gap on the LHC upgrade.

There is “no delay expected due to this”, he said.

© 2024 AFP