wolfe’s Growling Musings

Short shrift for most posting this week, as I’m very busy with work, but I found this story interesting.

Ground-Penetrating Radar locates buried meteorite in Kansas farm field.

“It validates the technique so we can use something similar to that instrument when we go to Mars,” said Patricia Reiff, director of the Rice Space Institute.

Such GPR systems had been used in the past to locate smaller meteorites through the ice in Antarctica. But until the Kansas dig, the technology had not been successfully used for ground detection in heavy soils — like on Mars — to find meteorites or water there.

The dig was likely the most documented excavation yet of a meteorite find.

Meteorite buried below a Kansas farm? Hmm… below, an ultra-scientific reconstruction of what the meteorite may have looked like:

Image via Planete-Smallville; Warner Brothers image.

In related news, small boy lifts car over his head.

-wolfe

I doubt many readers came of age before Sputnik; we grew up with the idea of ‘eyes overhead’. Indeed, in recent years, Google Earth has “open-sourced” satellite photography to nearly everyone.

So in one sense, this satellite photo of a desert area with some raised dunes in fascinating patterns in the middle is nothing special, though it is possessed of an incredible stark beauty.

Oddly, I can’t think of an exact antonym in the English language for ‘plateau’. Depression, lowland, or even crater will have to do and that does give a bit of a hint.

To me, that pattern in the middle looks almost like the folds in a cerebral cortex. Of course it’s not, but our brains do love to recognize patterns — even false or misleading ones.

Closer examination of the incredibly hi-res version of this picture reveals a vehicle, complete with tire tracks, stopped near the edge of the depression.

Big deal? Well, kind of. It’s a human-made satellite — technically an orbiter — in orbit around Mars. Watching a vehicle sent from Earth years ago driving around on the Martian surface. Now that’s just so many kinds of cool.

Photo Credits: HiROC. Hat tip: Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy) and Huffington Post.

I’m about a week late with the news (It happened on the 3rd of October), and Phil Plait’s blog, via the Huffington Post, was where I first stumbled across the story. I actually intended to post some different HiRISE (the name of the camera on the satellite — called the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — MRO) shots to not be quite such a copycat, but alas, these were the only color ones I’ve found to date.

This is the homepage for the HiRISE camera Operations Center (HiROC); I’m sure they’ll have lots of fascinating photos there as time unfolds.

As Dr. Phil Plait says at his amusingly named blog, Bad Astronomy, “imagine what we’ll see in coming weeks”.

-wolfe

Chris O’Meara, AP.

Landing in darkness, the space shuttle Atlantis returned safely to earth today, bringing home her 6 astronauts. There likely won’t be shuttle flights beyond 2010, and there will be, at most, only a few more landings in darkness between now and then. Treasure the sight.

-wolfe

the faint call of distant kin, across the deep-time of human pre-history
-wolfe

Looking resolutely backwards, today’s post is, in some ways, the opposite of yesterday’s, though both concern explorers. Here we speak of a man who, six years ago, made a startling find that’s only recently received attention.

Dr. ZERESENAY Alemseged [NB- where the 'surname' or formal name of someone is not the final name, I try to all-CAPS the first reference of it] has lead an investigatory team in Ethiopia for 7 years now. Back at the end of the 20th century, they set off for the north-eastern deserts of the country, the Afar region. They discovered something quite startling. They came to realize their discovery was the most complete fossil record of someone almost — but not quite — human ever discovered.

Dr. Zereseany holds up the skull of ‘Baby Lucy’ aka Selam.
Photo credit: Max Planck Institute via BBC.

We’ve all heard, I’m sure, of Lucy, that most famous putative ‘missing link’ discovered in the 1970’s. Australopithecus afarensis, dwelling 3 to 4 million years ago in eastern Africa, bipedal (walking upright) and probably partly arboreal (tree-climbing and dwelling) is widely believed to be a common ancestor of all mankind.

There are several catches though. Well, heck, just see Lucy’s fossilized remains, below:

Photo: Daniel Acosta.
Released to Public Domain. Via Wikipedia.

There’s not much of the skull there. Oh, there’s a fair bit, but we’re depending upon a lot of guesswork and reconstruction.

No hands, no toes. The torso and shoulders are at best thin gruel. Some have legitimately complained that this is pretty weak beer to base a ‘missing link’ (or even portion thereof) upon.

Dr. Zeresenay’s discovery is startling, though. Here’s the skull, and a sketched reproduction of the skeleton indicating what parts were ‘guessed at’ and what were actually found:

Photo Credit: apparently Zeresenay Alemseged
via journal Nature and then Globe and Mail.

(Note that the top of the skull — the darker bits — is ‘estimated’. That said, the curvature is a superb fit, and I have extremely high confidence. Yes, the girl could have been a conehead. No, I don’t think she was. Unlike Lucy, this is a rather astonishingly complete skull, legs and torso).

Image by Patricia J. Wynne. via Scientific American.
The brown bits indicate actual fossil recovery. The white bits indicate best guess/estimate reconstruction.

This is amazing. We’re receiving the faint call of distant kin, across the deep-time of human pre-history. Across millions of years, a poor, three-year-old girl tells us a great deal.

As for Dr. Zeresenay? It needs to be said: There aren’t enough Ethiopians that are investigating their country’s glorious ancient past (in this case not merely ancient, but pre-historic). He’s one. I’m sure he had to go through some tough times to succeed. Good for him. In this case, assistance credit goes to France where he studied and Germany where he nominally works (MPI).

sources used: BBC, Nature, Scientific American, Globe and Mail, Max Plank Institute, Wikipedia.

-wolfe