Smithsonian.com

It’s not exactly Indiana Jones, but with Seven Minutes of Terror, NASA has rolled out the blockbuster treatment for its new Mars mission, the Phoenix Mars Lander — headed for a dust-up on the Red Planet’s north pole around Sunday suppertime.

The video’s title refers to how long NASA engineers will have to bite their fingernails while their $450 million spacecraft decelerates from its 12,000 mph cruising speed to a dead stop. The ship’s hull will reach some 900 degrees as it plows through the upper Martian atmosphere. At 8 miles above terra (mars-a?) firma, a round, yellow-and-red parachute will stream out and slow the craft to about 250 mph.

But that’s still pretty fast. And so, like Indy jumping off a truck and straight onto a horse, at less than a minute before impact, the lander will jettison its parachute and let loose with its array of 12 thrusters. With any luck, Phoenix’s computer pilot will keep the jets pointed at the ground, slowing the craft to 5 mph.

One way or another, it’ll come to a stop. The nail-biter part will be whether anything gets broken. All this is clearly explained in “Seven Minutes” by the engineers themselves. Although be warned: you do have to endure that frenetic visual style — shaky cameras, incessant, 3-second cuts — that directors must think makes science cooler, if not any easier to understand.

You do have to admire NASA’s routine approach to the audacious. Any work plan where one of the middle steps is “Likely blackout period as hot plasma surrounds spacecraft” gets my support. They estimate it will all be over by 7:53:52 p.m. Eastern time. (That’s plus or minus 46 seconds.)

The robotic ship will lie low for 20 minutes as the dust settles. After that, out come the solar panels, and then a tentative robot arm to dig in the polar Martian soil. Over the next three months, Phoenix will analyze the soil for water and the rudiments of life, digging down about an inch every two weeks. But the worst part, presumably, will be the first 15 minutes after touchdown. That’s how long it takes an “All Clear” radio signal to travel the 250 million miles back to Earth. A long time for an engineer to hold her breath.

(An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the date of the landing event. The landing is scheduled for Sunday, May 25th.)

Here at The Gist we deeply admire everything that Monty Python has done for science (including but not limited to their work with silly walks, confused cats, migrating swallows, etc.).***

But who could have known that their famous dead parrot sketch - involving a shady pet shop and a parrot rumored to be Norwegian - could have had any basis in reality? Yet the current issue of Palaeontology carries the news that two ancient parrot species have been discovered from a Danish fossil bed. Some 55 million years ago, according to the report, these birds squawked and fluttered over ferny lagoons that stretched from Copenhagen to Oslo.

The British press has gone bonkers over the news, though they seem more interested in the Python angle than in any revelations about psittaciform evolution per se. The article’s author, David Waterhouse of Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, a Python fan himself, has helped out by peppering his interviews with snippets from the sketch.

And the last laugh: the bone that clinched the specimen as a parrot? It came from the upper arm. Or humerus.

(Image: David Waterhouse; hat tip: the KSJ Tracker)

***Catch up on your Monty Python science here, here, and here.

Squeaking in under a Thursday deadline, the U.S. Department of the Interior officially made the decision to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The government’s move appeared to have come somewhat grudgingly, in response to a judge’s order to end five months of hemming and hawing.

As many as 25,000 polar bears roam the Arctic today. But that number is likely to drop drastically as the climate warms and perhaps two-thirds of the Arctic summer sea ice melts by 2050 (as the L.A. Times summarizes). Concern over the fate of polar bears escalated last year as sea-ice melting reached historic highs and the Northwest Passage opened for the first time ever. Polar bears hunt for seals by roaming vast expanses of sea ice; when confined to land, they are much more likely to go hungry.

The great bears have more worries than just global warming. In a northern-hemisphere parallel with pesticide-laden penguins we mentioned last week, polar bears in remote Svalbard have some of the highest organic pollutant levels measured in any animal.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne seemed to hold little enthusiasm for the idea of using the Endangered Species Act as a way to spur the U.S. to curb its emissions. At least his language was forceful, and he hit the larger predicament dead-on. According to the Washington Post:

I want to make clear that this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting,” Kempthorne said. “Any real solution requires action by all major economies for it to be effective.

Hear, hear.
(Image: Alaska Image Library/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Here at the Gist we’d like to join the rest of the world in sending our sympathies to the victims and survivors of Monday’s earthquake in southwest China. As I’m sure you know by now, a 7.9 magnitude quake struck the Chengdu region of Sichuan Province, toppling buildings across the region and killing at least 13,000 people.

The earthquake’s epicenter was squarely in the middle of the endangered giant panda’s habitat. The only road into the Wolong Nature Reserve and captive breeding center was heavily damaged. The Smithsonian National Zoological Park’s panda page is posting news as they hear it and reported on Tuesday that the center’s 86 pandas had survived the disaster. They’re still awaiting news about how the staff are doing. Our hearts go out to them.

(Image: pandas at the National Zoo; Ann Batdorf/National Zoo)

You’d think one of the benefits of living in frigid Antarctica would be putting some distance between you and your warm-weather neighbors. But at least for Adelie penguins, the world seems to be a smaller place than that.

Enthusiastic use of potent insecticides became the ecological nightmare of the mid-20th century. And ever-increasing accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere promises to be the ecological problem of the mid-21st century. Adelie penguins may be dealing with both at the same time, according to a study reported this week in Environmental Science and Technology.

Along the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the most rapidly warming places on the globe, glaciers are melting. Mixed in with the torrents of meltwater are unusually high levels of organic pollutants. The alphabet soup of toxic compounds includes the infamous, long-lived insecticide DDT–the compound that helped curb malaria, but that also built up to poisonous levels in the food chain, putting predators like bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and ospreys on the endangered species list.
How does DDT wind up in a pristine glacier? As New Scientist explains, the pollutant molecules adhere to airborne particles and are carried around the globe on the wind. Over the poles, they come back down to Earth in blizzards and join the ice pack. There they sit, frozen in place, until the ice warms up.

According to the article, the Antarctic Peninsula’s glaciers could be releasing up to 4 kilograms of accumulated DDT per year. The steady trickle may explain why the study found that DDT levels in Adelie penguins hadn’t declined in the last 40 years despite major drops in worldwide use of the pesticide. (In 1959, the U.S. alone used 40,000 tons of DDT according to the EPA. Today, world usage is about 1,000 tons per year.)
(Image: Cape Royds, Ross Island, Antarctica, by H. Powell. Hat tip: sitta)