Page 28 - aruba-today-20181124

A28 SCIENCE
Saturday 24 November 2018
Big test coming up for tiny satellites trailing Mars lander

By MARCIA DUNN foam. In the film, WALL-E
Associated Press uses a fire extinguisher to
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) propel through space. In
— A pair of tiny experimen- reality, WALL-E has been
tal satellites trailing NASA's leaking fuel almost since
InSight spacecraft all the liftoff. Flight controllers
way to Mars face their big- have worked around the
gest test yet. problem. Meanwhile, "EVE
Their mission: Broadcast seems to follow her name-
immediate news, good or sake and has been flying
bad, of InSight's plunge beautifully throughout the
through the Martian atmo- mission," said Klesh.
sphere on Monday. DRY RUN
Named WALL-E and EVE af- In June, WALL-E and EVE
ter the main characters in aced a series of radio-relay
the 2008 animated movie, tests using signals from a
the twin CubeSats will pass big dish antenna near Palo
within a few thousand miles Alto, California. Klesh said
(kilometers) of Mars as the that gives engineers con-
lander attempts its dicey fidence in the CubeSats'
touchdown. ability to do the same with
If these pipsqueaks man- InSight's signals on landing
age to relay InSight's radio day. Last month, the pair
signals to ground controllers sent back photos of Mars
nearly 100 million miles (160 from 8 million miles (13 mil-
million kilometers) away, lion kilometers) out. Mars
we'll know within minutes was merely a bright pin-
whether the spacecraft point, but the team said it
landed safely. This illustration made available by NASA in March 2018 shows the twin Mars Cube One project marked a proud CubeSat
A look at InSight's itty-bitty (MarCO) spacecrafts flying over Mars with Earth and the sun in the distance. first.
sidekicks: Associated Press ALL EARS
HITCHHIKERS One project, or MarCO, journey to Mars to prevent the spacecraft draws ever It takes eight minutes and
WALL-E and EVE, each the built and managed by any collisions or close calls. closer to Mars. seven seconds for a radio
size of a briefcase, hitched NASA's Jet Propulsion Labo- The mini satellites were just BEST BEHAVIOR signal to get from Mars to
a ride on the same rocket ratory, cost $18.5 million. as far from each other for For the record, EVE has be- Earth, one way. It should
that launched InSight to FLIGHT FORMATION the same reason. The el- haved better than WALL-E take less than a minute on
Mars in May. CubeSats al- NASA kept the CubeSats bow room in this "very loose during the 6 1/2-month voy- top of that to get word from
ways share rockets; they're about 6,000 miles (10,000 formation," as chief engi- age to Mars. Each CubeSat InSight, if the mini satellites
too small and inexpen- kilometers) away from In- neer Andy Klesh describes has the same type of cold cooperate. That means
sive to warrant their own Sight during the 300 million- it, has varied during the gas propulsion that's used NASA could know InSight's
launch. This Mars Cube mile (483 million-kilometer) mission and is narrowing as in fire extinguishers to spray fate close to real time. q
Scientists find remains of huge ancient herbivore

By FRANK JORDANS were dated to be from an Christian Kammerer, a di-
Associated Press earlier period, before a cynodont specialist at the
BERLIN (AP) — A giant, series of natural disasters North Carolina Museum
plant-eating creature with wiped out most species on of Natural Sciences not in-
a beak-like mouth and rep- Earth. volved in the find, said the
tilian features may have "We used to think that after size of Lisowicia was "star-
roamed the Earth during the end-Permian extinc- tling."
the late Triassic period more tion, mammals and their "Large dicynodonts have
than 200 million years ago, relatives retreated to the been known before in both
scientists said Thursday. shadows while dinosaurs the Permian and the Trias-
In a paper published Thurs- rose up and grew to huge sic, but never at this scale,"
day by the journal Science, sizes," said Grzegorz Niedz- he said.
Polish researchers claim wiedzki, a paleontologist at Kammerer said that while
The undated photo provided by Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki shows their find overturns the no- Uppsala University in Swe- dicynodonts and dinosaurs
people uncovering a fossile of a plant-eating creature with a tion that the only giant den who co-authored the existed at the same time,
beak-like mouth and reptilian features in Lisowicia, Poland.
Associated Press plant-eaters at the time paper. there's no evidence yet
were dinosaurs. The discovery of giant di- that they lived in the same
The elephant-sized crea- cynodonts living at the habitats. He also ques-
ture, known as Lisowicia same time as sauropods — tioned the study's conclu-
bojani after a village in a branch of the dinosaur sions about Lisowicia's pos-
southern Poland where its family that later produced ture
remains were found, be- the iconic long-necked di- "However, overall I think this
longed to the same evo- plodocus — suggests en- is a very intriguing and im-
lutionary branch as mam- vironmental factors in the portant paper, and shows
mals. late Triassic period may us that there is a still a lot
Similar fossils from so-called have driven the evolution left to learn about early
dicynodonts have been of gigantism, the research- mammal relatives in the Tri-
found elsewhere, but they ers said. assic," said Kammerer.q