Photo credit: Jeffrey Stilwell
Scientist Jeffrey Stilwell, along with his colleagues, studied more than 5,800 amber pieces from the Macquarie Harbour Formation in Western Tasmania as well as the Anglesea coal seams west of Melbourne, dating all the way back to the early Eocene Epoch. In one piece, they discovered a rare “frozen behavior” of two mating long-legged flies. Amber not only preserves animals and insects, but it suspends them in a surreal scene.
Photo credit: Alfred-Wegener-Institut / James McKay | CC-BY 4.0
Antarctica may be a cold, desolate place right now, but in ancient times, the southernmost point of the Earth was once home to many swampy rainforests that were teeming with life. This was determined by the sediment core retrieved by scientists working aboard the research icebreaker RV Polarstern in the Amundsen Sea near the Pine Island Glacier, which is dated to about 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs roamed the lands.
SpaceX and NASA originally planned the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday morning on a short, but necessary, flight to prove the company’s Crew Dragon astronaut ferry ship can quickly propel a crew to safety in the event of a catastrophic booster failure. Unfortunately, the Falcon 9 rocket, featuring a thrice-flown first stage and a fueled but engine-less second stage, is expected to be destroyed during the event, which has been delayed to Sunday morning due to poor weather.
Photo credit: NASA
NASA’s SLS rocket was built to safely transport American astronauts and maximum payloads to the Moon as well as deep space destinations. Yesterday, the agency rolled out the completed core stage from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility for a trip to the Stennis Space Center to undergo further testing. The 1.3-mile trip from the Michoud factory to the barge’s dock is just the beginning of the SLS flight hardware’s journey, as Pegasus will then ferry the SLS core stage from Michoud to Stennis, where it will be lifted and placed into the historic B-2 Test Stand for the core stage Green Run test campaign set to start later this year.
A pilot first discovered a strange 2.2-mile-long geoglyph in 1998, etched directly into a South Australian plateau. Called Marree Man, the artwork shows a hunter with what appears to be a stick or boomerang in his hand. This design made from earthen materials is so large that it can only be viewed in its entirety from above, similar to the Nazca Lines in Peru.