Plus updates on Perseverance and the Starliner, volunteer astronauts, and lots of bones.

#01 REWILDING

+ Lord Randal Plunkett is the 21st Baron of Dunsany, and as a former-steak-eating bodybuilding death metal fan, he is something of an unlikely starting point for this week’s conservation spotlight. Regardless, the Plunketts are one of Ireland's most storied families, having been installed in Dunsany all the way back in 1402. Randal Plunket still lives at the historic Dunsany Castle and estate which dates to around 1180. After his concerns about the climate rose to alarm, Plunkett decided to let a large portion of the estate revert to nature. The baron who described himself as “never much of a country bumpkin” now owns what is probably Ireland’s most ambitious private rewilding effort. Gone are the cattle and sheep, and in their place “is a riot of shrubs, flowers and trees, along with insects and creatures that call this fledgling wilderness their home.”

#02 UPDATES

+ Last time we reported that a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule had been delayed due to some faulty valves on the spacecraft. We now know that the problem was widespread and extended to 13 pieces of hardware. To implement a fix, the spacecraft needed to be de-integrated from its rocket triggering a lengthy repair cycle. Even if the problem is ultimately fixed relatively soon, Boeing faces delays due to other higher priority missions scheduled to launch from the cape and the lack of available docking ports on the station due to resupply missions. Expect a Starliner flight near the end of this year at the earliest.

+ Another story from last time was Perseverance’s failure to collect a rock sample on Mars. Engineers have determined that all the hardware worked as expected, but the rock was not strong enough and basically powderized itself. Perseverance is now off to a new location where the rock is stronger and more likely to result in a successful sample collection.

#03 CURIOSITY

+ While we're talking about Mars, the Curiosity rover is exploring a stunning landscape and is on the verge of entering a new geologic region.

+ If you'd like to learn more about how to operate a Mars rover, check out this talk I gave last week to the Los Angeles Astronomical Society about my work on Curiosity's operations team (fast forward to around the 22 minute mark for the beginning of my presentation).

#04 HI-SEAS

+ A crew of volunteer "astronauts" is currently learning what it’s like to explore Mars by going to Hawaii. The HI-SEAS habitat is perched at over 8,000 feet on the side of a volcano and is meant to simulate what it would be like for astronauts to spend an extended amount of time on Mars and a new crew just "landed" a week ago. Curiously, I haven’t been able to find any press on the most recent mission, but you can get regular updates from the HI-SEAS Twitter account.

#05 BONES

+ “Archaeologists in northwestern Saudi Arabia have unearthed a massive collection of bones likely stockpiled by striped hyenas over the past 7,000 years.” Hyenas are avid hunters and scavengers and it's not uncommon for them to stockpile bones, but this cache is off the chart. It is a mile-long lava tube containing hundreds of thousands of well-preserved animal bones over thousands of years. In a region where extreme heat often causes bones of any kind to break down quickly, the discovery “is likely to hold valuable insights into the ecologies and environments of Holocene Arabia. This study is just the tip of the iceberg.”

+ A skeleton dating to the final decades of Pompeii provides definitive evidence of the use of the Greek language in theater performances in a time when Latin was the predominant language, indicating diversity and an open cultural climate in the city. Adults were normally cremated at the time so the discovery of a complete burial is quite unusual in the city.  

#06 A GOOD BOOK

+ Long-time readers know that I have a fondness for maps, so I was intrigued when I came across The Mapmakers by John Noble Wilford. Wilford recounts the history of cartography and surveying from its very beginnings in China and the Middle East, through the Age of Discovery, the detailed mapping of the American continent, and even to the moon and Mars. One of my major takeaways is how closely linked cartography and exploration truly are. Captain James Cook was an expert surveyor before becoming a captain. Lewis and Clark had instructions specifically to map the waterways of the American West. Sometimes making a map was a voyage of adventure in and of itself. One of the more remarkable stories in the book includes a British effort to send Indian secret agents on multi-year missions to map the impenetrable Tibetan Plateau. Wilford’s book is as comprehensive as it is entertaining, and is a great start for anyone wanting to learn more about the history of cartography and exploration.

“Why they went west involves a complex of human drives, glory and deed, curiosity and escape, but most of them plunged into the unknown because they believed there was something there worth knowing. Their expectations may have been inflated, which was often the case, and sometimes they deceived themselves and others in their efforts to square what they saw with their expectations. But such are the human strengths and weaknesses that produce maps of new lands.”

That's all for this week! You can respond to this email to tell me about anything you liked or didn't like, tell me about a project you're working on, or suggest a story. You might also forward this email to a friend so they can subscribe too!

- Evan Hilgemann