First Australian-made rocket crashes after 14 seconds of flight in a failed attempt to reach orbit
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CTV News
11 hours ago
- CTV News
Reaching for the stars: Montreal students' space mission
Concordia students launched a rocket from Northern Quebec, aiming to hit an exploration milestone in Canadian space. Genevieve Beauchemin reports. A team of Concordia University students gathered at a remote base camp on Cree territory in northern Quebec to launch the largest, most powerful student-built rocket ever made. The event captured on a livestream, may not have gone off quite as planned, still it marked an engineering breakthrough after years of effort. Cheers greeted the moment just after the countdown when a ball of white light sped up to the sky. 'This is insane,' said one student staring up at the rocket. The Space Concordia team's goal was to breach the edge of space at an altitude of 100 kilometres. Their liquid fuel rocket, Starsailor, blasted off at 5:34 am. They now say the rocket did not cross the Kármán line — the internationally recognized boundary of space. 'What we can tell you, is that it looks like the rocket burned out earlier and separated earlier than planned,' said Space Concordia's Hannah Halcro on the livestream. The liftoff was seven years in the making and sparked by an intercollegiate space race. In 2018, teams of universities and colleges entered a contest to launch a liquid fuel rocket into space. That was cancelled due to the pandemic, but the Concordia team forged ahead, determined to make history on its own terms. Over the years, more than 700 students contributed to the project, investing thousands of hours into design, testing, and development. Their rocket represented not just academic ambition, but a dream shared across generations of students. They built a space program and worked in collaboration with the Cree community in the Mistassini region to prepare for launch. Transport Canada cleared the mission for takeoff and the local airspace was closed, but two previous attempts were scrubbed due to poor weather conditions. This time, it was all systems go. But this is rocket science, and so it is hard. Some students say they feared the rocket may not launch, that it could blow up the launch tower, and so while not reaching space is not ideal, they say, it is far from a failure. 'The sky is not the limit obviously,' Space Concordia President Simon Randy told CTV News at the end of a long day. 'We have proven that we have a seat at the table of launch into space.' The team is now analyzing flight data and will look at debris to determine Starsailor's exact trajectory. Still the future engineers' hopes for the launch went far beyond expectations. 'See you in space next time,' Halcro signed off.
CTV News
a day ago
- CTV News
CTV National News: Journey to launch a rocket on Canadian soil
Concordia students launched a rocket from Northern Quebec, aiming to hit an exploration milestone in Canadian space. Genevieve Beauchemin reports.
Globe and Mail
a day ago
- Globe and Mail
Ancient whale with Pokémon-like face, killer bite discovered by scientists
Long before whales were majestic, gentle giants, some of their prehistoric ancestors were tiny, weird and feral. A chance discovery of a 25-million-year-old fossil on an Australian beach has allowed paleontologists to identify a rare, entirely new species that could unlock mysteries of whale evolution. Researchers this week officially named Janjucetus dullardi, a cartoonish creature with bulging eyes the size of tennis balls, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Unlike today's whales, the juvenile specimen was small enough to fit in a single bed. Boasting fiendish teeth and a shark-like snout, however, this oddball of the ocean was nasty, mean and built to hunt. 'It was, let's say, deceptively cute,' said Erich Fitzgerald, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at Museums Victoria Research Institute, and one of the paper's authors. 'It might have looked for all the world like some weird kind of mash-up between a whale, a seal and a Pokémon, but they were very much their own thing.' The rare discovery of the partial skull, including ear bones and teeth, was made in 2019 on a fossil-rich stretch of coast along Australia's Victoria state. Jan Juc Beach, a cradle for some of the weirdest whales in history, is becoming a hotspot for understanding early whale evolution, Mr. Fitzgerald said. Few family trees seem stranger than that of Janjucetus dullardi, only the fourth species ever identified from a group known as mammalodontids, early whales that lived only during the Oligocene Epoch, about 34 to 23 million years ago. That marked the point about halfway through the known history of whales. The Decibel podcast: Fossil feud: Paleontologists have a bone to pick with new find The tiny predators, thought to have grown to three metres in length, were an early branch on the line that led to today's great baleen whales, such as humpbacks, blues and minkes. But the toothy ancestors with powerful jaws would have looked radically different to any modern species. 'They may have had tiny little nubbins of legs just projecting as stumps from the wall of the body,' Mr. Fitzgerald said. That mystery will remain tantalizingly unsolved unless a specimen is uncovered with more of its skeleton intact, which would be something of a miracle. Even the partial skull that allowed the initial identification this week was an astonishing discovery. Janjucetus dullardi was named by researchers after an amateur fossil hunter who doesn't mind its looks in the slightest. 'It's literally been the greatest 24 hours of my life,' said Ross Dullard, who discovered the skull while fossil hunting at Jan Juc Beach. After Wednesday's confirmation of the new species, the school principal walked like a rock star onto campus with 'high fives coming left, right and centre,' he said. His friends and family are probably just relieved it's over. 'That's all they've heard from me for about the last six years,' he said. Mr. Dullard was on a regular low-tide hunt at Jan Juc the day he spotted something black protruding from a cliff. Poking it dislodged a tooth. A mysterious illness has killed billions of sea stars. Now scientists say they've solved the case He knew enough to recognize it was unlikely to belong to a dog or a seal. 'I thought, geez, we've got something special here,' he said. Mr. Dullard sent photos to Museums Victoria, where Mr. Fitzgerald saw them and immediately suspected a new species. Confirming the find was another matter. This was the first mammalodontid to be identified in Australia since 2006 and only the third on record in the country. Fossils of sufficient quality, with enough of the right details preserved to confirm uniqueness, aren't common. 'Cetaceans represent a fairly miniscule population of all life,' Mr. Fitzgerald said. Millions of years of erosion, scavengers and ocean currents take their toll on whale skeletons, too. 'It's only the chosen few, the vast minority of all whales that have ever lived and died in the oceans over millions of years, that actually get preserved as fossils,' he added. Finds such as Janjucetus dullardi can unlock insights into how prehistoric whales ate, moved, behaved – and evolved. Researchers said the discoveries also helped to understand how ancient cetacean species adapted to warmer oceans, as they study how today's marine life might respond to climate change. Meanwhile, Mr. Dullard planned to host a fossil party this weekend, featuring cetacean-themed games and whale-shaped treats in Jell-O, to celebrate his nightmare Muppet find, finally confirmed. 'That's taken my concentration for six years,' he said. 'I've had sleepless nights. I've dreamt about this whale.'
