Fossil

• STUTTGART, Germany, April 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The MAHLE Group successfully continued its sustainability activities in 2023.
• That is why we have firmly anchored measurable sustainability goals in our MAHLE 2023+ Group strategy."
• "This is a very good development," said Kathrin Apel, Global Head of Sustainability, Health, Occupational Safety, and Environmental Management at MAHLE.
• The newly released MAHLE Sustainability Report 2023 provides insights into the current progress of the company's sustainability initiatives.

• The NX-GREEN SAF Program, which began service at NX Europe in July 2023, is a carbon-insetting program (*2) that can be used to reduce CO2 emissions from all air transport services provided by the NX Group.
• Air transport utilizing SAF can reduce CO2 emissions by about 80% compared to conventional fossil fuels.
• The program is available for transport services arranged by the NX Group, which is the first Japanese forwarder to offer such a service without restrictions on the choice of airlines (*3).
• The Group submitted a letter of commitment in May 2023 to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) to have its targets validated.

• A critical NASA mission in the search for life beyond Earth, Mars Sample Return, is in trouble.
• Its budget has ballooned from US$5 billion to over $11 billion, and the sample return date may slip from the end of this decade to 2040.

The habitability of Mars

• But studies conducted over the past decade suggest that the planet may have been much warmer and wetter several billion years ago.
• Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, is still active; its twin, Perseverance, which landed on Mars in 2021, will play a crucial role in the sample return mission.

Why astronomers want Mars samples

• This meteorite is a piece of Mars that landed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984.
• They’re free samples that fell to Earth, so while it might seem intuitive to study them, scientists can’t tell where on Mars these meteorites originated.
• There’s no substitute for bringing back samples from a region known to have been hospitable to life in the past.

A compelling and complex mission

• Bringing Mars rocks back to Earth is the most challenging mission NASA has ever attempted, and the first stage has already started.
• The rover inserts the samples in containers the size of test tubes.
• The complex choreography of this mission, which involves a rover, a lander, a rocket, an orbiter and the coordination of two space agencies, is unprecedented.

Sample return breaks the bank

• Mars Sample Return has blown a hole in NASA’s budget, which threatens other missions that need funding.
• It’s likely that Mars Sample Return’s budget partly caused the layoffs, but they also came down to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory having an overfull plate of planetary missions and suffering budget cuts.
• Within the past year, an independent review board report and a report from the NASA Office of Inspector General raised deep concerns about the viability of the sample return mission.

Thinking out of the box

• Proposals are due by May 17, which is an extremely tight timeline for such a challenging design effort.
• And it’ll be hard for private companies to improve on the plan that experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had over a decade to put together.
• For the Artemis III mission, SpaceX will attempt to land humans on the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

• It’s not clear whether that rocket could return the samples that Perseverance has already gathered.
• Sending astronauts also carries extra risk and cost, and a strategy of using people might end up more complicated than NASA’s current plan.
• With all these pressures and constraints, NASA has chosen to see whether the private sector can come up with a winning solution.

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

• One of the few Cretaceous age deposits that’s been discovered in Africa is at Botswana’s Orapa Diamond Mine.
• Recently a team I lead discovered two new species of rove beetles preserved in the sediments of the Orapa Diamond Mine.
• Rove beetles are typically identified by their unique short elytra (protective wing cases) which expose the rest of the abdomen.
• Our finds are the first fossil rove beetles ever discovered on the continent and in the southern hemisphere.
• The fossils closely resemble today’s rove beetles, showing how successful they’ve been in adapting to various environments without significant changes to their bodies.

Identifying the fossils

• We found the fossils in lacustrine sediments (deposits that accumulate in lake environments).
• Afristenus orapensis belongs to the stenine rove beetle subgroup while Paleothius mckayi belongs to the subgroup staphylinine.
• The stenine rove beetle was previously described in Russia, France and Myanmar while the staphylinine rove beetle was previously described in Russia, China, Myanmar and England.
• So we scoured research articles about fossils of a similar age that have already been studied elsewhere for comparative purposes.

More to find

• We are currently studying each specimen and preparing academic manuscripts that describe what we’ve found.
• My hope is that more money will be invested in training more palaeoentomologists in South Africa and on the continent more broadly.
• The study of fossil insects and plants is an important way to preserve our beloved continent’s heritage.

Sandiso Mnguni receives funding from GENUS (Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences - UID 86073). He is affiliated with the Sophumelela Youth Development Programme (SYDP).