I called this place “the sagebrush ocean” when I first wrote about it in the 1980s. Now, scientists mourn the loss of 1.3 million acres of healthy sagebrush each year, threatening animals that need sagebrush, like the Greater Sage Grouse and pygmy rabbit.
As highly flammable cheatgrass expands across the deserts of Nevada and Utah, the sagebrush is in danger of disappearing. The dilemma is how to hold onto and add to what's left.
The long drive between Salt Lake City, Utah and Reno, Nevada on Interstate 80 feels endless, the landscape timeless. But these basins and ranges of the Great Basin Desert are changing dramatically. Wildfire, climate change.
OSIRIS-REx is on its way home packed with asteroid samples
Shane McGlaun - May 11, 2021, 5:28am CDT
The NASA OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has spent nearly half a decade in space and has finally departed asteroid Bennu and is on its way back to Earth. NASA has announced that on Monday, May 10 at 4:23 PM EDT the spacecraft fired its main engines full throttle for seven minutes. The firing of its main engines represents the most significant maneuver for the spacecraft since it arrived at Bennu in 2018.
NASA says the throttle burn pushed OSIRIS-REx away from the asteroid at 600 miles per hour. The burn away from the asteroid marked the very first steps on the spacecraft’s 2.5-year journey back to Earth. Once it arrives back home, OSIRIS-REx will fire its main engines and fly safely away from Earth on a trajectory that will see the spacecraft circle the sun inside the orbit of Venus. OSIRIS-REx will orbit the sun twice