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LOS ANGELES—NASA Administrator Charles Bolden dropped by JPL on Thursday to outline the agency’s plans to capture an asteroid, and to look at a model of a powerful new ion thruster that has enough strength to drag a space rock into orbit around the moon.

NASA unveiled a multi-step plan to rendezvous with a smallish asteroid, put it in what looks like a giant reflective garbage bag, and bring it into lunar orbit, earlier this year.

Once the space rock is in a stable orbit around the moon, astronauts could land on it and bring small chunks of it back to Earth.

“This is the first chance humanity has to demonstrate with an asteroid of this size that we can move its orbit,” Bolden said. “It will be tens of years before we can say we can protect the Earth from an impact. It won’t happen in my lifetime as administrator, but this is the first step.”

In order for the asteroid capture to work, scientists will have to find exactly the right space rock. They’d like it to be between 4 to 7 metres in length, moving at the relatively slow pace (for an asteroid) of 1.5 miles per second, and in an orbit that will take it close to the Earth and moon in the early 2020s.

NASA scientists originally envisioned sending a large spacecraft to the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter and plucking an asteroid from there, Bolden said. But with NASA’s budget flattening out, and President Obama’s challenge to land a person on an asteroid by 2025, the agency had to come up with a less costly strategy.

“The new plan is an ingenious alternative,” he said. “If we can’t get to the asteroid, we’ll wait for the asteroid to fly by us.”

While such a mission could help scientists better understand asteroids, or at least the particular asteroid that gets bagged, Bolden said the primary purpose of grabbing and moving an asteroid is to help develop the technologies that would be required to send people to Mars.

“My ultimate goal as a human being is to get us to Mars,” he said.

MIAMI—During a hurricane, the storm surge poses the greatest threat to life and land, yet many people don’t even know what it means.

Simply put, storm surge is the abnormal rise of sea water. Predicting it is far more complicated and explaining it is tricky, too, as forecasters at the National Hurricane Center discovered, again, during a review of Superstorm Sandy.

This hurricane season, forecasters hope to offer easy-to-understand colour-coded maps and they are changing the way they talk to emergency officials, the media and the public.

“Scientists by their very nature use very sophisticated language, technical language,” said Jamie Rhome, leader of the hurricane centre’s storm surge team. “It turns out that nobody else understands what we’re talking about. So once we figured that out, we started using more plain language.”

Forecasts during Sandy were exceptionally accurate, but often confusing. Perhaps because so many things contribute to storm surge: intensity, pressure, forward speed, size, where it makes landfall and other factors.

Most people believe storm surge is a wall of water, similar to a tsunami, but it’s actually just sea water being pushed toward the shore by winds. It can happen quickly and move miles inland, flooding areas not accustomed to being inundated with sea water.

Large death tolls have been blamed on storm surge. At least 1,500 people died during Hurricane Katrina either directly or indirectly because of storm surge, the hurricane centre said.

To better explain the danger, forecasters talked to focus groups consisting of local and state officials, law enforcement and hospital associations and other people from Maine to New Orleans. One thing they found out is that when they talk about storm surge, they should say “height” instead of “depth” when explaining how water levels might change.

“We were using ‘depth,’ thinking this was very clear. It turns out that nobody else does,” Rhome said. “They’re waiting for height, how high it is, and I would never have guessed in a million years that one word — one word — makes a difference in how people interpret something.”

Forecasters also will try to stress that the storm surge isn’t just from the ocean and can come from other bodies of water such as sounds, bays and lakes, sometimes well inland.

The hurricane centre also plans to show people where to expect storm surge with high resolution, colour-coded maps, much like a radar map on the local news showing rain and severe weather. If they can’t post the maps on the hurricane centre’s website this storm season, which begins June 1, the plan is to have the maps ready in 2014.

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration evaluation of the weather service’s performance during Sandy also recommended increasing the number of storm surge forecasters at the hurricane centre, and providing potential storm surge hazards at least 48 hours before the onset of tropical storm or gale-force winds.

Miami-Dade Emergency Management Director Curt Sommerhoff said his priority is getting the public to understand that the county’s evacuation zones are based on storm surge, not hurricane winds.

New data from the hurricane centre’s storm surge models prompted the county to redraw its storm surge planning zones to include inland areas along canals and rivers that previously weren’t identified as being at risk for storm surge.

“That’s the new message, the surge danger well inland, well in from the coast,” Sommerhoff said.

Separate storm surge warnings, similar to current tropical storm or hurricane warnings, will be rolled out in 2015.

The hurricane centre dropped estimates for storm surge and inland flooding from its wind scale three years ago because the predictions often didn’t match what actually happened.

“Storm surges can behave so differently from storm to storm that you can’t just apply a single number or use a scale like you can with the wind. That’s been tough, trying to get people to understand that every storm is different,” said Robbie Berg, a hurricane specialist who has taken the lead on social science at the hurricane centre.

Berg said Hurricane Irene didn’t produce the storm surge in 2011 that some expected, and the following year, many people were surprised by Sandy’s extreme tides and flooding.

Still, the advisories for Sandy were dramatically improved from the ones for Ike, explaining storm surge in layman’s terms and easy-to-read bullet points instead of long pages of jargon that required meteorologists and emergency officials to make their own calculations.

The progress may seem subtle, but Berg believes it’s helping emergency managers make better decisions about whether to order evacuations.

“For as bad as Sandy was, it almost makes you wonder what would have happened had we not made some of these changes since Ike,” Berg said. “I would hope that because of these new changes, they’re more educated and they’re more prepared to make those evacuation decisions when needed.”

Dennis King

Even casual movie fans probably know something of the rags-to-riches-to-ruin story of silent era matinee idol John Gilbert because “The Artist,” the popular, Oscar-winning homage to Hollywood’s golden age by French director Michel Hazanavicius, was in part inspired by Gilbert’s glamorous but tragic career.

Gilbert once rivaled Rudolph Valentino as the silent cinema’s “great lover,” and he became one of the biggest stars of the day after starring in King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” in 1925.

Read more on NewsOK.com

There are letters from camp, of course, adorning a million refrigerators each summer, immortalized in comic song.

But this was a letter to camp. It was written by Toronto’s Ryan Lawley, then 15, to the Moorelands Camp near Dorset, Ont., thanking staff for helping him become a hero.

It tells the story of a man in distress on a TTC bus last August. “When he got up, he fell off the stairs and banged his head on the floor. He passed out and was bleeding,” Ryan wrote in the December letter.

“I got a cloth from the bus driver and put pressure on the cut. When he came to I asked him if he felt pain. I called 911 . . .

“I kept him calm until they came and took him to the hospital . . . ”

“Without Moorelands camp teaching me first aid, I could not have helped this man.”

But first aid is far from all that Ryan leaned during four trips to Moorelands, one of 103 camps being supported this year by the Toronto Star Fresh Air Fund, which kicks off its 113th campaign Saturday.

“My son left for camp the first year a shy, nervous, scared kid,” his mother Sharon Lawley says.

“He came back with a big smile on his face. He stunk to high heaven, but he came back a changed kid. More at ease with people, more confident, more engaged with everything.”

It’s so often been thus for the hundreds of thousands of kids the Fresh Air Fund has helped send to camps over more than a century.

Since the searing summer of 1901, a deadly season for hundreds of this city’s downtrodden, the fund has allowed disabled, sick and underprivileged kids to escape their stifling concrete confines for respites in the wilderness.

Shackled by poverty, by ignorance, by a pitiless tolerance of want, the children of Toronto’s poor were stuck fast to summers of despair at the turn of the last century.

It was a condition that the Star’s legendary publisher, Joseph E. Atkinson, a child of poverty himself, knew intimately. And one he was determined to change.

In his life as a ceaseless crusader, “Holy Joe” would make his young newspaper a leading advocate for a more equitable, caring and just society, both in Toronto and across Canada. But on a June day in 1901, in a furnace of a city, Atkinson saw a more immediate wrong to be righted.

With temperatures creeping past 100 F that month (38 C) — with horses dropping dead on the streets — he walked through a squalid east-end neighborhood and saw its children in their listless distress.

“In the tenements of the east side, the pavements are packed with people,” Atkinson wrote in what was then called The Daily Star. “Awful as the heat was for all, it was most awful for the children.”

That’s when he made his decision. He would reach out to the paper’s readers to help take some of those children “to the countryside” for a soothing break.

And that’s what we’re doing again today. Over the coming 10 weeks, the Star will be asking you, its 2013 readers, to help us send some 25,000 sick, disabled or underprivileged kids to camp.

“Despite all the progress we have seen in Toronto in the last century, the fact is that the Star’s Fresh Air Fund remains as relevant and as needed today as it was when Joseph Atkinson established it,” says John Cruickshank, the paper’s current publisher.

“Unfortunately, the rate of poverty across the city is still very high. Because of that, many children don’t have the chance to experience the joy of attending a summer camp, where they can gain new experiences and meet new friends.”

The goal of this year’s fund is $650,000, which will help support 52 residential camps, 51 day camps and countless life-changing stories like Ryan Lawley’s.

“It totally changed his life . . . in one week,” Sharon Lawley says of her son’s first Moorelands experience at age 12.

“And he talked about it non-stop for the entire year, all the great things he got to do, how cool the cabin leaders are, how special they made him feel.”

Her son’s TTC heroics earned him a written commendation from Michael Coteau, the Liberal MPP for Don Valley East. Sharon says they would have been out of the question without the confidence and skills that he gained at Moorelands.

His grades have greatly improved, she says, as has his participation in school and extracurricular activities.

But Sharon Lawley also says Moorelands’ transformative pleasures would not have been not within her financial means without help from Star readers.

“I, as a single parent, could not afford this camp if I didn’t have some kind of help,” she says.

“But from donations from the Toronto Star Fresh Air Fund, these programs become available to people like myself.”

Ryan, who wants to become a camp counsellor, agrees that his Moorelands summers helped improve every aspect of his life.

“It’s actually changed a lot,” says Ryan, now 16. “I’m more responsible, I’m more outgoing, I’m more talkative.”

“I’m willing to try my best in stuff and my grades are boosting up. I’m more focused. That’s all from my camp experience.”

And if that’s not proof enough of a summer camp’s potential value, Patricia Jacobs has some scientific evidence.

“We’ve been studying our wilderness camp since 2000 . . . saying hmm, what could we do to improve this?” says Jacobs, executive director of Moorelands Community Services, which operates the camp.

The multi ethnic facility, which now caters to kids with emotional, learning, social or behavioral issues, has been a recipient of Fresh Air funding for more than a century.

A pilot study there 12 years ago was followed by full-scale surveys in 2001, 2005 and 2008. Another one will be conducted next year.

The research, which is overseen by University of Toronto sociologist Ann Marie Sorenson, surveyed hundreds of Moorelands campers using well established measures of self-esteem.

The studies were conducted to determine if changes being made to the camp’s infrastructure and programming strategies were helping to improve the kids’ confidence and sense of worth.

And what they found, as the years went by, was that the camp was raising self-esteem levels significantly, Jacobs says.

“The 2005 and 2008 (studies) showed us the same things,” she says. “And that is that after just one session at camp, kids’ self-esteem rose, for both boys and girls.”

Follow-up studies also showed those effects lingered long after the kids had left the camp, Jacobs says.