Today would have been Carl Sagan’s 82nd birthday, a man who was one of my primary inspirations (along with Albert Einstein, Robert A Heinlein, and Nikola Tesla). He brought an appreciation of astronomy and the cosmos to the masses, he co-founded the Planetary Society, and he wrote some amazing books and articles. Want to put the recent political news on Earth in perspective? Watch his famous presentation Pale Blue Dot:
The Smithsonian has an online exhibit you may enjoy: 50 Years of Human Spaceflight. Of course, the first humans were launched into space in 1961, so I am guessing that was originally an exhibit at the brick and mortar Air and Space Museum back in 2011. There is some fascinating information including a lot of details most folks have forgotten these days.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center does not often partner with someone to create a music video, but they did for this one. NASA Goddard video producer David Ladd got together with musicians Javier Colon and Matt Cusson to create a piece about NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that they hoped would ignite the imagination of young potential future engineers and scientists. Besides inspiring the kids, it also needed to engage the parents and educators around them, so they could encourage and support them during the education period they would need to go through to reach that goal. The first lesson to be learned would benefit all of them, whatever they decided to do with their lives: that nothing is beyond their reach if they put the effort into it! That seemed like a pretty positive thing to me, so I had to share it here. This is how we build the future.
If you missed seeing the Rosetta Destruction by Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after its 2 year exploration, you can watch it again complete with all the commentary and analysis the leading scientists can bring to bare on the project. It was a magnificent run, and a huge amount of science was done, questions answered, every answer spawning 2 or more new questions. Watch the program and you might just begin to understand the vastness of even our local space here within the Heliopause, a tiny percentage of the distance even to the closest star.
It will be years before a manned Mars mission gets to happen, and all bets are off about which country might get there first. But starting this past Monday they cut the ribbon for the opening of new Destination: Mars exhibition at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It uses a mixed-reality presentation created by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to give you a fully immersive idea of what being on Mars would be like. They used all the images they received from the Curiosity rover to build the virtual environment, so you can’t get much closer to an authentic experience than that. They are using the Microsoft HoloLens™ mixed reality headset to deliver the experience, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin will be your holographic guide. For those who missed it, I posted about this last June, complete with a couple of videos demonstrating the process; nice to know it is finally available. I am adding this to the list of fun exhibitions I want to visit, and am thinking some time next year I should be able to make it. Perhaps I will see you there.
The folks at Sci-Friday have put together their first 360 degree VR video, and it is a doozy. The recording in question is an homage to the CD they burned to go on Voyager on its journey to the stars. It could possibly be the last remaining evidence we existed if someone finds it and figures out how to play it a billion years from now. To put the journey into perspective, the Voyager satellites were launched in 1977 and are traveling at 38,000 MPH; Voyager 2 is currently at the Heliosheath, the barrier where the solar wind pushes up against interstellar gas, and so still in our local solar system at a distance of 31 light minutes. Voyager 1 made it through the Heliosheath barrier in 2012 and is now in true interstellar space at 39 light minutes, the first man made object ever to achieve that. In about 40,000 years it will do a close approach of another start 17.6 light years away, another cosmic first for our species. Yay us!