As everyone surely knows by now, Sally Ride died this past Monday at age 61 from pancreatic cancer. An astronaut, physics professor at the University of California, and benefactor of young students, Ride dedicated her life to science education. In the video above, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she describes how the shuttle program she was so much a part of helped provide evidence for what scientists now describe as climate change.
Ride entered the space program in 1978 and made her first space flight in 1983 and her second in 1984, becoming the first woman to do a spacewalk. As the Smithsonian’s tribute to Sally Ride points out, what made her flight different from that of the first Soviet woman in orbit twenty years earlier is that she was the first in “a steady queue of women going to work in space.” She did not take the honor of being a “first” lightly: after her retirement from NASA in 1987, she founded her own company, Sally Ride Science, to motivate young people, especially young girls, to pursue careers in math, science, and technology.
In the video, Ride’s quiet optimism shines through her discussion of a phenomenon that can seem dire. While she faults our technology for causing global climate shifts, she was optimistic that similar applications of technology can help us, as she puts it above, “solve the problem we created for ourselves.”
NASA’s website has a detailed tribute to Sally Ride, including a short video in which she discusses both of her shuttle missions.
Late last year, NASA released Perpetual Ocean, a remarkable three minute, Van Gogh-like video showing ocean currents swirling around the globe between June 2005 and December 2007. Now, the NASA team returns with Van Gogh Sun, a clip demonstrating a new technique created by Nicholeen Viall, a solar scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, who specializes in creating images that demystify “the mechanisms that drive the temperature and movements of the sun’s atmosphere, or corona.” The video above gives you the quick overview; this NASA web page (where you can also download the video) takes you deeper into Viall’s world.
When NASA launched its last space shuttle a year ago, McLean Fahnestock paid tribute to the 30-year old shuttle program by putting footage from every launch into one video. 135-in‑1. It makes for an arresting sequence. But, unfortunately, the 1986 Challenger explosion ends up overwhelming the story. One Vimeo commenter, Jeremy Ricketts, got it right when he said:
I don’t know about the rest being a decorative border to Challenger. In my eyes it highlighted what an insanely amazing accomplishment it was that out of all these launches, only two have ever resulted in failure of that type. This is the first reliable, reusable vehicle to ever bring humans to space. Given the violence of the launches and sheer absurdity of strapping a winged vehicle to the site of a rocket, it highlights (in my view) what an amazing feat it was, even in light of [the] Challenger.
Here it is. A short history of the Moon. 4.5 billion years covered in a slick 2.6 minutes, all thanks to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The video, moving from the Moon’s hot creation to its pockmarked present, can be downloaded via NASA’s web site.
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In the video above, NASA engineers explain the extremely precise calculations governing the landing of Curiosity, the seventh Mars Rover since the failed Soviet Mars 2 and 3 missions in 1971. Launched in November of 2011, Curiosity is scheduled to touch down in Gale Crater at exactly 10:31PM Pacific time, this August 5th. Using dramatic computer-generated imagery, the video shows the rover’s approach as it breaches the atmosphere and hurtles toward the surface of the planet in several complicated stages, a descent that takes exactly seven minutes. The engineers call this span of time “seven minutes of terror”; since the signal delay from the spacecraft to earth is fourteen minutes, NASA engineers must wait an additional seven minutes after its entry to learn whether the entirely-computer-guided craft has made it safely to the surface or crashed and burned. Since it’s speeding down from the upper atmosphere at 13,000 miles an hour and heating up to 1600 degrees, their fears are certainly warranted. And fear may be a symbolically appropriate emotional response to a planet named for the ancient god of war, with moons named Phobos and Diemos—“fear” and “terror,” respectively.
The Mars program has had several false starts and a history very much rooted in the Cold War space race. During the the 1960s, the U.S. and USSR sent competing flyby and orbiter missions to the red planet, but it wasn’t until July 4, 1997 that NASA was able to land a functioning rover, the Pathfinder, on the surface. A British-led attempt to land another rover, Beagle 2, was a failure, but NASA successfully landed Spirit in January, 2004. Sadly, Spirit became mired in the thick sand of the planet’s surface and could not be freed. Spirit’s twin, Opportunity, made a successful landing two weeks later and has continued to operate without serious incident, save periods of downtime over the Mars winter, when its solar panels cannot collect enough sunlight to power it. Intended to find signs of water on the planet, Opportunity has made discoveries that provide clues to the geological history of Mars. After its ninth year of work, NASA’s only functioning rover is beginning to show its age. NASA engineers hope the S.U.V.-sized Curiosity will survive its ordeal and continue the work of its predecessors, seeking more signs of water, and maybe finding signs of life.
Powerful. Simply powerful. In November, 1971, the Mariner 9 space orbiter was about to make history. It was rapidly approaching Mars, making it the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. There, it would produce a global mapping of the Martian surface and capture “the first detailed views of the martian volcanoes, Valles Marineris, the polar caps, and the satellites Phobos and Deimos.” This marked a major milestone in the great era of space exploration. The excitement leading up to the moment was palpable.
Just days before the Mariner 9 reached Mars, two of our greatest sci-fi writers, the dearly departed Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, shared the stage with two eminent scientists, Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray, at a symposium held at Caltech. At one point, Bradbury captivated the audience when he read his poem, “If Only We Had Taller Been,” and gave an almost spiritual inflection to the Mariner 9 mission, reminding us of something that Neil deGrasse Tyson once said: the line separating religious epiphany and feelings created by space exploration is awfully, awfully thin.
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Something extraordinary happens this week. The planet Venus will move across the face of the Sun for the last time in our lives.
Transits of Venus occur on a 243-year cycle, with pairs of transits eight years apart separated by gaps of 121.5 and 105.5 years. The last Venus transit happened in 2004. The next won’t occur until December of 2117. So if you want to see one, don’t put it off! “This is it, folks,” said Robert Naeye, Editor in Chief of Sky & Telescope magazine. “Unless modern medicine comes up with a miracle to extend human lifespans, this transit of Venus will be your final opportunity to watch our sister planet cross the Sun’s fiery disk as seen from Earth.”
The event will take place tomorrow, June 5, or the next day, June 6, depending on your location. In North America the transit will begin tomorrow, just after 6 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Because of the great distance between the Earth and Venus, the duration will be far longer than for a Solar eclipse: over six hours.
Here are six tips for making the most of this last-of-a-lifetime event:
1: Read up about it. For a quick and neatly organized overview your best bet is astronomer Chuck Bueter’s Transit Of Venus.org. The site includes all kinds of useful and interesting information, including the video above.
2: Find out when you can see it from your location. The international non-profit group Astronomers Without Borders has created an extremely handy Web page that will automatically generate a schedule of the transit for your location, based on your computer’s IP address. The site allows you to choose between a simple graphic representation (the default setting) or a more detailed data sheet. It even predicts the likelihood of cloud cover where you are.
3: Prepare for safe viewing. Looking directly into the sun can cause severe and permanent eye damage. There are a number of safe ways to view the transit of Venus, but it’s essential that you follow the advice of experts. Bueter has published an overview, “Six Ways to See the Transit.” Rick Fienberg of the American Astronomical Society has published a detailed article on how to build a “sun funnel.” And Doug Duncan, director of the University of Colorado’s Fiske Planetarium, has created a video explaining a very simple way to safely project an image of a solar event onto a two-dimensional surface using a pair of binoculars.
4: Check for events in your area. If you follow the links in step three you should be able to watch the transit on your own, but you might have more fun–and learn more–if you join a group. Astronomy clubs, planetariums and other science groups will be hosting transit-viewing events around the world. Check your local listings or go to the NASA Sun-Earth Day Web site for a comprehensive round-up of events across the globe. Just scroll the map on the NASA site over to your own geographic region and zoom in.
5:Download the app. If you have an Apple or Android device you can download a free Transit of Venus phone app that will allow you to send your own observations of the transit to a global experiment to measure the size of the Solar System. “In centuries past,” writes Steven van Roode of Astronomers Without Borders, which is organizing the project, “explorers traveled around the globe to time the transit of Venus to determine the size of the solar system. We invite you to inspire international collaboration during the 2012 transit of Venus by enabling a digital re-creation of those global expeditions. The phone app will allow citizens around the world to witness this rare phenomenon and to contribute their observation to a collective experiment to measure the sun’s distance.” Also, Sky & Telescope is helping people make the most of the transit by offering free use of its SkyWeek astronomy app through June 7. You can download it for iPhone or Android.
6: Watch the webcast. If you are unable to get a clear view of the transit from your location–or even if you are–you should check out either of a pair of live webcasts which will be held during the event. Astronomers Without Borders will transmit its webcast live from the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. The program will include interviews with experts and contributions from amateur astronomers, along with video tours of the historic observatory and its equipment, both antique and state-of-the-art. You can access the Astronomers Without Borders webcast here. Another major webcast will be broadcast by NASA from Mauna Kea, Hawaii beginning tomorrow at 9:45 p.m. UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) or 5:45 p.m. Eastern Time. You can access the NASA webcast here. For a schedule of the program, which will include many videos and interviews throughout the event, you can download a PDF.
British astronomer William Crabtree, depicted observing the 1639 transit of Venus in a mural at Manchester Town Hall, painted in 1903 by Ford Madox Brown.
Just when you think you’ve had enough Neil deGrasse Tyson, another not-to-miss video comes along. This one comes from the 2006 Beyond Belief Conference, and it features the astrophysicist giving what’s been called the “greatest science sermon ever.” As a youngster, Tyson stepped into the Hayden Planetarium (the institution he now runs) and he felt an unshakable calling to study the universe. It wasn’t unlike the feeling someone undergoes when they’re religiously born again. And ever since, Tyson has experienced revelation after revelation, epiphany after epiphany, when studying the universe, and especially whenever he’s reminded that, chemically speaking, we are in the universe, and the universe is in us. We’re all made of the same stardust. How can that not leave us with an incredibly spiritual feeling?
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