Archive by category | Space

Show home for the Red Planet

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , , ,

Mars show home at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, London.

A big red igloo with a towering antenna seems a little overblown for a London show home. And so it proves. The object squatting outside the Royal Observatory Greenwich is actually a life-sized mock-up of a Mars habitat, billed as the imaginary dwelling of a second wave of settlers from Earth. That is, those who might live on the Red Planet in their thousands by around 2037, if the ambitious plans of space entrepreneurs such as SpaceX’s Elon Musk bear fruit.  Read more

Breaking barriers: the US space programme’s black women mathematicians

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , ,

Breaking barriers: the US space programme's black women mathematicians

Some of the most intriguing stories in the history of US science have emerged over the past few years. It’s about time. These books centre on something long under wraps: the centrally important roles women played starting some 70 years ago in the great technological transition that gripped the twentieth century. Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City (Touchstone, 2013) chronicled the contributions of the women who worked at the secret atomic-bomb laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Second World War. Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt (reviewed here) depicted the mathematicians or “human computers” who crunched numbers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California from the 1940s. In this catalogue, Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures is more than just another entry.  Read more

The Hubble ‘space opera’

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , ,

Hubble image of the Orion Nebula, at 1,500 light-years away, the nearest star-forming region to Earth. The bright glow at upper left is from M43, a small region being shaped by a massive, young star's ultraviolet light.

In 2012, composer Paola Prestini began collaborating with astrophysicist Mario Livio — who worked at the Hubble Space Telescope’s operations centre from 1991 to 2015 — on a “space opera” celebrating the intrument’s 25th anniversary. The result, The Hubble Cantata, debuted on the telescope’s 26th. Performed on 6 August at the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! festival in New York City’s Prospect Park, it is a multidimensional paean to the ‘eye in the sky’, meshing Livio’s narration with performances by Norwegian orchestra 1B1, a 100-strong chorus and Metropolitan opera stars Jessica Rivera and Nathan Gunn, and a climax featuring a 3D virtual-reality (VR) experience incorporating Hubble images that allows viewers to drift through the Orion Nebula. Here Prestini talks about the joys and challenges of putting together a highly collaborative meld of science and art.  Read more

A world of change

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A world of change

Watching the new IMAX 3D documentary film A Beautiful Planet, I was struck when astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti noted how contemplating the planet for months on end from the International Space Station (ISS) convinced her that it is a spacecraft. ‘Spacecraft Earth’ may be an old theme, but Cristoforetti spoke with passion about how humanity, as its crew, must look after the ship. The film, which showcases spectacular footage of Earth shot from the ISS, is intended in part to spur awareness of the negative influence we are having on the planet.  Read more

Reflections of a Moonwalker

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , ,

Reflections of a Moonwalker

The Moon landings – those grainy shots of men in bulky suits and stunning visions of Earthrise – have burned into the public consciousness for half a century. But to those who weren’t there to watch it live and who have seen human space travel since confined to Earth’s orbit, walking on the Moon seems like a distant fairytale (a fact that no doubt contributes to the conspiracy theory that it never happened).  Read more