Curious Silence

The seven minutes of terror were over. Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena finally had the news: Curiosity had landed as gently as a feather on the surface of Mars, every step of the complex landing process proceeding with unparalleled perfection. Even the weather conditions on the red planet were ideal for the landing. It was a spectacular accomplishment.

This was a huge victory for NASA and JPL, but much of the enthusiasm got lost in the much greater excitement over the Olympics and negativity of the multiple mass murders of recent weeks. A few weeks ago, a panorama of Mars exploded onto the internet, filling the public with awe over the alien yet strangely familiar landscape. President Obama’s lauding of the great accomplishment of this mission was not met with the rapt attention of the American public the way our great space explorations of the past were. The urge to explore is still out there – in all of us – but why is it that Curiosity’s landing was so overshadowed by everything else in the news?

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Past Our Horizons

Science fiction as a genre has existed almost as long as storytelling itself. Jules Verne wrote of travel to the moon in the eighteen hundreds. The Princess of Mars, upon which Disney’s recent film John Carter of Mars was based, was published in the early part of the twentieth century. Even in Ancient Greece there was sci-fi: Lucian of Samasota wrote of creatures that resided on the sun and the moon in the second century C.E. That’s right – nearly two thousand years ago, someone wrote a book about aliens. Philosophy, science, and literature have always sought to reach beyond our planet, and the general public devours stories that combine this super-terrestrial striving with the very human desire for adventure and exploration.

Last week, NASA released a panoramic photo taken by Opportunity, the sole remaining functioning Mars rover since Spirit fell silent in August 2010. (The new Mars rover, Curiosity, will not land until this August). This beautiful image (which you can click to make massively large) was seen worldwide – the alien landscapes of Mars brought home to Earth. This is the power of space exploration. Children dream of becoming astronauts. Consumers in cafés discuss the possibility of alien life. Dreams of exploring other planets, other galaxies, and even other universes enthrall the public. It is possibly the single greatest way to popularize science as a whole.

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NuSTAR: A 2012 Space Odyssey

It’s been an exciting month full of supermoons, solar eclipses, and black holes devouring stars. This week, there will be another exciting development, but one that is much easier to miss. However, it might lead to answering the greatest question ever encountered by humanity: how did we get here?

NASA will be holding a press conference Wednesday regarding the upcoming launch of their NuSTAR probe. NuSTAR, which stands for “Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array,” is the first orbiting telescope of its kind, built and managed by CalTech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. It’s an X-ray telescope, which means that its mirrors are designed to reflect and focus X-rays, allowing scientists to see high-energy waves that our eyes can’t normally detect. This telescope does not emit X-rays like the machine in your doctor's office – it receives X-rays from space and reflects them using mirrors into something we can see...

Read more at The Inclusive: http://theinclusive.net/article.php?id=691