I learned a LOT this morning from a myriad of speakers. The first thing I learned was that when you have a room full of rocket scientists, you still can't find anyone who knows how to start a projector screen. After much conferring with the presenter and the hotel staff, the screen finally worked and we were off and learning!! Below is a quick synopsis of the speakers and what I learned from them:
Leonard David, Space Journalist
Richard Branson is my space hero. Virgin Galactic actually has a space port near completion and is the closest entreprenuer to begin commercial space flights.
There is a LOT of debris in space (satellites and such).
Richard Cook, Project Manager of the Mars Science Laboratory
I wish I had this man's brain.
I saw an animation of the rover landing for the MSL. It was pretty fricking wicked.
The MSL, named Curiosity, will launch in the Fall of 2011. It will take 8 months to get to Mars and will land via a sky crane. It's roughly the same size as a Mini Cooper and its goal is to find out the history of Mars. They think Mars was warm and wet enough to support life long ago, so that's why they're looking for the history.
They have a Mars Yard at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for rover testing. How cool is that?!?! Imagine the Tonka Truck fun you could have in THAT sand box.
Leslie Young, Deputy Project Scientist on NASA's mission to Pluto
This woman is too smart for her own good. You can tell she's extremely intelligent, but has a hard time putting her thoughts completely together. That being said, I still found her incredibly engaging and was fascinated by her own interest in what she was doing.
There is a part of the New Horizons (the name of the mission) spacecraft that is named Venetia. It was named after the schoolgirl who named the planet Pluto in the 1930s.
The New Horizons craft was the fastest thing to ever leave the Earth's atmosphere. It passed the moon in 4 hours.
It will pass Pluto at noon on July 14, 2015 (Bastille Day). Then who knows where it will go.
Andrew Chaikin, Science Journalist, Author, and Speaker
I didn't like this guy. He was name dropping like crazy. His book, A Man on the Moon, was the basis for Tom Hanks' HBO miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon. And he wanted you to know that HE interviewed Tom Hanks, and HE interviewed so and so, and when HE spoke to blah blah...
You have to travel 17,500 mph around the Earth to keep from falling back in to it.
No one may have gone to space at all if we hadn't been in a cold war. It was a geo-political move by the US and Russia to be at war without actually shooting any weapons.
Did you know it was only 63 years between the Wright Brothers flight and man landing on the Moon? That's crazy!
Speaking of crazy, it's crazy Buzz Aldrin!
And the more sedate Jim Lovell.
I made a friend at lunch.
In the afternoon, I joined a group of folks to take a tour of the Mt. Lemmon Sky Center, 9100 feet above sea level. It took about an hour and a half to get there (which meant an hour and a half to get back at 10:30 pm!!), but it was WELL worth the trip. Very much the highlight of my visit so far. Here's the telescope we used to look through. In case you're wanting one of these bad boys for yourself, you can purchase one for about $500,000.
We looked at two things when we arrived. The first was the star Arcturus. I didn't know you could see another star during the day. So that was pretty cool. But what really blew my mind was when we got to look at the sun. We didn't use the above telescope for it, but a special one made just for looking at the sun. WOW! It was the coolest thing. There was a huge prominence coming off of it that was about 10 times the size of Earth. You've seen them if you've ever watched Nova or seen pictures of the sun. But to actually see it live through a telescope was pretty amazing. BTW, it only takes 8 minutes for what happens on the sun to be seen on Earth.
This isn't what we saw through the telescope, which was color, but was a previous picture of the sun used with a black and white camera.
After looking at those two things we went to the learning center and had a presentation by Adam Block who is a world known astrophotographer. This guy is a GREAT presenter and if you ever get a chance to listen to a talk of his, by all means do it. Plus he has a voice that, well, um, do any children read this blog......
I bought some of Adam's photographs, not because of his voice, which he signed. We all then went outside to watch the sunset through binoculars. Yes, once the sun sets low enough on the horizon you can use binoculars to watch it without harming your eyes. It was unbelievable. And so beautiful. I didn't want the sun to go below the horizon at all. The photos below don't do it justice.
Did you know your shadow is actually blue? It's not black at all. And if you were on Mars, your shadow would be pink.
Once the sun went down, we went inside the observatory dome to start looking at things through the telescope. The very first thing he set up in the lens was something that he told us he hoped would produce gasps and exclamations of WOW. It certainly did. He had lined it up with Saturn. The view was so clear that you could see the rings and two moons around the planet. WOW indeed. I don't even know if I have the words to exclaim how amazing it was to see a planet that clear with my own eyes (well, with the help of a highly powered telescope, but you get my meaning). I could have stood there all night looking at just that. Seriously, I'm trying to think of how to explain the feeling, but I just can't. And it only got better.
We went on through the night looking at spiral galaxies (from both a top view and a side view, one of them being the Whirlpool Galaxy), nebula, globular star clusters (including Omega Centauri), binary star systems, and a drive by of the Hubble Space Telescope. We would alternate between the telescope and going outside to look through our binoculars at the different things. You can actually see clusters and galaxies without the aid of a telescope, but I guess you have to be 9100 feet up and have a dark sky in which to do it.
Of course, it was very cold up on the mountain, so we were all huddled in our jackets. At one point, they made hot cocoa for us to drink while we were waiting our turn to look at something through the telescope. And with the requisite Enya-esque music playing in the background, cheese factor aside, it was an amazing night. I saw things I've never seen before and may never have the chance to see again. I consider myself very fortunate and lucky to have had the experience and I'm already plotting my next trip to another observatory.
Quote of the day: "It's the subtlety that helps create the sublime."
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