NASA Shut Down, But We Still Celebrate 55 Years

(Editors Note: Most of the NASA links are inactive because of the government shutdown. Yay Congress.) 

In the midst of the Cold War, the US government created NASA in 1958 to gain an edge in space exploration. It was partially a defensive move agains the Soviet launch of the first Earth satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.  NASA superseded the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was formed in 1915 to pursue aeronautical research.

In the past 55 years, NASA has grown beyond its iniitial goals to be part of a global initative in support of space travel and harnessing its benefits for Earth. Check out the following infographic to get a sense of accomplishments as well as future endeavours. My hope is that this blog will be around long enough to cover each of the "things to come"! For more info, click on the infographic or visit this site.

Some more detail is available on NASA's site:

We’ve sent 12 humans to walk and work on the moon, sent four rovers and four landers to explore Mars and sentVoyager into interstellar space.

We’ve studied our home planet, every other planet in the solar system, and the sun at the center of it all.

We’ve peered deep into the distant past of the universe with Great Observatories like Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra.

We’ve built an International Space Station larger than a five-bedroom house and sent humans to live and work off the planet continuously since November 2000. 

We've flown 30 years of space shuttle missions to launch and repair Hubble, build the space station and perform science in Earth orbit.

We've developed experimental aircraft and tested technologies that make today's airplanes safer and greener

We’ve produced hundreds of innovations that enable current and future NASA missions and improve the daily lives of everyone on Earth, from life-saving medical technologies to advances in telecommunications, weather forecasting, robotics and emergency response.

There’s way too much to list it all … and we’re not done yet.

We plan to land humans on Mars in the 2030s. We're getting set to send MAVEN to Mars and OSIRIS-REx to an asteroid, and we'll be watching as Juno arrives at Jupiter and New Horizons arrives at Pluto. We’ll launch the James Webb Space Telescopeto follow Hubble in the quest to understand our universe, looking all the way back to the first luminous glows after the Big Bang.   We’ll continue looking at the home planet from our unique perspective in space, improving air travel and developing cutting-edge technologies for the benefit of all mankind.

50 Years of Tech: March on Washington

AFP / Getty Images

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s had a clear high point when Dr. King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 50 years ago in Washington, DC. If the march had taken place in current times, official photos like the one above would show an entire crowd with mobile phones and tablets, recording King's speech, tweeting, and uploading pics and videos to Instagram.  The trolls would be out in full force on social media, delivering instant reaction to the speech and trashing King and the rest of the civil rights movement pioneers. Maybe even King would have a social media account managed by someone else, updating the account with segments from the speech soon after they were spoken.  But in 1963, mainstream television was still in its early ages and a mobile phone was a pipe dream. 

 A few highlights of the tech scene in 1963 are below: 

• NASA culminates its first spaceflight program Mercury by sending astronaut Gordon Cooper into Earth orbit. He completed 22 full orbits before returning home. The Mercury program, which had a goal of putting a human into Earth orbit, made a hero out of John Glenn when he became the first human to orbit the Earth the year prior (1962). 50 years later, many astronauts have been beyond Earth orbit to to land on the surface of moon.  While we still haven't ventured past the moon to put our feet on another planet, we've sent various probes throughout the entire solar system and, in Voyager's case, beyond.

• The first episode of sci-fi cult classic of Dr. Who was broadcast in London., with William Hartnell as the first Doctor. 50 years later and the current reboot of Dr. Who is still going strong.  Still waiting for a Doctor that's not white or male though ...

• Instant Replay is used for the first time during the live transmission of the Army Navy Game by its inventor, director, Tony Verna. 50 years later and we're able to create video on our phones and rewind, fast forward, and manipulate our videos in the same way that instant replay was intended for. Also, we have to deal with annoying commentating by sports announcers who usually replay the most horrible injuries over and over again.

• The television remote control is authorized by the FCC. paying the way for people to turn the TV on and off and change channels without leaving their chair. 50 years later and we are controlling our TVs with our phones, tablets, and WIi U Gamepads.  Somehow, I still didn't have a remote for my TV when I grew up in the 80s though ... 

The Atlantic put together a beautiful photo montage of 1963 which includes some of these tech highlights - check it out here! 

NASA Fermi: You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry

Gamma rays helped turn Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk

The Hubble isn't the only telescope floating in orbit around earth - NASA also has the Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope. Fermi turns five this week.

Why gamma rays? The visible light that we see is a small part of a much larger electromagnetic spectrum. The Fermi telescope uses gamma rays, which travel very fast with a very high energy (i.e. they have a high frequency). Faster, high energy waves have a better chance of detecting hard-to-see objects in the universe such as black holes. Check out the following description of the spectrum from Science Company.

The chart makes it apparent that lower energy light on the left of the visible spectrum such as radio, microwave, and infrared are what we see in our everyday lives.  Several of these waves are passing through your body as you read this, but since they are low energy no damage is done. The higher energy gamma rays on the right can only be used safely because the Fermi telescope is in space, away from human contact.

From the NASA Fermi mission site:

The Large Area Telescope (LAT), the mission's main instrument, scans the entire sky every three hours. The state-of-the-art detector has sharper vision, a wider field of view, and covers a broader energy range than any similar instrument previously flown.

Fermi's secondary instrument, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), sees all of the sky at any instant, except the portion blocked by Earth. This all-sky coverage lets Fermi detect more gamma-ray bursts, and over a broader energy range, than any other mission. These explosions, the most powerful in the universe, are thought to accompany the birth of new stellar-mass black holes.

Check out a five year retrospective of the Fermi telescope below.

All this news makes the Incredible Hulk happy, and he celebrates by beating the mess out of Loki in this scene from the Avengers movie.

A Curious Year for NASA

When you think about government accomplishments in the past year, many of NASA's achievements get overlooked. As entertaining as constant partisan deadlock between the legislative and executive branches can be, let's not forget about our tech success! Despite the end of the space shuttle program, NASA has been steadily moving toward exploring space.

This week marks a year since NASA landed the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. You can check out the multiple posts that I did last year on the "7 minutes of terror" landing process here. For some new media, relive the landing with the crew in the following 4 minute video from NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) site. And yes, that is Mohawk guy (MSL systems engineer Bobak Ferdowsi) front and center.

A longer, in depth video celebration by NASA is below. It clocks in at about an hour.

An Awesome Poster on Social Media for Space

One of my space geek Facebook friends has recently taken it to the next level. Remco Timmerman put together a poster on social media and the space industry. If my tons of NASA posts haven't let you know already, social media has played a huge impact in furthering the public impact of space research.

Remco's poster,  "Social Media for Space",  was presented at the International Space University ISU alumni weekend poster session last weekend. According to the ISU Facebook page, "ISU provides an interdisciplinary education in the context of an intercultural and international environment to support the development of future leaders." They always have a great YouTube channel chock full of space stuff.

Check out the poster below. A higher res version is available for download here.