We need a backup.
background: NASA/JPL-Caltech animation showing known asteroids from 1999 to the present.
https://images.nasa.gov/details-JPL-20180716-ASTRDSf-0006-All%20Known%20Asteroids%202018-Feature%20version.html
Video clip 04: Mars is waiting…
background: NASA/JPL/MSSS; processing and mosaic: Olivier de Goursac, 2013 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Martian-Sunset-O-de-Goursac-Curiosity-2013.jpg)
Video clip 03: Unmanned
Our unmanned efforts in space deserve great credit, but they aren’t enough.
background: NASA Juno Mission Collection 2 excerpt (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/multimedia/junoanimations.html), NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center MAVEN animation (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11024)
Video clip 02: Apollo Memory
Next up: a hazy memory of the Apollo era.
Background video footage: Apollo 11 montage from NASA
Video clip 01: Two Kinds of People
I got together with a friend and a green screen recently to shoot for a promo video. I can be chatty, so we ended up with more footage than I need, much of it quite good. I’ll throw some clips against the wall here over the next couple weeks and see what sticks.
background: Illustration for Scratching the Surface by Luis Peres.
Back cover text
One day, in the near future, children will be born on Mars. The environment they grow up in will be very different from yours. And yet, they will still be human children, just like you. They will have dreams and worries, just like you. They will go to school; they will play; they will cry; they will laugh: in so many ways just like you.
But their sky won’t be blue. They will never see an ocean. They will never go to an amusement park or go camping in a forest. They will never hear the sound of rain.
Instead, their sunsets will be blue. They will see the tallest volcano and the deepest canyon in the solar system. They will ride in rovers and rockets, and this will be normal for them. They will walk through rocky red landscapes that haven’t changed for billions of years. They will see, and be part of, the development of an entirely new branch of human existence.
And, once in a while, they will look up at a particularly blue evening star in the sky and know that on that planet so far away, there are billions of children, just like themselves, some of whom might, at that same instant, be looking up at a particularly red star in the sky.
Which will they call home?
illustration by Luis Peres (work in progress)
Mars PD
How will we keep law and order on Mars? This article digs into various facets of concern, from the physics of hand-to-hand combat in low gravity to the ethical implications of humans living in an environment controlled all the way down to the air they breath. There’s a lot to digest here, but it’s interesting to think about.
The Atlantic Bombarded with words
Geraldine McCaughrean recently won the UK’s Carnegie Medal for children’s literature. Her acceptance speech gives me a bit more confidence in my prose choices for Scratching the Surface.
“Accessible language is, to me, a euphemism for something desperate. Most of its tyrannies are brought to bear on younger books right now. But blink twice and today’s junior school readers will be in secondary school,armed only with a pocketful of single syllable words, and with brains far less receptive to the acquisition of vocabulary than when they were three or seven or nine… We master words by meeting them, not by avoiding them.”
Reaching the next generation
“The idea of the next generation and beyond being able to choose between a life here on Earth or a life of exploration and research in space is a truly exciting one. But does the next generation know it? Probably not.
…more has to be done to reach folks at a younger age, and really convince them that what they are seeing is not only possible but accessible to them in the future.”
Star Letters
Clair de Lune
I found this profoundly moving. Clair de Lune is always one of those prickly hair on the back of the neck songs for me. But this takes it to an entirely new level.
Bravo, NASA Goddard.