Showing posts with label RAY BRADBURY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RAY BRADBURY. Show all posts

Saturday, August 4, 2012

CURIOSITY GOES TO MARS

Curiosity and Descent Stage, Artist's Concept NASA, CAL-TECH
FROM: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Bradbury Science Museum Gets Martian Fever!
Public invited to Curiosity rover landing party Sunday night at new Mars exhibit
LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO, July 31, 2012—Curious about Curiosity, the SUV-sized rover scheduled to touch down on Mars on Sunday? Then come on down to an opening party for a new exhibit about it this Sunday at the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos.

The public is invited to a special opening reception beginning at 10 p.m. Sunday (August 5, 2012) to celebrate Los Alamos National Laboratory technologies aboard the six-wheeled mobile science laboratory. The Curiosity rover, the centerpiece of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet Sunday at 11:31 p.m. local (Mountain Daylight) time. The museum plans to show the landing via NASA TV live that evening.

While waiting for the nail-biting news about the successful landing of the Curiosity rover, visitors to the new museum exhibit can learn about LANL technologies on board, view a nearly life-sized 3-dimensional stereo poster of Curiosity, and use their iPhone or iPad to interact with it. Light refreshments will be served.

"This is an exhibit about LANL technology on Mars. We’re really excited to showcase LANL’s scientific and technologic expertise while also providing an educational and fun experience for the public," said Bradbury Science Museum Director Linda Deck. "We’ve been thinking about this for months and intensely working on it about four weeks," she said, adding that the exhibit will remain in place indefinitely in the museum’s TechLab.

Museum visitors will find display models of ChemCam—the rock-zapping laser that will help characterize Martian geology—CheMin, which uses X-ray diffraction to determine the composition of mineral samples collected and dropped into a funnel on the Curiosity rover; and simulated radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), the tiny plutonium canisters that provide heat and power sources that give Curiosity several times as much electricity as previous-generation rovers—a necessity for the much larger and more-advanced payload on Curiosity.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

THE MAN WHO CHRONICLED LIFE ON MARS DECADES AGO IS DEAD AT AGE 91.


FROM:  U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
"Ray Bradbury and Pogo
June 6th, 2012 by Jennifer Gavin
Ray Bradbury, the towering writer of science fiction, died today at age 91. Talk about an author who will be missed …

In the United States, our lives been steeped in science fiction, from the days of “Buck Rogers” and the cheesy B-movies of the 1950s to the phenomena of “Star Trek,” “The Matrix” and more recent films based on a variety of sci-fi and fantasy works.  Yet, for many decades, the genre was sneered at.

Ray Bradbury turned that around.
He elevated the form to literature.  He packed it with humanity, and he pointed out – to paraphrase the cartoon character Pogo – that we humans had “met the enemy, and he is us.”

An uncomfortable portion of the world Bradbury created, in novels such as “Fahrenheit 451,” has come to pass.  Every time I see someone shambling down the street, staring blankly into a hand-held device, I visualize those two telescreen figures from the movie version of “Fahrenheit 451” looking down at Julie Christie and saying, “Linda, you’re absolutely fantastic!”

And I visualize her, staring back, vacuously."

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