Ice From Other (Atmo)spheres

Of all the exciting places to find ice: a rural german church, a warming hut, a plastic bag, et cetera none are quite as exciting as finding ice somewhere other than earth. It’s exciting to sciencefolk because it points to water, which points to the potential to find extraterrestrial microorganisms. To date, ice has been found on our moon, other planets and other planets’ moons. One of these icely-endowded moons is Europa, which orbits Jupiter along with 63 other natural satellites.

What’s remarkable about Europa is its surface: it’s smooth compared to other moons, but distinguished by shallow cracks and fissures across its icy surface. And the ice makes Europa very bright; so bright that even though it’s over 400 MILLION MILES AWAY, it was first observed 400 years ago using a rudimentary telescope. The images below were taken by space probes with much fancier telescopes. The top image shows Europa’s natural color while the lower ones are colored to exaggerate Europa’s surface features. I think the lineae created by ice tectonics are oddly beautiful. Europa may not have fancy hydrocarbons like Enceladus has spewing out of its south pole, but it has an atmosphere and maybe even a liquid ocean hidden below is icy and rugged surface.

Alex

Space Suit of the Week

Emily Kane has created a conceptual space advocacy group called Project Moon which explores the relationship between space industry and graphic design. The project renders a new visual aesthetic for contemporary manned space exploration. While nodding to the aesthetic and humanistic contributions to the pursuit of space, she lays out the ambiguity of the terrain ahead. The design, detailed in a palette of black, red, and periwinkle, paints out the major contributions of the past and of areas still to be further explored.

Seeing Emily’s work made me begin obsessively considering/scheming what the aesthetic of space exploration will look like in the near future. 2011 was a pretty monumental year for space: the Shuttle era ended, the International Space Station was officially completed, Earth-like planets were uncovered, commercial space exploration took huge strides and the true stellar standout – 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of human space flight. Future of space exploration is undefined and new aesthetic of space exploration is needed.

During the 1970’s and 80’s, NASA used a red logotype nicknamed the “worm”. Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn created in their words, “a more useful new logotype” as part of the National Endowment of the Arts. It was an effort to design a more modern logo for a space agency that’s forward thinking. Then the Challenger accident happened and the agency was put on hold. In the early 90′s, administrator Daniel Goldin brought back the traditional NASA blue “meatball” with its red chevron and spattering of star in an attempt to herald back to the golden age of space exploration.

Soon manned space travel will not be limited to decorated patriots in uniform flight suits, commercial space exploration is charting new ground, including the aesthetic design of space. Virgin Galatic’s Spaceport America opened this past year; I can’t wait to see what Sir Richard Branson has up his sleeves.

Alana

Space Suit of the Week

Bon Voyage. Good luck. See ya later. Godspeed.

A spacesuit has 27 layers. Like the garments they bear, Adam Devarney’s travelers navigate through a layered patchwork of imagined narratives. Devarney’s pieces were first included in a 2010 exhibition entitled Godspeed, collaged portraits pieced together in a dream-like narrative of hallowed ghosts of aviators past, suited up for a prosperous journey ahead. The Fox is Black reader and Vermont native speaks of his process:

“I’m interested in how narratives arise from simply taking things out of context and thrusting them together,” Deverney says. “How the collage material relates depends on the associations we make with the content.  They are almost like dreams to me… Vague fogs, with little snippets of information that allude to some sort of dialogue or story.”

Alana

Finding your Twin – Kepler-22b

After years of waiting, nothing came. So instead of waiting we found a planet.

Kepler-22b is NASA’s latest discovery. The incredibly awesome Kepler telescope has been searching for earth-like planets for years now. This is the first instance in our history that we have found a planet similar to our own. A twin if you will. Except we have no idea what it is made of and it is 2 1/2 times our size. It has an orbit similar to Earth, which makes Kepler-22b’s year (290 days) as close to ours as possible. As they said on badastronomy,

[T]hat puts the planet inside of that star’s habitable zone, the distance where, given certain planetary conditions, liquid water can exist. It may be that life can arise where there’s no water, but we know life on Earth needs water, so if we’re looking for habitable planets it makes sense to look for the possibility of water there.

NASA has provided one theoretical image of Kepler-22b. I mean, it is 600 light years away, it’s kinda hard to see. Yet this definitively proves there are water-bearing planets in our universe, leading to the possibility of life. Kepler will find more planets like ours, but how many and how close will they be to us?

Alec

Space Suit of the Week

This week’s Space Suit of the Weeek comes from Ric Stultz, an illustrator and painter hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Reaching Out to You, The Dream Got Control, and Sleeping with the Fishes (above) are really playful and rather cheeky, a departure from a lot of the work we feature. After taking a stroll through his portfolio, I was chuckling more often than not. His work feels familiar or rather comfortable – like you’re sharing a recurring childhood dream where imagination was the basis of reality.

Alana