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Sunday is going to be a once-in-a-generation moment. For those of us who were too young to remember the original Cosmos (writer puts hand up) or those who are eager to see the classic 1980 Carl Sagan series updated with discoveries since then, we’re all in luck. A new series starring astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson is premiering on Fox.
NASA hosted a sneak preview of the series at several NASA centers, and the early reviews on Twitter indicated a heck of a lot of excited people in the audience. In the video above, you can watch the Q&A with the main players after the premiere concluded.
“Watching Cosmos, I saw a Brooklyn-born researcher pull back the curtain on a world of seemingly dense scientific concepts, which, with the flair of P.T. Barnum, he managed to present in ways that made them accessible to those of us lacking a degree in mathematics or physics,” Seth MacFarlane, the executive producer of Cosmos (who is best known for creating Family Guy), said in a statement.
“He was able to make a discussion of the most distant stellar objects suddenly become relevant to our small, day-to-day lives. And he did so with such obvious passion, enthusiasm, and love for the knowledge he imparted that even those who had little interest in science found it impossible not to want to go along for the ride.”
The original Cosmos series premiered in 1980 and won three primetime Emmys. Sagan — who was involved in NASA missions such as the Voyagers — combined his worktime experiences with more meditative thoughts on the cosmos, the role of intelligence and the future of the universe. It’s still easy to purchase the original series, despite its age, so we’re sure Fox is hoping for the same kind of longevity with the reboot.
deGrasse Tyson, for those who don’t know, is the engaging director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Like Sagan, he’s a New York City-based popularizer of science who appears regularly on shows that aren’t necessarily science focused — such as The Colbert Report, where he has spoken several times and is often cited as one of Colbert’s most-returning guests, if not the most returning one.
We’ll be eagerly watching the series as it comes out. For more information, you can check out Fox’s website.
Artist's conception of a hypothetical giant planet (left) in Beta Pictoris. The gas giant would sweep up comets into a swarm, causing frequent collisions. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) are calling this the "preferred model" for observations they made. Credit: Goddard Space Flight Center/F. Reddy
A Saturn-mass planet might be lurking in the debris surrounding Beta Pictoris, new measurements of a debris field around the star shown. If this could be proven, this would be the second planet found around that star.
The planet would be sheparding a giant swarm of comets (some in front and some trailing behind the planet) that are smacking into each other as often as every five minutes, new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) show. This is the leading explanation for a cloud of carbon monoxide gas visible in the array.
“Although toxic to us, carbon monoxide is one of many gases found in comets and other icy bodies,” stated Aki Roberge, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who participated in the research. “In the rough-and-tumble environment around a young star, these objects frequently collide and generate fragments that release dust, icy grains and stored gases.”
ALMA captured millimeter-sized light from carbon monoxide and dust around Beta Pictoris, which is about 63 light-years from Earth (relatively close to our planet). The gas seems to be most prevalent in an area about 8 billion miles (13 kilometers) from the star — the equivalent distance of three times the length of Neptune’s location from the sun. The carbon monoxide cloud itself makes up about one-sixth the mass of Earth’s oceans.
Ultraviolet light from the star should be breaking up the carbon monoxide molecules within 100 years, so the fact there is so much gas indicates something must be replenishing it, the researchers noted. Their models showed that the comets would need to be destroyed every five minutes for this to happen (unless we are looking at the star at an unusual time).
While the researchers say they need more study to see how the gas is concentrated, their hypothesis is there is two clumps of gas and it is due to a big planet behaving similarly to what Jupiter does in our solar system. Thousands of asteroids follow behind and fly in front of Jupiter due to the planet’s massive gravity. In this more distant system, it’s possible that a gas giant planet would be doing the same thing with comets.
If the gas turns out to be in just one clump, however, another scenario would suggest two Mars-sized planets (icy ones) smashing into each other about half a million years ago. This “would account for the comet swarm, with frequent ongoing collisions among the fragments gradually releasing carbon monoxide gas,” NASA stated.
A 25-acre sinkhole near Bayou Corne, Louisiana that formed in Aug. 2012. In 2014, a new analysis of NASA radar data found that the sinkhole was evident in that information before its collapse. Credit: On Wings of Care, New Orleans, La.
A Louisiana sinkhole the size of 19 American football fields shifted sideways in radar measurements before its collapse and resulting evacuations in 2012, a study reveals.
The implication is that if certain types of radar measurements are collected regularly from above, it is possible to see some sinkholes before they collapse. The researchers added, however, that their discovery was “serendipitous” and there are no plans to immediately use a NASA robotic Gulfstream plane used for the study to fly over spots that could be vulnerable to sinkholes.
Data showed the ground near Bayou Corne moving horizontally up to 10.2 inches (26 centimeters) toward where the sinkhole appeared suddenly in August 2012. The hole started out at about 2 acres of size (1 hectare) — an area smaller than the initial ground movements — and now measures about 25 acres (10 hectares).
The research was published in the journal Geology in February, and was first made available online in December. NASA highlighted the information in a press release published in early March.
“While horizontal surface deformations had not previously been considered a signature of sinkholes, the new study shows they can precede sinkhole formation well in advance,” stated Cathleen Jones, leader of the research and a part of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Regions and rock types of the United States that could be vulnerable to sinkholes. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey
“This kind of movement may be more common than previously thought, particularly in areas with loose soil near the surface.”
Jones and her NASA JPL colleague, Blom, found the information in NASA’s interferometric synthetic aperture radar (inSAR), which flew over the region in June 2011 and July 2012 on the agency’s Uninhabitated Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar. The radar can see shifts in the Earth’s surface.
The sinkhole — which is full of water and ground-up solids and is still getting bigger — collapsed after several small earthquakes and after the community became aware of “bubbling natural gas” in the area, NASA stated.
A sinkhole threatens the nearby community of Bayou Corne, Louisiana in this image released on NASA’s website in March 2014. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“It was caused by the collapse of a sidewall of an underground storage cavity connected to a nearby well operated by Texas Brine Company and owned by Occidental Petroleum,” the agency added.
“On-site investigation revealed the storage cavity, located more than 3,000 feet (914 meters) underground, had been mined closer to the edge of the subterranean Napoleonville salt dome than thought.” (A salt dome is a location in sedimentary rocks where salt is pushed up beneath the surface.)
Measurements of the area were taken as recently as October 2013, as the growing sinkhole is threatening the nearby community as well as a highway in the region.
Like anyone else who’s ever looked up at the night sky in any but the smallest cities, I’ve seen light pollution first-hand. Like anyone else even marginally involved in amateur astronomy, I know about the fight against light pollution. And I know that, what with new LED lights and everything, it’s not going to be easy.
When, the other day, I was looking around for images demonstrating the effects of light pollution, it didn’t take me long to find some scary examples – the satellite images tracing human presence on Earth by its light pollution are rather unequivocal, and on Wikimedia Commons, there was an impressive image showing the same region of the night sky when viewed from a dark and from a lighter location:
The images were taken by Jeremy Stanley and are available via Wikimedia Commons under the CC BY 2.0 license. According to the author’s comment, he tried to match the two images’ sky brightness to his memory of how bright the sky appeared to his eyes.
What I didn’t find was an image showing a comparison of two images with the same specs (same camera and lens, same ISO, aperture and exposure time) under different viewing conditions. In the end, I found that I could produce such an example myself, using images I had taken during a trip to South Africa last spring.
During the first leg of our trip, we had visited South Africa’s national science festival, SciFest Africa, which is held annually in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape Province. Grahamstown has a population of 70.000, and there is some visible light pollution. I took an image of the Milky Way, including the Southern Cross, from the reasonably well-lit courtyard of our hotel:
Some days later, we visited the Sutherland site of South Africa’s National Observatory SAAO, home, among other things, to the 10 m South African Large Telescope (SALT). In the small city of Sutherland, with a population of only about 3000, the observatory a mere 7 miles away and a spirit of cooperation with the astronomers’ needs, light pollution levels are low.
When we took some images of the sky from the backyard of our hotel, the biggest light pollution problem was the moon. Here’s an image that shows, among other objects, the Southern Cross, Alpha Centauri and Carina:
It was only much later that I realized that these images could be used for the light pollution comparison I was looking for. They were both taken with the same camera (Canon EOS 450D = EOS Rebel XSi), the same lens (Tokina 11-16 mm at 11 mm) with the same settings (ISO 1600, aperture 2.8, exposure time 10 seconds). Whatever difference you see is really due to the viewing conditions. To show what you can do with a dark, high-contrast sky, I added a third image. Its only difference to the second image is the exposure time (20 seconds to 10 seconds), which brings out the Milky Way much more strongly.
I combined the images, used GIMP to increase the contrast and saturation on the combined image (to make sure I treated all three images the same), and separated the images again. Here is the result:
The difference between the first two images is fairly drastic. And keep in mind that, as far as light pollution goes, Grahamstown is likely to be fairly harmless, compared with a big, brightly-lit city. (And yes, if I should get the chance, I’ll try to take an image with the same set-up in a larger city!)
This is just one of all too many examples. Through careless lighting, many of us are missing out on one of humanity’s most fundamental experiences: an unobstructed view of the enormity of what’s out there, far beyond space-ship Earth.
Researchers at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have identified a fascinating natural process by which the magnetosphere of our fair planet can — to use a sports analogy — “shot block,” or at least partially buffer an incoming solar event.
The study, released today in Science Express and titled “Feedback of the Magnetosphere” describes new process discovered in which our planet protects the near-Earth environment from the fluctuating effects of inbound space weather.
Our planet’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere, spans our world from the Earth’s core out into space. This sheath typically acts as a shield. We can be thankful that we inhabit a world with a robust magnetic field, unlike the other rocky planets in the inner solar system.
But when a magnetic reconnection event occurs, our magnetosphere merges with the magnetic field of the Sun, letting in powerful electric currents that wreak havoc.
Now, researchers from NASA and MIT have used ground and space-based assets to identify a process that buffers the magnetosphere, often keeping incoming solar energy at bay.
The results came from NASA’s Time History Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) constellation of spacecraft and was backed up by data gathered over the past decade for MIT’s Haystack Observatory.
Observations confirm the existence of low-energy plasma plumes that travel along magnetic field lines, rising tens of thousands of kilometres above the Earth’s surface to meet incoming solar energy at a “merging point.”
“The Earth’s magnetic field protects life on the surface from the full impact of these solar outbursts,” said associate director of MIT’s Haystack Observatory John Foster in the recent press release. “Reconnection strips away some of our magnetic shield and lets energy leak in, giving us large, violent storms. These plasmas get pulled into space and slow down the reconnection process, so the impact of the Sun on the Earth is less violent.”
The study also utilized an interesting technique known as GPS Total Electron Content or GPS-TEC. This ground-based technique analyzes satellite transmitted GPS transmissions to thousands of ground based receivers, looking for tell-tale distortions that that signify clumps of moving plasma particles. This paints a two dimensional picture of atmospheric plasma activity, which can be extended into three dimensions using space based information gathered by THEMIS.
And scientists got their chance to put this network to the test during the moderate solar outburst of January 2013. Researchers realized that three of the THEMIS spacecraft were positioned at points in the magnetosphere that plasma plumes had been tracked along during ground-based observations. The spacecraft all observed the same cold dense plumes of rising plasma interacting with the incoming solar stream, matching predictions and verifying the technique.
Launched in 2007, THEMIS consists of five spacecraft used to study substorms in the Earth’s magnetosphere. The Haystack Observatory is an astronomical radio observatory founded in 1960 located just 45 kilometres northwest of Boston, Massachusetts.
How will this study influence future predictions of the impact that solar storms have on the Earth space weather environment?
“This study opens new doors for future predictions,” NASA Goddard researcher Brian Walsh told Universe Today. “The work validates that the signatures of the plume far away from the Earth measured by spacecraft match signatures in the Earth’s upper atmosphere made from the surface of the Earth. Although we might not always have spacecraft in exactly the correct position to measure one of these plumes, we have almost continuous coverage from ground-based monitors probing the upper atmosphere. Future studies can now use these signatures as a proxy for when the plume has reached the edge of our magnetic shield (known as the magnetopause) which will help us predict how large a geomagnetic storm will occur from a given explosion from the Sun when it reaches the Earth.”
The structure of Earth’s magnetosphere. Credit-NASA graphic in the Public Domain.
Understanding how these plasma plumes essentially hinder or throttle incoming energy during magnetic reconnection events, as well as the triggering or source mechanism for these plumes is vital.
“The source of these plumes is an extension of the upper atmosphere, a region that space physicists call the plasmasphere,” Mr. Walsh told Universe Today. “The particles that make the plume are actually with us almost all of the time, but they normally reside relatively close to the Earth. During a solar storm, a large electric field forms and causes the upper layers of the plasmasphere to be stripped away and are sent streaming sunward towards the boundary of our magnetic field. This stream of particles is the ‘plume’ or ‘tail’”
Recognizing the impacts that these plumes have on space weather will lead to better predictions and forecasts for on- and off- the planet as well, including potential impacts on astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Flights over the poles are also periodically rerouted towards lower latitudes during geomagnetic storms.
“This study defines new tools for the toolbox we use to predict how large or how dangerous a given solar eruption will be for astronauts and satellites,” Walsh said. “This work offers valuable new insights and we hope these tools will improve prediction capabilities in the near future.”
And speaking of which, there’s a common misconception out there that we see reported every time auroral activity makes the news… remember that aurorae aren’t actually caused by solar wind particles colliding with our atmosphere, but the acceleration of particles trapped in our magnetic field fueled by the solar wind.
And speaking of solar activity, there’s also an ongoing controversy in the world of solar heliophysics as to the lackluster solar maximum for this cycle, and what it means for concurrent cycles #25 and #26.
It’s exciting times indeed in the science of space weather forecasting…
and hey, we got to drop in sports analogy, a rarity in science writing!
On March 3, 2014 the The Ground-to-Rocket Electrodynamics – Electron Correlative Experiment (GREECE) sounding rocket launched straight into an aurora from the Poker Flat Research Range in Poker Flat, Alaska. Credit: NASA
If you’ve ever wondered what makes the aurora take on the amazing forms it does you’ve got company. Marilia Samara and the crew of aurora researchers at Alaska’s Poker Flat Range head up the NASA-funded Ground-to-Rocket Electrodynamics-Electrons Correlative Experiment, or GREECE. Their mission is to understand what causes the swirls seen in very active auroras.
Robert Michell, who built some of the instruments on the sounding rocket, and Marilia Samara, the principal investigator for the GREECE project. Credit: NASA
“Our overarching goal is to study the transfer of energy from the sun to Earth,” said Samara, a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, or SwRI, in San Antonio, Texas. “We target a particular manifestation of that connection – the aurora.”
Here’s what we know. Electrons and protons from the sun come charging into Earth’s magnetic domain called the magnetosphere and strike and energize molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere between 60 and 200 miles overhead. The molecules release that extra energy as the greens, reds and purples of the northern lights.
Earth has a magnetic field much like an ordinary refrigerator magnet but shaped by charged particles flowing from the sun called the solar wind. When those particles travel down the planet’s magnetic field lines and excite atmospheric gases, they create the familiar parallel rays seen in auroras. Credit: Greg Shirah and Tom Bridgman, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio (left); Bob King (right)
And those picket-fence, parallel rays that can suddenly spring from a quiet arc are created by billions of electrons spiraling down individual magnetic field lines, crashing into atoms and molecules as they go. Because the lines of magnetic force are closely bunched, as shown in the illustration above, we see side-by-side, tightly spaced rays.
What we less about is how the twists, swirls and eddies form.
Wave clouds forming over Mount Duval, Australia from a Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability. Credit: GRAHAMUK / English language Wikipedia
Scientists suspect the swirls may take shape as a result of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities or Alfven waves. The first occurs when two fluids or gases moving at different rates of speed flow by one another. In a familiar example, wind blowing over water creates ripples that are amplified into curling, white-topped waves.
Alfven waves are created when flows of electrified particles from the sun (plasma) interact with Earth’s magnetic field. To study the structures, sounding or research rockets are launched directly into an active display of northern lights to gather electrical and magnetic measurements. At the same time, cameras on the ground record the dance of rays and arcs above. Samilla and her team at GREECE then compare the aurora’s shifting shapes with real-time data gathered during the rocket’s 600 seconds of flight.
Still and video cameras on the ground simultaneously image the aurora as the instrument-laded rocket flies into the aurora to gather data. Credit: Marilia Samara / Robert Michell / SwRI
“Auroral curls are visible from the ground with high-resolution imaging,” said Samara. “And we can infer from those observations what’s happening farther out. But to truly understand the physics we need to take measurements in the aurora itself.”
Poker Flat rocket launch – Jason Ahrns
And that’s exactly what the team did this past Monday morning March 3. Conditions looked good from Poker Flat the previous evening with a flurry of red and green arcs after sunset. At about 2:10 a.m. Alaska time, after careful monitoring of activity, the order was given to launch.
“It was a wonderful auroral event,” said Kathe Rich, Poker Flat Range manager. “We got good data throughout the flight, and all the instruments worked.”
Time exposure showing the trail of the rocket after it was launched into the aurora over Poker Flat early Monday morning March 3, 2014. Credit: Jason Ahrns
The rocket soared to an altitude of 220 miles (354 km) and recorded data as the video and still cameras whirred on the ground during the 10 minute 15 second long flight.
There must be a bunch of happy scientists at the Range this week. They have their work cut out for them; those few minutes of data collecting will mean years of work to track down the cause of the beautiful curlicues that make our hearts leap at the sight.
Happy researchers at the Poker Flat Research Range. Credit: Lex Wingfield / NASA
Poker Flat Research Range, the world’s only scientific rocket launching facility owned by a university, is located about 30 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska and is operated by the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute under contract with NASA. Most of the research there involves the aurora with sounding rocket launches done about once a year. While waiting for the right moment to launch, members of the team exercise their poetic side by writing and sharing haikus about their beloved aurora. Here’s a sampling, and there are more HERE.
Dim, wide green madness Electromagnetic ghost Surrender your soul – EM
Hey elusive arc Zenith is over there, dude It’s about damn time -EM
Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh So ready to launch! -JC
While the cause of auroras is understood, what causes the swirl shapes is an open question. University of Alaska researchers at Poker Flat hope to find an answer. Aurora photographed on Dec. 15, 2012 from Tromso, Norway. Credit: Ole Salomonsen
You might be surprised to know that you’re living in a very special time in the Universe. And in the far future, our descendant astronomers will wish they could live in such an exciting time Let’s find out why.
You might be interested to know that you are living in a unique important and special time in the age of the Universe. Our view of the night sky won’t be around forever, in fact, as we think about the vast time that lies ahead, our time in the Universe will sound very special.
Astronomers figure the Universe has been around for 13.8 billion years. Everything in the entire Universe was once collected together into a singularity of space and time. And then, in a flash, Big Bang. Within a fraction of a second, the fundamental forces of the Universe came into existence, followed by the earliest types of matter and energy. For a few minutes, the entire Universe was like a core of a star, fusing hydrogen into helium. Approximately 377,000 years after the Big Bang, the entire Universe had cooled to the point that it became transparent. We see this flash of released light as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
Over the next few billion years, the first stars and galaxies formed, leading to the large scale structures of the Universe. These new galaxies with their furious star formation would have been an amazing sight. It would have been a very special time in the Universe, but it’s not our time.
Over the next few billion years, the Universe continued to expand. And it was during this time that the mysterious force called dark energy crept in, further driving the expansion of the Universe. We don’t know what dark energy is, but we know it’s a constant pressure that’s accelerating the expansion of the Universe.
As the volume of the Universe increases, the rate of its expansion increases. And over vast periods of time, it’ll make the Universe unrecognizable from what we see today. The further we look out into space, the faster galaxies are moving away from us. There are galaxies moving away from us faster than the speed of light. In other words, the light from those galaxies will never reach us.
The Universe 1.9 billion years after the Big Bang. Credit: Alvaro Orsi, Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University.
As dark energy increases, more and more galaxies will cross this cosmic horizon, invisible to us forever. And so, we can imagine a time in the far future, where the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation has been stretched away until it’s undetectable. And eventually there will be a time when there will be no other galaxies visible in the night sky. Future astronomers will see a Universe without a cosmological history. There will be no way to know that there was ever a Big Bang, that there was ever a large scale structure to the Universe.
So how long will this be? According to Dr. Lawrence Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer, in as soon as 100 billion years, there will be no way to see other galaxies and calculate their velocity away from us. That sounds like a long time, but there are red dwarf stars that could live for more than a trillion years. We will have lost our history forever.
Cherish and make the most of these next hundred billion years. Keep our history alive and remember to tell our great great grandchildren and their robotic companions the tales of a time when we knew about the Big Bang.
What about you? What would you go see if you could witness any astronomical event in the history of the universe?
One of my favorite pet peeves is the inability of conventional models to accurately convey the gigantic scale of the Solar System. Most of us grew up with models of the planets made of wood or plastic or spray painted styrofoam balls impaled on bent wire hangers (don’t tell Mommy), or, more commonly, illustrations on posters and in textbooks. While these can be fun to look at and even show the correct relative sizes of the planets (although usually not as compared to the Sun) there’s one thing that they simply cannot relate to the viewer: space is really, really, really big.
Now there are some more human-scale models out there that do show how far the planets are from each other, but many of them require some walking, driving, or even flying to traverse their full distances. Alternatively, thanks to the magic of web pages which can be any size you like limited only by the imagination of the creator (and the patience of the viewer), accurate models can be easily presented showing the average (read: mind-blowingly enormous) distances between the planets… and no traveling or wire hangers required.
Despite their similar apparent sizes in our sky, the Moon and Sun are (obviously) quite different in actual size. Which is a good thing for us. (Credit: Josh Worth)
Created by designer Josh Worth, “If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel: A Tediously Accurate Scale Model of the Solar System” uses a horizontally-sliding HTML page to show how far it is from one planet to another, as well as their relative sizes, based on our Moon being just a single pixel in diameter (and everything lined up neatly in a row, which it never is.) You can use the scroll bar at the bottom of the page or arrow keys to travel the distances or, if you want to feel like you’re at least getting some exercise, scroll with your mouse or computer’s swipe pad (where applicable.) You can also use the astronomical symbols at the top of the page to “warp” to each planet.
Just try not to miss anything — it’s a surprisingly big place out there.
“You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
A still from Space Racers, a half-hour preschool series premiering in 2014. Credit: SpaceRacers.org
Blastoff! A new space show aimed at preschoolers aims to showcase the joy of space, while making sure that the youngsters learn as much as they can about the science. Space Racers (which is being distributed by Maryland Public Television) is coming to television screens across several countries this year, including the United States.
Universe Today was lucky enough to see one of the episodes of the series, which is made up of two short animated segments (and a live-action section in between) featuring the spaceship characters Eagle, Hawk, Robyn, Starling and Raven. There were some fun action segments showing them zooming towards the Sun and also doing a race on Mars. And in between this, preschoolers get to learn about things such as how a solar eclipse works (and how to look at it safely).
“It’s entertaining, but there’s also a very strong sense of making sure there is a curriculum part of the show that is based on science,” said Richard Schweiger, the creator of Space Racers and its executive producer. “NASA helped us develop that curriculum.”
Schweiger is the parent of two young boys, 10 and 8, and told Universe Todaythe idea for Space Racers germinated when they were around 3, 4 and 5. At the time, vehicle shows were very popular for them, such as Thomas the Tank Engine, the Cars movie and Jay Jay The Jet Plane. He also brought them on visits to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which he called the “coolest place in the world to bring a four-year-old.”
As an entrepreneur, Schweiger saw an opportunity. “That’s when I said, ‘Oh my gosh, what if we did a vehicle show where the characters were spaceships?’ ”
Working with a friend from college who has a masters in creative writing, Schweiger developed a screenplay and received an award in 2009. “That gave us some confidence and credibility,” he said.
He formed a company in January 2010 and raised some money from friends, family and a few other interested people. Schweiger’s group determined that instead of a film, the much better platform would be television. And they knew exactly who they wanted for subject matter experts.
A still from Space Racers, a half-hour preschool series premiering in 2014. Credit: SpaceRacers.org
“It was a simple phone call from Richard Schweiger. He explained the effort, the Space Racers team, what they were doing, and that they were looking for subject matter experts to review and clarify the information,” Ruth Netting, NASA’s communications and public engagement director, told Universe Today.
A preschool audience was a first for NASA, but the agency relished the challenge. Officials determined it would be best to “show and tell” certain concepts rather than use technical terms. There also were subtle adjustments for scientific accuracy, such as when the characters talk to each other in space. Because sound doesn’t carry there, NASA suggested the characters’ voices sound like they’re talking over a radio.
Science not only means teaching the concepts, but showing that you don’t always get things right the first time, added Tom Wagner, a NASA cryospheric scientist. “It includes learning from their elders and making mistakes. I don’t know if kids always get this today. They see stories about an app created and somebody making $19 million off of one little thing.” A “discovery aspect” is also included, meaning that kids see characters forming hypotheses and then changing their minds as more evidence comes in.
A still from Space Racers, a half-hour preschool series premiering in 2014. Credit: SpaceRacers.org
The U.S. national premiere will occur on May 2, but the show is already showing in New Zealand (where it premiered Feb. 15). Space Racers‘ international distributor (CAKE) also has commitments signed with the following locations: France, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Israel, Taiwan and parts of Africa, with dubbing taking place for those countries who have another language besides English as a first language.
Season 1 has 26 episodes in it. There are no immediate plans to produce a Season 2, but depending on how Season 1 is received, that is something Schweiger says he is willing to consider, along with merchandising for the $5 million production. Check out the Space Racers website for more information, and preschool activities.
