In 2005, the Discovery Channel aired
Alien Worlds, a fictional documentary based on Wayne Douglas Barlowe's graphic novel,
Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage to Darwin IV." Depicting mankind's first robotic mission to an extrasolar planet that could support life, the show drew from NASA's
Origins Program, the NASA/JPL
PlanetQuest Mission, and ESA's
Darwin Project. It was primarily presented through CGI, but included interviews from a variety of NASA scientists and other experts, including Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, John Craig Venter and Jack Horner. Oh, and George Lucas, too.
Official site.
Previously on MeFi. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 21, 2012 -
12 comments
Croatian software developer and amateur image processor
Gordan Ugarković takes images from NASA's unmanned space probes released to the
Planetary Data System, splices them together and tweaks the colors, sometimes combining higher resolution black and white images with color images, sometimes recreating what the object would look like in natural color (ie, in visible wavelengths, from images taken in multiple wavelengths), sometimes heightening the contrast to bring out detail. (
via)
[more inside]
posted by nangar
on May 20, 2011 -
7 comments
Scientists have discovered a planet composed of
scorching hot ice. Originally thought to be a gas giant due to its mass, its actually only four times the size of Earth and most likely composed of exotic forms of ice, such as
Ice VII and Ice X with s surface temperature of 300° C.
posted by Artw
on May 16, 2007 -
30 comments
Alien planet "The drama takes place on Darwin IV, a fictional planet 6.5 light-years from Earth, with two suns and 60 percent gravity. Having identified Darwin as a world that could support life, Earth sends a pilot mission consisting of the mothership and three probes." Discovery channel feature, Flash heavy site, via
Pharyngula.
posted by dhruva
on May 9, 2005 -
20 comments
Reflections on a Mote of Dust "We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."
Carl Sagan "Pale Blue Dot"
posted by crasspastor
on Sep 11, 2001 -
15 comments
