The latest update from NASA on activities related to the Int. Space Station:
Video: OK Go makes music weightlessly
Here’s a cool music video of the song Upside Down & Inside Out from the band OK Go. It was filmed on a S7 Airlines aircraft flying a series of parabolic trajectories, which provide periods of 20-25 seconds of weightlessness.
[ Update: This is the third video link I’ve posted here. The other two were each disconnected eventually due to copyright issues with OK Go’s record company. I hope this is finally the official video:
]
As seen in this diagram, the “zero-g” periods are when the plane coasts over the top of the ballistic trajectory. You pay for this when the plane pulls up and your weight nearly doubles.
Usually people lay down flat during those heavy times. I had assumed the video makers had done an excellent job of weaving a series of segments seamlessly together to make it look like a continuous performance. However, articles about the video say it was actually shot in one continuous take. The band members and stewardess actors steadfastly stood or sat upright and tolerated the extra weight without changing their expressions. It took a lot of planning and practice to make this video.
[ Update 2: Yep, that’s what they did: Behind-The-Scenes Of OK Go’s Zero Gravity “Upside Down & Inside Out” Video – Stereogum
An Il-76 MDK airplane is capable of flying in parabolic maneuvers to generate brief periods of weightlessness, but these periods only last up to 27 seconds, and the song is over three minutes long. “Because we wanted the video to be a single, uninterrupted routine, we shot continuously over the course of eight consecutive weightless periods, which took about 45 minutes, total,” explains Trish Sie, who directed the clip with her brother, OK Go frontman Damien Kulash, Jr. “We paused the action, and the music, during the non-weightless periods, and then cut out these sections and smoothed over each transition with a morph.”
Update: Watching the video again, it is obvious that it was not a continuous take. One can see where a weightless period ends and then immediately continues into another weightless segment. So they have edited out most of the time that the performers were weighed down.]
Articles about the video:
First direct detection of gravitational waves
I can remember attending a colloquium talk in the 1970s by Joseph Weber on his pioneering attempts to measure gravitational waves. I also recall a talk later in the 1980s on the concept of a giant Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) for detecting such waves. It’s sure has been a long search, but two LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington have now observed for the first time the gravitational waves signal created by two black holes rotating around each other and then colliding and merging into one big black hole.
- Found! Gravitational Waves, or a Wrinkle in Spacetime – National Geographic
- Gravitational Waves Detected 100 Years After Einstein’s Prediction – LIGO Lab/Caltech
- Cosmic breakthrough: Physicists detect gravitational waves from violent black-hole merger – The Washington Post
Here is a brief video about the discovery
This clip illustrates how the waves are detected by monitoring the interference pattern of two laser beams that have traveled to the ends and back of 4 km (2.5 mile) long tunnels at 90 degrees to each other. A gravitational wave will alter the length of those tunnels slightly, which in turn will alter the interference of the two beams :
https://youtu.be/BWJJeJAUdfM
Here is a video of the entire briefing held today:
And here is the scientific paper: LIGO-P150914-v14: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger.
Video: “Life in the Universe – The Breakthrough Initiatives” – Pete Worden
Last summer billionaire Yuri Milner announced he would fund a $100M initiative for the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life. The organization formed to implement the program is called Breakthrough Initiatives and its chairman is Pete Worden, former director of NASA Ames Research Center. Below is a video of an interesting and entertaining SETI Institute talk given by Worden in which he discusses the history of SETI, exoplanets, the possibility of earth-like planets around nearby star systems, the feasibility of interstellar travel, and other topics.
On July 20, 2015, the 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced in London, UK a new initiative to study life in the universe. The announcement was made by Silicon Valley billionaire Yuri Milner and physicist Steven Hawking. The Breakthrough Initiatives currently consist of two primary elements, Breakthrough Listen which is a $100M renewed search for intelligent extraterrestrial signals, and Breakthrough Message, a global competition with a $1M prize to create, but not send a message representing humanity. S. Pete Worden, the former Center Director of the NASA Ames Research Center, is the Chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. He will talk about these initiatives in the broader context of our search for life in the universe.
Video: “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos” – Oscar nominated animated-short
Check out Konstantin Bronzit’s poignant We Can’t Live Without Cosmos, a fifteen-minute film that has been nominated for a 2016 Oscar in the animated-short category:
- The Screening Room: “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos” – The New Yorker
- WATCH: Oscar-Nominated ‘We Can’t Live Without Cosmos’ Premieres Online – CartoonBrew.com