The innovative folks at Edorble have something fun to announce! There is a new alpha of Edorble WebVR, a cross-platform, browser-based multiplayer Edorble experience. Edorble WebVR works on Android, iOS, Mac, PC, Google Cardboard, Daydream, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Gear VR. If curious to hear more, check out what you can in Edorble WebVR on their blog post announcing the launch. You can also just jump right in at . Edorble will be building on this foundation in the weeks and months to come, and with participatory help from users, they will keep shaping it into something special for teachers and students around the world.
While we were celebrating the new year yesterday, Michael Minovitch celebrated his birthday.
I hope he had an out of this world birthday because he is the reason we know so much about the outer planets of the solar system. Dr. Minovitch proposed the solution to the “three body problem” that would propel the Voyager spacecrafts from one planet to the next using that planet’s gravitational power. Voyager 1 launched in September, 1977 and Voyager 2 launched in August, 1977. The Voyagers contain gold disks with “The Sounds of Earth” an idea from Carl Sagan. Click the link from “the Sounds of the Earth” to hear them.
Traveling at 50,000 miles an hour, over 10 miles a second. Voyager 1 is out in deep space is now over 11 billion miles from Earth and passed most of the power of Sun’s gravitational grasp (see the real-time distance measurement at this link.) Its twin, Voyager 2, has flown past all the outer giant planets, of Saturn, Uranus, and within 3,000 miles of Neptune in 1989.
The maths required for Voyager 2 to fly over Neptune required mathematical accuracy within one second and weather forecasting on a planet 3 billion miles away from Earth. Both Voyagers have flown farther than Pluto into interstellar space.
Now in a mission over 35 years, data from the Voyager transmiter, takes over 15 hours to arrive back to scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. And it all began with Dr. Michael Minovitch’s math of the “three body problem.”
Happy Birthday, Dr. Nancy Grace Roman!!!
One of the most influential “Makers” at a time before Makerspaces were in vogue, Dr. Nancy Grace Roman is an American astronomer who was one of the first female executives at NASA. She is known to many as the “Mother of Hubble” for her role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope. Wikipedia
Denied tenure as a female, she left academia and continued on as Chief of Astronomy was the U.S. Space agency. Dr. Roman, a native of Nashville, Tennessee, pioneered research on the Hubble Telescope.
During the years when budget cuts threatened the research, Dr. Roman was able to conceptualize both the need and the desire of deep space research. She famously said, “For the cost of the night at the movies, every American would have 15 years of exciting discovery.”
Dr. Nancy Grace Roman was correct and since the Hubble’s launch in 1990, we have seen enchanting and amazing images of our expansive celestial neighborhood. Among the many, many discoveries from the Hubble telescope, is the discovery that the number of galaxies in the universe is two with 22 zeroes after it.