Blueshift - May 31, 2009: A Tale of Three Telescopes

06/01/09 • 4 min

The telescope on everyone's mind during this month's Space Shuttle flight was certainly the Hubble Space Telescope, as astronauts inspected, repaired, and upgraded the satellite for years of additional scientific observations. But two additional telescopes were aboard Atlantis for this historic flight - a museum-quality replica of one of Galileo's telescopes, and a 200-year-old telescope built by master craftsman Jesse Ramsden. To give you the scoop about these telescopes, we interviewed Marvin Bolt of the Adler Planetarium. Hubble may be NASA's best-known telescope, but it wouldn't be here without 400 years of innovation.

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Blueshift - May 18, 2009: The C.O.L.B.E.R.T. Episode

NASA is famous for its acronyms and technical jargon. If you've ever watched a rocket launch or a spacewalk, you've heard some of them. Blueshift is produced by the ASD EPO team at NASA GSFC - that is, the Astrophysics Science Division Education and Public Outreach team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Do we need to spell out NASA, too? In this episode, we explore NASA mission names and where they come from. And we make a very special dedication - this one's for you, Stephen Colbert!

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Blueshift - June 18, 2009: Making Data Beautiful

To kick off our special summer series about data, we interviewed 2006 Nobel Laureate John Mather about the importance of imagery in communicating science and sharing data with the public. More than just "pretty pictures," data can be used to tell a story and explain the mysteries of the cosmos. Not every piece of data would be considered a work of art, but the information contained is at the very heart of NASA science. Working with COBE and the James Webb Space Telescope, Dr. Mather is no stranger to the power of data and the importance of scientific imagery. We got the scoop on how data is used in communication and why every bit of data is beautiful in its own way.