The faster we move into cosmic depths, the more images of these strange new worlds are created by artists and planetary scientists who adapt them for our perception. Thanks to this, they try to influence our imagination and increase enthusiasm for further research.
Those who viewed the Bugs Bunny rabbit cartoons or read Life magazine in the 1950s could already imagine what outer space looks like, although we had not visited it yet. The artists had exquisite visualizations of near and far planets based on observations through a telescope at different times.
A few worships changed, and the situation became different. NASA vehicles circled every planet in our solar system and even explored several smaller objects. Another important achievement happened last year, when the automatic interplanetary station New Horizons reached Pluto. And this is 80 years after its discovery.
The Curiosity rover can show Mars the way a person would see it, although astronauts have not been there yet.
But one of the greatest achievements of artists and scientists was how they manage to make these worlds familiar, as if we had already been there. About this in her new book “Placing Outer Space” says Lisa Messeri.
A single scientist and technical anthropologist working at the University of Virginia traveled around the world to get more information about this phenomenon. She watched how Martian astronauts imagined themselves at the research station of the Martian desert in Utah. She visited the famous telescopes of the European Southern Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile, who manage to discover worlds located far beyond our solar system. And she even talked about the importance of Mars with a small group of people from Silicon Valley studying space. “The way we imagine other planets influences our attitude to the question of studying them,” said Messeri in a comment to Discovery News.
It all started with the fact that the space artist Chesley Bounstell wanted to find a new way to portray Saturn in space. So he got one of the most famous works in art, made so that the observer is on a rocky moon and looks at the planet through the peaks. Today we see that the art of depicting exoplanets is performed in the same manner.
Pluto was a mysterious world for 80 years, until the New Horizons spacecraft visited it in 2015
And now some drawn worlds become reality. In 2015, the first images of Pluto appeared, and a new stage of studying this dwarf planet began. Masseri says that new images or data about distant worlds change our anthropological perception of these objects.
“Of course, this means that we sent a piece of ourselves and this technology far into the solar system,” she said. - “Thanks to my collaboration with astronomers, I believe that now they perceive Pluto in a more voluminous and concrete manner and they have consolidated its deeper planetary significance.”
Most of all Messeri in her book likes the part about searching for exoplanets resembling the Earth, which the Kepler telescope is doing, as well as the above-mentioned telescopes in Chile. Over the years, a large number of rocky planets have been discovered in the habitable zones of their stars. Messeri spent time in Chile, studying how hard astronomers should work to find out more details about these worlds. “The observation process is more mundane,” she says with a laugh. “I'm not a night person.” But they have to watch all night, which is quite inconvenient. I loved these people and was glad to spend time with them, but I also really wanted to sleep. ”
As the next project, Messeri plans to look at the burgeoning field of virtual reality and see how it can help astronomers explore other worlds. She added that astronomy is changing so quickly that it is worth taking a fresh look at certain topics every 5-10 years. “These changes are worth talking about and trying to understand,” she said.
