In two weeks I'm going to be delivering an hour-long talk at Amherst College for the class reunions (it's my 10th reunion). Mostly I plan to talk about what's cool in space right now, how you can get images from the Web and what kind of fun you can have with them, etc (with lots of cool examples from this forum). But as I was beginning to think about what I was going to say, I asked myself how all of the different Reunion classes -- the classes of 1996, 1991, 1986, etc... -- experienced space exploration differently, in terms of what missions were active and returning data when they were in college. So I made up a set of slides showing where we had active missions returning data for each of those 5-year periods. What do you think of these? Any suggestions for improvements / changes / pointing out of errors would be greatly appreciated.

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(Also, if anyone wants to play with the Photoshop file I used for the background, I'll be happy to share it.)

--Emily

Very nice slides Emily !
I would add the Rosetta Mars flyby in 2007.

-- Rakhir

And I don't know if you plan to add ExoMars. Perhaps in the last slide, with two question marks '??'.

EDIT : BTW, you should also add Luna 21 / Lunokhod 2 and Luna 23.

All good suggestions, thank you Rakhir; you remind me I need to add the New Horizons Jupiter flyby next year too.

--Emily

Emily:

SOHO and other Solar observatories; and if you include Hubble, do you include Skylab, Hipparcos, Spitzer, Compton etc?

And did I see Beagle 2?

Bob Shaw

Also remaind about the future mission from ESA in cooperation with JAXA to Mercury with BepiColombo polar orbiter spacecraft. The expected launching would be in the year Aug 2013 and arrives at Mercury at 2019 and its mission would last one year.

If you visit JAXA web, you will find here many future small projects. Now China is awakening and has ambitions to send any sonda to space. However, I don't know if China has own Space Agency Web.

Rodolfo

Emily, overall I liked the concept, but I have these reservations:

I presume you are speaking to an audience that, while educated (either that
or they sure didn't get their money's worth from Amherst ), may not be
into space exploration and astronomy.

The successive images of the same worlds with just the names and dates
changing may lose your audience's interest rather quickly. Too many
facts and especially numbers and other raw data tends to do that with
novice audiences.

May I suggest that you keep the idea of showing how much and what we
have explored over the decades, but then add different perspectives
of the Sol system that are relevant to the dates of each slide. I would
also add at least sample images of some of the more famous probes
and some of the images of the worlds they took.

Perhaps this may be more than you had planned for your talk, but I
just wanted to give you these suggestions. Good luck with it.

The whole shebang might make a great animated .gif - a bit big for the WWW, but good for a presentation or a display... ...especially with the planets illuminating like they do as missions are sent to them!

Bob Shaw

Bob,

if Emily adds also the failures, the 1958 to 1973 slides will be completely overcrowded around venus, mars and, above all, the moon !

-- Rakhir

I probably should have mentioned earlier that I was strictly confining myself to the planets -- Hubble gets on there because it gives us pictures of the planets -- Compton, no. Will Spitzer? Much as I'd like to put BepiColombo on there, it doesn't make it to Mercury within the time frame of the slides. For Beagle 2 -- I was debating about putting on (perhaps in red text) notable failures like Beagle 2, Mars Observer, MCO, MPL -- Phobos 2 and Nozomi I waffled about, perhaps they should be removed, or those others put on. But if I put on ones that failed when they arrived at Mars, should I also put on the long list of ones that failed when they arrived at the Moon?

Also, to reply to ljk, heaven help the audience who'd have to snooze through a speaker reading through these slides one by one. I'm just going to flick back and forth between them to, as Bob suggests, animate the planets lighting up and going dim; I expect the individuals in the audience will mostly be interested in looking at their own year and comparing and contrasting with the others. The main points will be -- look at the explosion of lunar exploration in the 60s and think about the people who came of age then -- contrast that with the '80s (looking forward to which was what got the Society going) -- and, by God, look at how much of the solar system we're exploring now -- and not only do we have active spacecraft in all these places, but they're all making lots of pictures available to the public. Now let's go look at some of those pretty pictures! Put on your 3D glasses...

--Emily

I think this is a very effective presentation, Emily. Just seeing how the names appear, first at the Moon, then Mars and Venus, then spreading out further, the emphasis shifting from the Moon to Mars, and so on - it really helps tell the story well. Of course, anyone can spoil a good presentation by reading all the text on a slide, but that's not necessary!

Phil

The other striking thing is the longevity of the more recent missions versus the old ones.

Chris

Yeah. If I did this one year at a time, that would become much more obvious, because so many of the earlier missions were pretty brief. But that would be an awful lot of slides.

--Emily

Good idea! Perhaps the early slides ought to contain the best images of the planets available from Earth-bound telescopic sources, and as we see exploration occurring, replace such poor-resolution images with those made possible by the listed missions? That way you get a feeling for the expansion of knowledge as our efforts have proceeded?

For future missions to places we haven't yet visited, you can place a question mark over the current best-resolution images, to indicate that we don't know what we'll find when we get there...?

-the other Doug

But perhaps a cool animation! Especially if you include the Simon style sound effects for each planet like the used in the new Huygens descent video....

Where is the time? That was 25 years ago or so ...