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News Release
Office of News and Information
Johns Hopkins University
3003 N. Charles Street, Suite 100
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-3843
Phone: (410) 516-7160 / Fax (410) 516-5251
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April 22, 1999
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT:
Gary Dorsey,
gdd@jhu.edu
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A Child's Touch Unveils Mysteries of
Satellite Universe
The chemical mysteries of astronomical science and
cosmic origins
gives way to a child's touch in a new permanent display at the
Maryland
Science Center
in Baltimore of the soon-to-be launched FUSE
satellite.
When the Far Ultraviolet
Spectroscopic
Explorer is launched from Cape Canaveral on May 27, visitors
at the Outer Place
Space at the science center will not only be able to follow its
orbital path as it speeds
around the globe, but they will be able to investigate the birth,
life and death of stars
and dip into far regions of the electromagnetic spectrum just
like the satellite will
throughout its three-year mission.
As a showcase for today's golden age of astronomy, the science
center offers hands-on
interactive displays, video/audio clips, galactic models, live
viewings of rocket launches
and experiments that make ordinarily hard-to-understand
concepts--galaxy formation,
chemical evolution, the Big Bang--simple to grasp.
Just as textbooks are already being rewritten to reflect new
knowledge generated by the
great end-of-the-century observatories, such as the Hubble Space
Telescope, the science
center's Outer Space Place brings the very dreams of today's
astronomers straight to the
public with its FUSE
exhibit.
Planned for nearly 20 years by an international team led by Johns
Hopkins astronomer
Warren Moos, the FUSE mission is designed to scour the cosmos for
the fossil record of
the universe's birth, a chemical investigation of stars and
galaxies and interstellar spaces
that will reveal what conditions were like moments after the Big
Bang. With data from
FUSE, scientists hope to understand better how stars form, how
galaxies evolve, and how
the primordial chemicals were created and distributed throughout
the universe since the
beginning of time.
Just as an education awaits FUSE researchers, an education awaits
visitors at the FUSE
exhibit. Visitors can access a "live link" to the satellite
control center on the Johns
Hopkins campus and see, at any moment, what star or galaxy is
being observed by the
satellite.
Because FUSE observes a region of the spectrum that is invisible
to the eye, the exhibit
demonstrates how to make the unseen comprehensible. Astronomers
at the university
helped the science center staff create activities that show how
scientists use a technique
called "spectroscopy" to detect the chemical make-up of objects
millions of light years
from the Earth, how to detect physical conditions of the universe
billions of years ago,
and how to assess the speed of objects traveling across the
far-away space.
In one part of the exhibit, visitors can actually build their own
stars by mixing "scoops" of
interstellar gases. By literally grasping the controls, even a
child can begin to understand
the scientific goals of a space mission that presently is at the
vanguard of astronomical
science.
Outer Space Place and the FUSE exhibit, fashioned by Johns
Hopkins scientist Luciana
Bianchi and other FUSE colleagues, opened April 15, with
presentations by NASA
astronauts Thomas D. Jones and Frederick Gregory as well as
remarks by Theodore
Poehler, vice provost of research at Johns Hopkins University,
and Richard C. Henry,
director of the Maryland
Space Grant
Consortium and a professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Physics and
Astronomy.
Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the
World Wide Web at
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/
Information on automatic e-mail delivery
of science and medical news releases is available at the
same address.
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