NASA's COSMOS
http://ase.tufts.edu/cosmos/
Kenneth R. Lang, Tufts University
The NASA’s COSMOS project shares the excitement and scientific content of the space agency’s missions with the American public and the wider international community, presenting important results of current and past NASA missions and providing a foundation for the justification of future space missions. The Principal Investigator accomplishes this task by first writing books that appeal to the general educated reader, from amateurs to specialists, and then enhancing public accessibility and exposure through an enjoyable Web Site.
The existing web site, located at http://ase.tufts.edu/cosmos/ , is based on the author’s two books, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Sun and The Cambridge Guide to the Solar System. This site consists of five main segments Planets and Moons, Asteroids and Comets, Search For Life, Human Impact, and Sun. Within each tab, or segment, numerous thematic concepts are listed along the left sidebar. Each topic has the following content areas associated with it, accessible from the top:
Overview: provides key ideas, fundamental discoveries, and substantive scientific results in a capsule form.
Tutorial: provides text and figures, abridged from the author’s books. Metaphors, similes, analogies, and literary material are of immense help to the layperson. Placing the space age results within the context of other major discoveries provides historical authority.
Images: presents hundreds of visually appealing images and line drawings with authoritative captions, available within the abridged text or separately.
The site presents new perspectives of the Sun, taken from the Yohkoh, Ulysses and SOHO spacecraft, and close-up views of the major planets and their satellites, as well as asteroids and comets, obtained from the Apollo, Clementine, Deep Space 1, Galileo, Giotto, the Hubble Space Telescope (planetary images), Lunar Prospector, Magellan, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars 2001 Odyssey, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR-Shoemaker), and Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft with home pages accessible from the Resources tab at the top of any page.
NASA’s COSMOS is now being extended with five new navigation tabs Invisible Worlds, Motion, Content and Form, Pervasive Violence, Impermanence, Illusory Emptiness, and Unanswered Questions. The extended site will include topics of immense public interest, such as black holes, cosmic evolution, the expanding Universe, dark energy, dark matter, gamma-ray bursts, planets around other stars, pulsars, quasars, and the three-degree cosmic microwave background. We will present the significant scientific accomplishments, historical context and visually appealing images of the relevant spacecraft such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory, COsmic Background Explorer, COBE, Cosmic Gamma-Ray Observatory, CGRO, Hubble Space Telescope, HST, Space Infra-Red Telescope Facility, SIRTF, and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, WMAP, spacecraft.
Contact Info: Kenneth R. Lang, Tufts University
ken.lang@tufts.edu