Intangibles
Posted by Chris Radcliff in News on June 24, 2009
There are many reasons why we prefer sending humans to explore space, but this recent photo gives a visible reminder of one of the intangible benefits:
This photo of the shockwave from an erupting volcano was taken by an astronaut photographer on the ISS as part of the Crew Earth Observations experiment. While it’s possible to send up legions of automated cameras to take millions of photos and sort through the results back on Earth, sometimes there’s just no substitute for someone saying “what’s that?” and sticking a camera out the window.
It’s not their primary job, or even in the top-10 list of things they need to do up there. But it’s awesome.
Comments
Not an insignificant observation. Just sorting through the photographs, especially those from a transitory event such as fly-by, should be the back-up for a human eye, augmented or otherwise, by optics, and a brain with some conscious backdrop of context (even if imaginary) to sort the interesting from the uninteresting. On ISS every scene on Earth is a one of a kind fly-by event. Consider the discovery of eruptions on Io, originally perceived after the fact, much later in anticipation. What have we missed without this quick ability to pick the straight stick out of a pile of crooked ones? The ideal is both human and machine.