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      William Herschel Is Famous for Science. What About His Music?

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      The accomplished astronomer was, one historian said, “the Einstein of his time.” But before he surveyed the sky, he was a prolific musician.Within the four-square opening of William Herschel’s Symphony No. 8 is a phrase that sounds like one of the delicately reorchestrated pop songs in “Bridgerton.” The first violins play a goading, syncopated refrain as the harmony lurches underneath, slithering to a resolution before launching into grand second subject. It’s a standout moment, and an earworm.That is, if you ever get the opportunity to hear it.If Herschel (1738-1822) is talked about today, it’s probably not for his music. He’s better remembered in the world of science, as a distinguished astronomer notable for discovering Uranus, infrared radiation, Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Mimas; for the idea that stars are born and die like other living things; and for a rigorous approach to cataloging the night sky on his sweeps of the skies that set in motion a method of conducting scientific research.“He was the Einstein of his time,” said Sarah Waltz, an associate professor of music history at University of the Pacific in California. “But of course, Herschel was much better at music than Einstein was.”This year is the bicentennial of Herschel’s death, and an occasion to explore his musical life. The range of works that survive today — 24 symphonies, a dozen concertos, the same number of violin sonatas, six published harpsichord sonatas, music for church services — suggests he was no compositional slouch.But does he stand out in the crowded marketplace of 18th-century symphonies, among the reigning works of Mozart and Haydn? Assessing one of the few commercial recordings of Herschel’s compositions, the Gramophone critic Stanley Sadie wrote that this is “no music of the spheres,” and bemoaned its structural predictability and lurching modulations.Perhaps, though, composing was one of many tools in the arsenal of a talented and successful freelance musician who plied his trade until the age of 44. He had been born in Hanover, Germany, in 1738, the son of an oboist who led that city’s military band. Intellectual curiosity was encouraged in the family, with William and his brother Jacob engaging in detailed musical debates in the margins of their correspondences. William learned to play the oboe, violin and organ, and followed his father into the band. But, as war with France loomed in 1757, he fled to England.In the early 1760s, Herschel worked as a teacher, composer, performer and impresario across northern England. Although he would later be regularly employment as an organist, his contemporary and peer Edward Miller noted his particular talent on the violin: “Never before had we heard the concertos of Corelli, Geminiani and Avison, or the overtures of Haydn performed more chastely, or more according to the intention of the composers than by Mr Herschel.”Herschel was not entirely happy with a freelancer’s life. “From one place to another; from one social circle to another; from one lifestyle to another; —— what an intolerable condition!” he wrote in 1761. A paper trail of his many movements exists almost by accident, with most of his symphonies including the precise locations of their composition: Pontefract, Leeds, Sunderland, Richmond.However, Herschel was unwilling to entertain a move to the busy but musically competitive London. So, after a brief stint as organist of Halifax Parish Church in West Yorkshire — according to Miller, he informed the panel in his audition that he had already accepted a better offer elsewhere — he moved to Bath in 1776, entering a city of emergent upper-class sophistication, with a budding intellectual scene and the newly built Octagon Chapel, from which Herschel constructed a small musical empire built around oratorio performances and subscription concerts.Several years earlier, William’s sister Caroline had followed her brothers to England. Accounts of her story also obscure her early musical interest. The first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the first published woman to publish scientific research and the first female scientist to receive a salary, Caroline moved to England after an intervention from her brother — to rid her from a life of household drudgery following the death of their father — and began to take singing lessons, eventually becoming the resident soprano in William’s oratorio performances, at a time when performing families were in fashion.Herschel believed that music belonged as one of the four liberal arts of the quadrivium, alongside arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. With the aid of two 18th-century books by the Cambridge scholar Robert Smith — “Harmonics” and “A Compleat System of Opticks” — he began to tackle astronomy with the same autodidactic zeal employed when learning English through the dense texts of John Locke. And one of his first homemade Newtonian reflector telescopes brought about a change that would turn Herschel into an overnight celebrity: the discovery, in March 1781, of Uranus, which he initially believed to be another comet. Herschel obsequiously named that planet Georgium Sidus to the delight of King George III, who later offered him a salary with the title of “the King’s Astronomer.”The position involved taking a large pay cut from his profitable music business, but Herschel nevertheless abandoned music to focus his gaze on the heavens. As the Herschels moved to Slough to be closer to the king, the telescopes got bigger, the surveys more ambitious and the celebrity more intense.Although Herschel’s musical compositions had ground to a halt with the move, there is mystery surrounding his relationship with Haydn, who visited the observatory in June 1792. In “Essays in Musical Analysis,” classic volumes from the 1930s, Sir Donald Tovey concluded that looking through Herschel’s famed 40-foot telescope provided the cosmic inspiration for the famous opening of Haydn’s oratorio “The Creation.” The problem: Records show that Herschel was out of town at the time. But perhaps Caroline, at this point his trusted assistant, could have ushered Haydn toward his moment of clarity?Waltz, the music historian, and Woody Sullivan, an astronomy professor from the University of Washington, are currently undertaking a critical biography of Herschel that combines science with music.“We’re trying to remind people that a musician at this time period is not necessarily a composer first, the way that we think of them today,” Waltz said. “They were composing as part of the package.”Much like Herschel’s pathbreaking surveys of the heavens, studying his life requires starting with the big picture, then adding details, piece by piece. More

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      Hear the Weird Sounds of a Black Hole Singing

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      As part of an effort to “sonify” the cosmos, researchers have converted the pressure waves from a black hole into an audible … something.Sound waves of the Perseus galaxy cluster were resynthesized after boosting their frequency quadrillions of times, scaling them 57 to 58 octaves — or about seven piano-lengths — above their true pitch.NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand/SYSTEM SoundsIn space you can’t hear a black hole scream, but apparently you can hear it sing.In 2003 astrophysicists working with NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory detected a pattern of ripples in the X-ray glow of a giant cluster of galaxies in the constellation Perseus. They were pressure waves — that is to say, sound waves — 30,000 light-years across and radiating outward through the thin, ultrahot gas that suffuses galaxy clusters. They were caused by periodic explosions from a supermassive black hole at the center of the cluster, which is 250 million light-years away and contains thousands of galaxies.With a period of oscillation of 10 million years, the sound waves were acoustically equivalent to a B-flat 57 octaves below middle C, a tone that the black hole has apparently been holding for the last two billion years. Astronomers suspect that these waves act as a brake on star formation, keeping the gas in the cluster too hot to condense into new stars.The Chandra astronomers recently “sonified” these ripples by speeding up the signals to 57 or 58 octaves above their original pitch, boosting their frequency quadrillions of times to make them audible to the human ear. As a result, the rest of us can now hear the intergalactic sirens singing.Through these new cosmic headphones, the Perseus black hole makes eerie moans and rumbles that reminded this listener of the galumphing tones marking an alien radio signal that Jodie Foster hears through headphones in the science fiction film “Contact.”As part of an ongoing project to “sonify” the universe, NASA also released similarly generated sounds of the bright knots in a jet of energy shooting from a giant black hole at the center of the humongous galaxy known as M87. These sounds reach us across 53.5 million light-years as a stately succession of orchestral tones.The “sonification” of M87.NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM SoundsYet another sonification project has been undertaken by a group led by Erin Kara, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as part of an effort to use light echoes from X-ray bursts to map the environment around black holes, much as bats use sound to catch mosquitoes.All this is an outgrowth of “Black Hole Week,” an annual NASA social media extravaganza, May 2-6. As it happens this week provides a prelude to big news on May 12, when researchers with the Event Horizon Telescope, which in 2019 produced the first image of a black hole, are to announce their latest results.Black holes, as decreed by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, are objects with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, much less sound, can escape. Paradoxically, they can also be the brightest things in the universe. Before any sort of matter disappears forever into a black hole, theorists surmise, it would be accelerated to near-light speeds by the hole’s gravitational field and heated, swirling, to millions of degrees. This would spark X-ray flashes, generate interstellar shock waves and squeeze high-energy jets and particles across space like so much toothpaste from a tube.In one common scenario, a black hole exists in a binary system with a star and steals material from it, which accretes into a dense, bright disk — a visible doughnut of doom — that sporadically produces X-ray outbursts.Using data from a NASA instrument called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer — NICER — a group led by Jingyi Wang, an M.I.T. graduate student, sought echoes or reflections of these X-ray blasts. The time delay between the original X-ray blasts and their echoes and distortions caused by their nearness to the weird gravity of black holes offered insight into the evolution of these violent bursts.Meanwhile, Dr. Kara has been working with education and music experts to convert the X-ray reflections into audible sound. In some simulations of this process, she said, the flashes go all the way around the black hole, generating a telltale shift in their wavelengths before being reflected.“I just love that we can ‘hear’ the general relativity in these simulations,” Dr. Kara said in an email.Eat your hearts out, Pink Floyd.Sync your calendar with the solar systemNever miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that’s out of this world.Exploring the Solar SystemA guide to the spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit. More

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      in Television

      Pete Davidson to Join Next Blue Origin Space Flight

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      The “Saturday Night Live” comedian will be one of six passengers to fly to the edge of space this month with Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos.The “Saturday Night Live” actor Pete Davidson will travel to the edge of space next week on the next Blue Origin spaceflight, the company said on Monday.Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, said on Monday that it would launch its fourth flight with human passengers on March 23. Mr. Davidson will be one of six passengers on the company’s New Shepard rocket for its 20th flight.Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the richest people in the world, was a passenger on the company’s first flight with humans on board last July. Earlier that month, another private spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, took its founder, Richard Branson, to the edge of space and back.Mr. Davidson, 28, joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in 2014. He has also appeared in movies, including the 2020 semi-autobiographical film “The King of Staten Island.” He could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday.A Blue Origin spokeswoman said Monday that Mr. Davidson would fly as “an honorary guest,” while the other five passengers were paying customers. The spokeswoman did not say how much the others had been charged to join the flight.Mr. Davidson will be the latest celebrity passenger to travel to the edge of space with Blue Origin.In October, the “Star Trek” actor William Shatner, 90, became the oldest person to travel to space and cross the Kármán line, the widely recognized boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space that is about 62 miles above the planet’s surface. Mr. Shatner shared the New Shepard rocket with three other passengers on a mission that lasted about 10 minutes.In December, Michael Strahan, the “Good Morning America” co-host, joined a Blue Origin flight with five others.The flight carrying Mr. Davidson is scheduled to lift off from Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas at 8:30 a.m. local time on March 23.In addition to Mr. Davidson, Blue Origin said on Monday, the flight will have five other passengers: Marty Allen, Sharon and Marc Hagle, Jim Kitchen and George Nield.Mr. Allen is a former chief executive of Party America, the party-supply store. Mr. Hagle is the president and chief executive of Tricor International, a residential and commercial property development company. Ms. Hagle founded the nonprofit group SpaceKids Global. Mr. Kitchen is a professor of the practice of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Dr. Nield is the president of Commercial Space Technologies. From 2008 to 2018, he was associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency that regulates commercial launches like Blue Origin’s.Kenneth Chang More

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      in Movies

      Douglas Trumbull, Visual Effects Wizard, Dies at 79

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      His technical savvy was on display in films like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Star Trek: the Motion Picture,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Blade Runner.”Douglas Trumbull, an audacious visual effects wizard who created memorable moments in a series of blockbuster science-fiction films, including the hallucinogenic sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which an astronaut in a pod hurtles through space, died on Monday at a hospital in Albany, N.Y. He was 79.His wife, Julia Trumbull, said the cause was complications of mesothelioma.With colleagues, Mr. Trumbull was nominated for visual effects Oscars for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Blade Runner” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” but perhaps his most stunning work came in “2001” — his first big break in motion pictures.He was in his early 20s when Mr. Kubrick hired him as a $400-a-week artist, and his first job was to create graphics for the 16 screens that surround the “eyes” of HAL 9000, the seemingly omniscient computer that controls the Discovery One spacecraft at the center of “2001.”Then, using a process called slit-scan photography, he conceived the trippy five-minute scene in which the astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) soars at hyperspeed in his pod through a phantasmagorical cosmic passageway in the universe.Mr. Trumbull used a motorized camera that tracked to a slit in a rotatable rectangle of sheet metal, behind which he manipulated illuminated art — wedding his ambitious youthful vision to Mr. Kubrick’s.Keir Dulleau in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). Mr. Trumbull’s first job after being hired by the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, was to create graphics for the 16 screens that surround the “eyes” of the seemingly omniscient HAL 9000 computer.Warner Bros. via Museum of the Moving Image, New York“It wasn’t about the normal cinematic dynamics of close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots and reversals and conflicts and plot,” Mr. Trumbull told The New York Times in 2012. Mr. Kubrick, he said, “was trying to go into another world of first-person experience.”Over the next half-century, Mr. Trumbull became known as one of the film industry’s most innovative visual effects masters. He used old-school tools like mattes and miniatures to enhance science fiction films before digital effects animation became the industry standard.“He had this ability that I don’t think most people have — to see a final image in his mind and somehow figure out what was needed to get that image on film,” said Gene Kozicki, a visual effects historian and archivist. “Sometimes those images were crazy, like a diaphanous cloud traveling through space heading toward the Enterprise,” the spacecraft in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979).For Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), Mr. Trumbull’s team injected white tempera paint into an aquarium filled with a mixture of fresh and salt water to create the ominous clouds that announced the coming of the extraterrestrial mother ship.For Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), Mr. Trumbull used, among many other things, models and images projected onto blimps and buildings to fashion the look of a bleak, dystopian future Los Angeles.When Philip K. Dick — whose book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was adapted into “Blade Runner” — saw a segment of Mr. Trumbull’s visual effects on a local newscast, he recognized them approvingly as “my own interior world,” he told an interviewer shortly before his death in 1982.An image from Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), for which Mr. Trumbull fashioned the look of a bleak, dystopian future Los Angeles. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesFor “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” Mr. Trumbull oversaw the docking of the shuttle with the Enterprise and Spock’s spacewalk, a wild excursion (partly through a “plasma energy conduit”) that has obvious visual links to “2001.”“I thought it would be fun to just get kind of abstract and make it a fantasy dream sequence in a way, not literal,” he told TrekMovie.com in 2019.In 2012, Mr. Trumbull received the George Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his technological contributions to the film industry and the Georges Méliès Award from the Visual Effects Society.Douglas Hunt Trumbull was born in Los Angeles on April 8, 1942. His mother, Marcia (Hunt) Trumbull, was an artist; his father, Don, worked in visual and special effects, most notably on “The Wizard of Oz,” but had gone to work as an engineer in the aircraft industry by the time Douglas was born.His father “never mentioned much about ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ except that he had something to do with the lion’s tail, the apple tree and rigging the flying monkeys,” Douglas Trumbull told VFXV, a magazine devoted to visual effects, in 2018.Growing up, Douglas was a fan of science fiction movies, became fascinated with photography and could build crystal radio sets. After high school he worked for an electrical contracting firm while studying technical illustration at El Camino College in Torrance, Calif.For “Close Encounters,” Mr. Trumbull’s team injected white tempera paint into an aquarium to create the ominous clouds that announced the coming of a U.F.O. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesHe took a job with Graphic Films in Los Angeles, where his paintings of space modules and lunar surfaces appeared in documentaries for NASA and the Air Force. He was hired for “2001” after Mr. Kubrick noticed his work on a 15-minute film, “To the Moon and Beyond,” which was produced in Cinerama 360 and exhibited during the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.After working on “2001,” Mr. Trumbull created space scenes in “Candy” (1968), a comedy based on the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg; provided visual effects for “The Andromeda Strain” (1971), about a team of scientists trying to contain a deadly alien microorganism; and directed his first film, “Silent Running” (1972), in which botanical life has ended on Earth and plants are kept in a greenhouse on a space station by an ecologist played by Bruce Dern.Although Vincent Canby of The Times called “Silent Running” “simple-minded,” he praised its “beautifully eerie and majestic special effects — particularly its spaceship that looks like horizontal Eiffel Towers attached to gigantic oil tankers.”Mr. Trumbull resuscitated his father’s film career by hiring him for “Silent Running,” “Close Encounters” and “Star Trek.” The senior Trumbull also worked on George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” but his son was too busy for that one.Douglas Trumbull’s affinity for vivid visual effects led him to conceive ways to produce films with a format that more closely approached reality. He created Showscan, a cinematic process in which 70-millimeter film is projected at 60 frames per second (35-millimeter projection is usually at 24 frames per second).He shot part of “Brainstorm” (1983), his second directorial effort, with a Showscan camera. That film — about scientists who devise a system that can record and play a person’s thoughts — is better known for the death of one of its stars, Natalie Wood, during production. Mr. Trumbull fought to complete the film, but it could not be exhibited in Showscan because theaters would not invest in the necessary equipment until all studio films were shot in that format.But developing the Showscan camera earned Mr. Trumbull, Robert Auguste, Geoffrey Williamson and Edmund DiGiulio the Motion Picture Academy’s Scientific and Engineering Award in 1992.Mr. Trumbull in action in 2011, the year he returned to traditional filmmaking after many years of designing theme-park attractions and other projects and working for Imax.Joseph HeckThe experience led him to detour from Hollywood filmmaking and move to the Berkshires, where he worked on projects for the rest of his life. He developed simulator-based attractions like “Back to the Future: The Ride” for Universal Studios Florida, which opened in 1991, and, using Showscan, created “Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid,” a virtual reality experience featuring three films, at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, in 1993.In 1994, he signed a deal to bring his simulator-ride technology to Imax. He also served for a time as the company’s vice chairman.In addition to his wife, Mr. Trumbull is survived by his daughters, Amy Trumbull and Andromeda Stevens; his stepdaughter, Emily Irwin; his stepsons, John Hobart Culleton, Ethan Culleton and John Vidor; nine grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; his sister, Betsy Hardie; his stepsister, Katharine Trumbull Blank; and his half sisters, Kyle Trumbull-Clark and Mimi Erland. His marriage to Cherry Foster ended in divorce; his marriage to Ann Vidor ended with her death.Mr. Trumbull returned to traditional moviemaking when the director Terrence Malick, a friend, asked him to help on his film “The Tree of Life” (2011). Working as a consultant, Mr. Trumbull helped conjure the kaleidoscopic sequence that depicts the Big Bang and the creation of life on Earth, using chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, carbon dioxide, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics and high speed photography, he told cinematography.com in 2011.“It was a freewheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business,” he said. “We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.” More

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      in Movies

      What a Times Journalist Learned From His ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment

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      A new film about a killer comet revives memories of a nail-biting night in The Times newsroom two decades ago.One of the thus-far theoretical duties of the astronomer is to inform the public that something very big and horrible is about to happen: The sun will soon explode, a black hole has just wandered into Earth’s path, hostile aliens have amassed an armada right behind the moon.In the new Netflix film “Don’t Look Up,” a pair of astronomers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, assume this responsibility when they discover that a “planet-killing” comet is headed straight for Earth and must spread the news.It doesn’t go well. The president of the United States, played by Meryl Streep, is more concerned with her poll numbers. Television talk show hosts ridicule the scientists. Rich oligarchs want to exploit the comet’s minerals. “Don’t Look Up” may be the most cinematic fun anyone has had with the End of the World since Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”Watching it brought back my own experience reporting Really Bad news. In March of 1998, I was the new deputy science editor of The Times, and my doomsday audience was small but elite: The Times’s top editors. I had been on the job for only a month. Nobody really knew me. My direct boss, the science editor, had taken the week off, leaving me in charge.And so, late in the afternoon on March 11, I walked into the 4:30 news meeting where editors pitch stories for the next day’s front page and announced that we had a late-breaking story by the distinguished reporter Malcolm Browne. “It’s a pretty good story,” I said. “It’s about the end of the world.”Brian Marsden, the astronomer who calculated that in 2028 the asteroid 1997 XF11 would come within 30,000 miles of Earth.Evan RichmanThe source was Brian Marsden, director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which is the International Astronomical Union’s clearinghouse for cosmic discoveries, as well as its Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for keeping track of comets and asteroids. He had just calculated that a recently discovered asteroid, a mile-wide rock named 1997 XF11 (now asteroid 35396), would pass within 30,000 miles of Earth on Oct. 26, 2028 — and had a small but real chance of hitting our planet.“In more than 40 years of computing orbits, I had never seen anything like that before,” Dr. Marsden later said. He felt he had a duty to share this with the world in an I.A.U. Circular.The front-page meeting dissolved into a purposeful pandemonium. I spent the rest of the night answering questions from newsroom colleagues who wanted to know whether they should continue to pay their mortgages, and responding to queries and suggestions from the top editors. Astronomers sent pictures of the asteroid, a fuzzy dot in the darkness. I was having an adrenaline-fueled crash course in the scrutiny a front-page story receives in the newsroom before it can be published.I didn’t want to go home that night but eventually did, in a nervous fritter. The next morning it was already all over. Pictures of the asteroid from several years earlier had turned up overnight, and Dr. Marsden had recalculated the orbit and found that 1997 XF11 would miss the Earth by 600,000 miles. That was still close by cosmic standards, but safe for civilization.An image of the asteroid 1997 XF11, now minor planet 35396, taken on March 11, 1998, over an interval of 30 minutes by the astronomer Bernadette Rodgers of the University of Washington.Bernadette Rodgers/University of Washington/Astrophysical Research ConsortiumIn the following days, Dr. Marsden was publicly scolded by his colleagues and the media as a “Chicken Little” who had made “cockamamie calculations” without consulting other astronomers who already knew that the asteroid posed no risk. NASA told the astronomers to get their act together before blindsiding the agency and the public with news of an apocalypse.Dr. Marsden apologized for generating such a scare, but noted that he had helped raise awareness on the danger of asteroid strikes and extinction..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Much as the incident was bad for my reputation, we needed a scare like that to bring attention to this problem,” he later wrote in The Boston Globe. “I also believe that for us not to make the announcement as we did would have led to condemnation that science was being stripped of its essential openness,” he said.I felt bad for Dr. Marsden, a wry, cherubic presence I had known for 20 years of reporting on astronomy. (He died in 2010.) And I felt bad for myself. How often do you get to cover the possible end of the world after only a month on the job? The next day, when The New York Post ran the headline “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye!,” I took it personally.The New York Times’s front-page article of March 12, 1998, and The New York Post’s cover of March 13.But the incident was indeed a kind of turning point, according to Amy Mainzer, an asteroid expert at the University of Arizona who served as a scientific consultant on “Don’t Look Up.”In 2005, Congress ordered NASA to find and begin tracking at least 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 500 feet wide or so that come near Earth. (They neglected to provide much money to pay for the search until years later.) The word was out that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery.NASA now spends some $150 million a year on the endeavor. “We’ve come a long way since 1997 XF11,” said Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who criticized Dr. Marsden back in 1998.These days, computers do the work of sorting asteroids and comets, automatically calculating orbits from new observations, comparing them with known objects, scoring them for how dangerous they are and sending out the results to astronomers. Anything that comes within five million miles of Earth is considered a Potentially Hazardous Object, or PHO.“We didn’t have all that back then,” Dr. Mainzer said. “We’ve learned a lot as a community.”“Don’t Look Up,” directed and co-written by Adam McKay, arrives on Friday — incidentally, less than three weeks after NASA launched a mission to see whether asteroids could be diverted from their trajectories. But the film is less about asteroids than about the tendency of humans to dismiss bad news from science and to embrace misinformation. It was conceived as an allegory about the failure to act on climate change. “A lot of people don’t want to hear it,” Dr. Mainzer said. “As a scientist, this is terrifying.”However, the film was shot, very carefully, during the pandemic, and the parallels to the ongoing health crisis are hard to miss.“Scientists don’t possess the power to effect change,” Dr. Mainzer said. “How do we get people to act on scientific information?” Should they “work within the system,” she asked, even if it means they have to cope with purveyors of misinformation?Humor helps, Dr. Mainzer added: “We’re saying it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to go down this path.”Sync your calendar with the solar systemNever miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that’s out of this world. More

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      Russian Film Crew Wraps Space Station Shoot and Returns to Earth

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      A Russian actress and film director landed near Russia’s spaceflight base in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit.A Russian actress and a film director landed safely on Earth early Sunday after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station shooting scenes for the first feature-length drama made with scenes shot in space.Yulia Peresild, the actress, and Klim Shipenko, a film director, launched to space with a Russian astronaut on Oct. 5 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They used the orbital laboratory as one of the main sets for their movie, “The Challenge,” a drama in which Ms. Peresild plays a surgeon embarking on an emergency mission to save the life of an ailing cosmonaut.The 12-day journey, backed by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, was the latest act in a race among spacefaring countries to generate public excitement about human spaceflight and demonstrate that destinations like the space station aren’t exclusive to government astronauts. The mission also adds another superlative to Russia’s spaceflight record over the United States: beating Hollywood to orbit.Ms. Peresild, Mr. Shipenko and Oleg Novitsky, a Russian astronaut who’s been on the station since April and played the role of the film’s ailing cosmonaut, bid farewell to the station’s crew of seven on Saturday. The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft that carried them back to Earth undocked at 9:14 p.m. Eastern time. The crew’s trip home took about three hours before landing at 10:35 a.m. local time in the desert steppe of Kazakhstan’s Karaganda Region.In live footage streamed by Russia’s space agency, helicopters from search and rescue teams circled the area where the astronauts were to set down, and mission controllers urged the crew to “get ready” and brace themselves for landing. Under a large parachute, the capsule touched down, sending up a cloud of dust.“They landed vertically, awesome guys,” said a mission controller from Russia, suggesting the capsule had not landed in a way that could add some difficulty to the crew’s exit.The Russian space agency said that the crew felt well ahead of their exit from the Soyuz, and would undergo a 10-day rehabilitation to help recover from the effects of living in the microgravity environment of low-earth orbit.The filming began as the movie crew arrived in space. Mr. Shipenko filmed scenes using hand-held cameras inside the capsule of another Soyuz module as it approached the station. When it docked, Pyotr Dubrov, one of the space station’s Russian astronauts, was waiting behind a large digital cinema camera as the crew emerged from their capsule and floated into the station for the first time. And on Saturday, the filming continued as the crew exited the station and boarded their capsule. Few details about the plot of “The Challenge” have been announced.But drama on the station turned real on Friday when it was tilted out of its position in orbit during a test of the thrusters on the capsule that ferried the film crew home to Earth. Mr. Novitsky had been testing out the engines, Roscosmos said, but they fired longer than expected, according to a NASA statement. The station, which is the size of a football field, was tilted 57 degrees out of position, according to Russian mission control officials quoted by Interfax, a Russian news agency.The incident sprang Russian and NASA officials into action, and they corrected the station’s positioning within 30 minutes. It was the second such emergency since July, when Russia’s new Nauka module erroneously fired its thrusters, shifting the station one and a half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before it came to a stop upside down.Whatever caused the problems with the spacecraft’s thruster on Friday did not recur as the film crew and Mr. Novitsky departed the station Saturday night.“The Soyuz is in good shape, was declared ready to support undocking and landing this evening, and everything is in order for the departure,” said Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman, during a livestream of the process.Russia’s space agency announced its intention last year to send an actress to the space station shortly after plans emerged that Tom Cruise would trek to space as part of an action-adventure film directed by Doug Liman. Jim Bridenstine, who served as NASA’s administrator under President Donald Trump, confirmed the plans on Twitter at the time, but no updates on the film project have emerged since that time. Other entertainment projects centered on the International Space Station may occur in the years to come, including a Discovery Channel reality TV competition called “Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?” More

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      In a Blue Origin Rocket, William Shatner Finally Goes to Space

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      The actor who played Captain Kirk played the role of pitchman for Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company at a time that it is facing a number of workplace and business difficulties.NEAR VAN HORN, TEXAS — William Shatner, the actor best known as the heroic Captain James T. Kirk in “Star Trek,” and three other passengers returned safely from a brief trip to the edge of space on Wednesday.Mr. Shatner, 90, became the world’s oldest space traveler on the flight, which was the latest excursion over the West Texas desert aboard a rocket built by Blue Origin for space tourists. The private space company is owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the wealthiest men on the planet.It was the sixth launch carrying private passengers this year, as billionaire-backed companies jockey to normalize launching humans to space. Carrying two paying passengers, the quick jaunt to space also checked off another revenue-generating flight for Blue Origin’s space tourism business, advancing competition with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic to attract more wealthy and adventure-seeking customers.But the successful flight and landing came amid a string of controversies for Mr. Bezos’ company, particularly charges from current and former employees that its workplace culture was “rife” with sexism and that it prioritized speed over addressing some employees’ safety concerns. The company has rebutted the criticisms, but has also faced setbacks in other lines of its business.The actor who played Captain Kirk in “Star Trek” told Jeff Bezos his visit to the edge of space in the Blue Origin rocket was the most profound experience he could imagine.Blue Origin, via EPA, via ShutterstockThose concerns were absent on Wednesday as an effusive Mr. Shatner bent Mr. Bezos’ ear just outside the capsule after it landed, pouring forth words during a video livestream to describe his brief trek into the limits of the planet’s atmosphere. His trip aboard the rocket might have been conceived as a publicity stunt, but brushing the edge of the sky left the actor full of wonder, mixed with unease.“What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,” Mr. Shatner told Mr. Bezos, waxing poetically about the “immeasurably small” line he witnessed between Earth and space, describing it as a fragile, underappreciated boundary between life and death.“This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin,” he continued, adding: “it would be so important for everybody to have that experience, through one means or another.”The Origin New Shepard rocket rising from the launch site on Wednesday.LM Otero/Associated PressSpectators watched the New Shepard rocket carrying Mr. Shatner to the edge of space.Mario Tama/Getty ImagesMr. Bezos, who has said he was inspired by “Star Trek” as a boy, listened, still as a statue. He may have been giving Mr. Shatner some space, but it was a sharp contrast to his appearance after his own brief spaceflight in July, when he was aboard the same spacecraft. Then, Mr. Bezos held forth from a stage, rousing condemnation from critics of the vast company he founded as he thanked Amazon’s employees and customers for making it possible for him to finance his private space venture.Mr. Shatner shared the capsule on Wednesday with three other passengers: Audrey Powers, a Blue Origin vice president who oversees New Shepard operations, and two paying customers: Chris Boshuizen, a co-founder of the Earth-observation company Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, a co-founder of a company that builds software for clinical researchers.The launch Wednesday morning was pushed back by roughly an hour by two pauses to the launch countdown — caused in part by extra checks to the spacecraft and winds near its launchpad. The quartet was driven in electric pickup trucks to Blue Origin’s launchpad, roughly an hour before liftoff, flanked by Mr. Bezos and company employees.For a moment, it appeared Mr. Bezos, dressed in a flight suit like the one he wore in July, would join them in flying to space. But he closed the hatch door before leaving the pad, sending the crew on their journey.The rocket lifted off at 9:49 a.m. Central time, ascending nearly as fast as a speeding bullet at 2,235 miles per hour and sending the crew some 65.8 miles high. The whole trip lasted 10 minutes, 17 seconds, and gave the four passengers about four minutes of weightlessness.Mr. Boshuizen, talking to reporters after the flight, likened the crew’s entry into space to a stone hitting the surface of a lake. “I was trying to smile but my jaw was pushed back in my head,” he said.Mr. Shatner emerged from the New Shepard capsule after a safe landing near Van Horn, Texas, on Wednesday. Blue Origin, via EPA, via ShutterstockIn the “Star Trek” episode, “A Piece of the Action,” William Shatner as Captain Kirk appears with DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard McCoy, center, and Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, right, in 1968.CBS via Getty ImagesMr. de Vries said the crew “had a moment of camaraderie” when they reached space. “We actually just put our hands together,” he said.“And then we enjoyed the view as much as we can,” Mr. de Vries said.In video footage released later by Blue Origin, Mr. Shatner appeared nearly speechless as the crew floated inside the capsule, legs aloft and small toys wafting around. “This is nuts,” said Ms. Powers, gripping the frame of one of the capsule’s windows.Footage captured the 90-year-old “Star Trek” actor and three other passengers floating weightless inside the Blue Origin spacecraft capsule during their trip to the edge of space.Blue OriginThe capsule then descended back to land under a set of three parachutes.Mr. Shatner wasn’t thrilled about his new status as the oldest person to fly into space. “I wish I had broken the world record in the 10-yard dash, but unfortunately it was how old I was,” he said hours after the mission during a news conference on the landing pad. He beat the record recently clinched during Blue Origin’s first crewed flight in July by Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pilot and former candidate for NASA’s astronaut corps who was turned down from joining in the 60s because of her sex.Like Blue Origin’s July trip, in which Mr. Bezos launched to space with Ms. Funk and two other passengers, Wednesday’s flight served as an advertisement of the company’s space tourism business to prospective wealthy customers. It is competing primarily with Virgin Galactic, a rival space company founded by Richard Branson, the British businessman.Virgin Galactic’s suborbital ship is a space plane that takes off from a runway like a commercial airliner. It tops out at a lower altitude. The company sent Mr. Branson and three company employees to the edge of space in July aboard SpaceShipTwo, nine days before Mr. Bezos’ flight.Blue Origin has declined to publicly state a price for a ticket to fly on New Shepard. The company is nearing $100 million in sales so far, Mr. Bezos had said in July. But it’s unclear how many ticket holders that includes.Tickets on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo were hiked to $450,000 in August, from $250,000, when the company reopened ticket sales after a yearslong hiatus. And flights to orbit — a much higher altitude than Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic’s trips go — are far more expensive. Three passengers going to the International Space Station next year are paying $55 million each for their seats on a SpaceX rocket, bought through the company Axiom Space.An illustration of the proposed SpaceX Starship human lander on the moon.SpaceXVirgin Galactic’s passenger rocket plane VSS Unity, carrying Richard Branson and crew, beginning its ascent to the edge of space above New Mexico in July.Virgin Galactic, via ReutersBut space tourism is not Blue Origin’s only business, nor its only challenge. Earlier this year, the company lost out to SpaceX, the rival rocket company owned by the billionaire Elon Musk, for a lucrative NASA contract to land humans on the moon. The company is currently challenging the award to SpaceX in federal court, and may receive a ruling in November.Mr. Bezos’ company is also attempting to overcome technical hurdles in its effort to finish building its much bigger rocket, New Glenn, as well as that rocket’s engines, which are to be relied on by a competitor, United Launch Alliance, to fly NASA and Pentagon hardware on its rockets.Its most immediate challenge has concerned accusations that the company’s work culture allowed harassment and sexist behavior. In September, Alexandra Abrams, the former head of employee communications at Blue Origin, published an essay with 20 unnamed current and former employees of the company outlining those charges, as well as accusations that internal safety concerns were often dismissed by management.“Even if there are absolutely zero issues with all of Blue’s programs, which is absolutely not the case, a toxic culture bursting with schedule pressure and untrustworthy leaders breeds and encourages failures and mistakes each and every day,” Ms. Abrams said this week.Blue Origin disputed the allegations in the essay, saying in a statement that the company has an internal hotline for sexual harassment complaints. And on Wednesday’s livestream of the launch, Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s astronaut sales director, emphasized the company’s safety record, saying “safety has been baked into the design of New Shepard from day one.”On Wednesday after the flight, Mr. Shatner also brought up New Shepard’s safety.“I think, just generally, the press needs to know how safe this was,” he said, adding “the technology is very safe, the approach was safe, the training was safe and everything went according to exactly what they predicted. We even waited for the winds an extra half-hour.”But asked by reporters if he would launch to space again, he said, “I am so filled with such an emotion, I don’t want to dissipate it by thinking of another journey.”Floating back to the west Texas desert after a successful mission.LM Otero/Associated PressDavid Streitfeld and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. More

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      Many 'Star Trek' Fans Are Eager to See William Shatner Go to Space

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      The voyages of Captain James T. Kirk and the starship Enterprise in the 1960s created a fandom that has expanded exponentially over the decades, much like the cute but deadly tribbles of the original “Star Trek” television series. Now many “Trek” fans are excited as William Shatner, the man who embodies that role, readies himself to venture into space — for real.“I think this is fantastic for the ‘Star Trek’ mythos, to have the guy who really started it all to go into space,” said Russ Haslage, who co-founded the fan organization The Federation, also known as the International Federation of Trekkers, with Gene Roddenberry, the creator of “Star Trek,” in the 1980s.Through the lens of “Star Trek,” human space travel has typically had a rosy tint. Much of the show’s universe takes place hundreds of years in the future, with humanity venturing into the Milky Way after surviving a brutal 21st century. Homo sapiens expand from our solar system under the flag of United Earth, a founding member of the United Federation of Planets, an egalitarian alliance of intelligent species. That vision, started in Mr. Roddenberry’s original TV series, is a culmination of the events set in motion by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, when he became the first human to travel to space.Captain Kirk is arguably the most extreme incarnation of the show’s high-minded, moralistic vision.“He’s the guy who’s at the center of all of this,” said Mr. Haslage, who’s planning to offer live commentary on the launch’s livestream via The Federation’s YouTube and Facebook pages. “There wouldn’t be any of this without Captain Kirk.”Carly Creer, a moderator for a “Star Trek” Facebook group with over 150,000 members, grew up watching the original series with her father. Mr. Shatner is a regular at an annual “Star Trek” convention in Las Vegas that she often attends.“If we didn’t have Captain Kirk and that awesome force that he created, we wouldn’t have the amazing fandom that we’ve got,” Ms. Creer said.The involvement of billionaires like Jeff Bezos selling private spaceflight experiences to wealthy customers has generated considerable criticism. But among fans like Ms. Creer there is a fascination with what both NASA and private companies are working to accomplish.“I’ve really appreciated how SpaceX and Blue Origin have stepped in,” she said. “I really think it’s just amazing. It’s been so wonderful to watch, because as a fan of ‘Star Trek’ all you want is to see that future that Gene Roddenberry created so well.” More