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NASA STEREO Spacecraft Set to Launch

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bring-yer-3d-glasses dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As first reported on last year, NASA's STEREO mission is set to launch tonight at 8:38pm EST. The two near-identical spacecraft will give us unprecedented stereoscopic views of the Sun-Earth system, hopefully leading to the creation of the first 3-D movies of the Sun! Launch can be watched live on NASA TV with coverage starting at 6:30pm EST."

1 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Gigantic 3D glasses being erected in desert . . . by StefanJ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    . . . for those who haven't figured out the trick of fusing images by crossing their eyes.

    * * *

    Funky fictional anecdote.

    Olaf Stapledon's science fiction "novel" (more like a future history) Last and First Men covers the evolution of humanity from us poor demi-apes to a hyper-evolved species living on a terraformed Neptune two billion years from now.

    These "last men" are not only telepathic (and have 96 genders and look like anthropomorphic animals), but they can communicate with themselves across time.

    Stapledon describes the "last men" astronomers staring at the sky, sending a telepathic impression of the sight one-half of a Neptune year in the future, where their future selves integrate it with their own observation of the sky to create a wide-baseline 3D parallax image of the heavens.

    No. I don't know what Stapledon smoked.

    Stefan