Amy recently had an art project where she had to draw an object provided by a friend, with the story behind the object. I volunteered the 3D glasses I’d gotten at the NASA Tweetup for Juno. Here’s the drawing and the story.
On the first morning of the Juno event I had to stop at the NASA KSC Media Accreditation office to register. It was a cool Florida morning, with the sun rising through a patchy fog over the green marshes of the Space Center Nature Preserve, the famous cube of the Vehicle Assembly Building towering over it all, with a wisp of lenticular cloud hovering over its roof like some kind of misty yarmulke.
At the accreditation office we received a NASA-branded bag of freebies, with a press kit, stickers, buttons, and a pair of red/blue 3D glasses with the JPL logo and Twitter mascot printed on them. I wondered at the time what we’d need 3D glasses for — after all we’d be watching a rocket launch in real life. I found out the next day: Doug Ellison of JPL demoed to us his space visualization software, Eyes on the Solar System, which had a red/blue anaglyph mode to see 3D models of stars, planets, and spacecraft. In some ways the immersive experience of soaring through the solar system in 3D was almost as enthralling as the rocket launch itself later that day.
I still have the 3D glasses today, and use them to view NASA EYES, look at 3D anaglyphs from the Mars Rovers, and occasionally play Minecraft in 3D mode. They’re just cardboard and cellophane, and have gotten a bit crumpled, but they’re still a functional pair of 3D glasses I got from NASA, that time I watched a rocket launch a robot to soar amidst the planets.
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