Natural History Museum curators eye New Horizon Pluto images for solar system exhibition
This article originally appeared on Culture24.
Curators at the Natural History Museum are hoping the New Horizon mission to Pluto will feature in their major exhibition about the solar system
Europa, Jupiter's ice-covered ocean moon© NASA JPL / Michael Benson, Kinetikon PicturesOtherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System will run from January 22 to May 15 2016 and will bring together over 70 composite images created by artist, curator and writer Michael Benson from raw NASA and ESA data.
Benson is currently visiting the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, USA, and is engaged in a race against time to turn the incoming data into exhibition art.
“It's very exciting, and the atmosphere here is quite electric, in particular because the first close image of the solar system’s outermost world proves that it’s a quite fascinatingly variegated place, with multiple kinds of terrain,” he says.
New Horizon’s flypast could provide the exhibition with a complete set of the classic nine planets, even though Pluto was demoted from planets status in 2006. However, Benson is hedging his bets as to whether or not he can include the Pluto images in the exhibition.
“I do hope to use the mission’s image data to composite an image of Pluto for the Otherworlds exhibition, though it will take many months for the spacecraft to trickle the full resolution images to Earth. So we’ll see if there is time.”
Mars, an afternoon view within the Gusev Crater© NASA JPL / Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures“Through the agency of a small squadron of increasingly sophisticated robotic spacecraft, we’ve seen Earth dwindle to the size of a pearl, and then a pixel, as we voyaged far beyond any place ever directly visited by human beings,” says Benson.
“As a result, the archipelago of planets within which the Earth turns has become tangibly, vividly real.
"Otherworlds is a retrospective survey of an entire genre of photography and an overview of the solar system’s quite dazzling diversity of landscapes.”
The images will be supported by additional content, including an audio guide about the work of Museum research scientists such as Dr Joe Michalski who is investigating the geological processes which shaped Mars to better understand how our own planet was formed.
Otherworlds: Visions of our Solar System will be at the Natural History Museum, London, from January 22 until May 15 2016. Buy tickets online at www.nhm.ac.uk/otherworlds from September 25 2015.
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