Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Listen to the planets

There is a great interactive solar system at Spacesounds.com where you can listen to the "music of the spheres".

You can also hear flight recordings from space missions here, including Apollo 13.
(I watched it again for the nth time on Sunday - anyone else see it? - and appreciate it even more, hence this post.)

Thanks to their years of intensive
military and mission training, the astronauts would have remained extremely calm. Lovell's famed "Houston, we have a problem" sounds surprisingly matter-of-fact, compared to the panic portrayed in the movie. (If you can hang on until 14 minutes in, out of a total of 38.) Throughout the crisis, from troubleshooting to resolution, you may perceive that the crew have snapped into a familiar military operation mode.

Those were the days of heroes...


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And now to the point of this post:

Join me on a tour of our universe...!

You will hear radio and gamma waves and elecromagnetic pulses converted into frequencies audible to humans.


Turn up the volume and listen to Jupiter (and enjoy the video):


Personally, I can't get enough of it.



Now turn the volume down a bit (tis scary) and listen to Saturn - with lots of info:



More here:
NASA's SSE Galileo site


And here is the sound of our Earth:



Planetary Multi-Pack: Here are a Uranian moon (Miranda), a Jovian moon (Io), Neptune, Uranus, our melodic Earth, and a very eerie Saturn:




You've got to love the universe even more now, for you have heard it.

11 comments:

Um Naief said...

haven't listened to the sounds yet, for naief is sleeping, but will in a bit.

as far as the crew of the apollo, yes indeed, that was the time of true heroes.

by the way, do you watch that series? heroes?

this post is very interesting. i can't wait to listen to this... especially saturn!!!

Olivia said...

Um Naief - woohoo! Can't wait to hear what you think.

Nope, I don't watch Heroes, can't get into it somehow. The new import that I do like is Pushing Daisies. It started in the US when I was there last October, and it's only been on here for a few weeks, so I will be skipping a huge chunk.

Will be back later today.

Anonymous said...

What a fascinating entry! I've always been interested in space and science fiction.
I've got a CD somewhere which has a 'tour of the solar system' on it. I'll find it and have another look at it as it's been been ages since I last did.
This also reminds me of just how noisy the oceans are which some people find surprising. xx

Anonymous said...

Great subject Liv. Really amazing sounds!

The Moody Minstrel said...

That is really cool!

BTW have you ever heard any old Tangerine Dream, such as the Zeit album? Jupiter in particular really reminds me of it!

Anonymous said...

Ooooh, can't wait to get home and watch your clips (they've nipped the sound at my office computer).

CafeMark said...

Hmm, looks like you're competing for the most original blog entry of the month! Fascinating stuff! I think my next project will be searching out total silence - I wonder if it exists! Have a nice holiday weekend. Mark-CafeCortado

Anonymous said...

It's so fascinating that Jupiter just sounds gigantic. You really get a sense of it as an entity. And you're right about Saturn. There's a metallic edginess to it. Have to run now, but will come back to listen some more - so interesting! How do you find these things!

Nabeel said...

yes, i have heard about this. Hope you also know about this SETI project where they are listening to radio signals from outer space ... but see intelligent beings (if any) might not use radio signals (they deflect) and there are so many things in the universe which might block the signal. So they came up with some other form of wave to listen to, that can easily penetrate various cosmic objects. They are building a massive machine to listen to it (5 times bigger than the eifel tower)

Olivia said...

Mark - really? Most original :) yay me!

Nope, I don't believe there is total silence - yes, in the vacuum of space, but of course if you took your helmet off you wouldn't be around for very long to hear it.

***

Nikki - I'm awed by the sound of Jupiter, but don't really like Saturn. Speaking of which, I used to drive one, in silver plum.

***

Nabeel - Of course I know about SETI. 6 or 7 years ago, at university, I used my computer's down time to help out - at the time anyone could download a screensaver with a very smooth Star Trek style interface and contribute some processing power to the project. It was discontinued after a while, I believe. Probably for the reasons you've given. I wondered at the time, how we humans place the universe into our own little box. Radio waves, how primitive, ha!

cha0tic said...

Heroes don't need military training. I know a number of people that can/have keep/kept a clear head in life threatening situations as I've been privileged enough to work with them.