Collins Unbound

NASA

The International Space Station (ISS) orbits the earth at an average altitude of 240 miles. It’s traveling at a speed of about 17,000 mph and is roughly the size of a football field. There is an international, six-person crew on board performing scientific experiments and earth observations.

The ISS is the third brightest object in the sky after the sun, moon and Venus and is easy to spot if you know where to look. Visit NASA’s Spot the Station website to sign up for alerts for when it will be passing over your neighborhood.

The ISS was launched in October 2000 and assembly was completed in 2010. It is arguably the quintessential ‘big science’ project that has remained controversial due to its dubious scientific benefit and sky high costs.

Collins Library holds a number of books, e-Government documents and magazine/journal/newspaper literature on the ISS as well as other big science projects, manned spaceflight, and other related topics.

Try a subject search in the Collins Catalog on ‘International Space Station’ to get started. Also search EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier  database for journal, magazine and newspaper articles.

What do you think? Is the ISS a colossal waste of money or critical to our future in space? Like so many issues, some personal reading, research and consideration of the complexities of the topic are required. Beware of bias and incomplete information available on the internet. Library resources can provide a more balanced perspective.

Hubble Deep Field (1996) NASA

Have you ever wondered about the scale of the universe from the smallest microscopic entity up to the extent of our vast universe? Scale of the Universe presents this concept beautifully using simple illustrations, a horizontal slider, and minimal text. It spans 62 orders of magnitude: 35 orders of magnitude smaller than you, and 27 orders of magnitude larger. Here’s a quick sample of what you will find along the journey.

10^-35 meter                         String, Planck length, quantum foam (not confirmed)

10^-14.7 meter                       (10 yoctometers) proton

3 x 10^-9 meter                    (3 nanometers) DNA

5 x 10^-3 meter                    (5 millimeters) grain of rice

1.7 x 10⁰ meters                (1.7 meters) human

1 x 10² meters                   (100 meters) Redwood tree

1.27 x 10⁷ meters             (12,700 kilometers) Earth

1.4 x 10⁹ meters                (1.4 million kilometers) Sun

1.2 x 10²¹ meters              (120,000 light-years) Milky Way Galaxy

1.27 x 10²⁶ meters            (1.27 billion light-years) Distance to the Hubble Deep Field, a seemingly empty spot in the sky near the Big Dipper for which the Hubble Space Telescope did a long exposure photograph in 1995 and discovered 1500 distant galaxies.

9.3 x 10²⁶ meters              (93 billion light-years) Radius of the Universe. The age of the universe is 13.7 billion years but it is expanding.

1.6 x 10²⁷ meters              (160 billion light-years) Observable Universe

The widely acclaimed ten-minute film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames (1968) is a narrated version of the same concept as Scale of the Universe.

Search the Collins Library catalog on the subject terms ‘cosmological distances,’ or ‘physical measurements,’ to find books and other resources on this topic. Here are a few titles to explore.

• Asimov, Isaac. 1983. The Measure of the Universe.  New York: Harper & Row.
• Bishop, Owen. 1984. Yardsticks of the Universe. New York: P. Bedrick Books.
• Cadogan, Peter H. 1985. From Quark to Quasar:Notes on the Scale of the Universe. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Van Helden, Albert. 1985. Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Submitted by Elizabeth Knight, Interim Science Librarian