By Alanna Norton
For Murphy News Service
“I remember distinctly watching the Apollo 10 mission, as a number of my cousins where there, and I remember how hot the living room was, huddled around the black-and-white TV, and the comment that my grandmother made that she was alive when the Wright brothers flew, and now we are at the moon.”
Chick Woodward was reflecting on some of his early memories that helped spark his interest in space and the unknown. His grandmother was a shop steward of a cleaning crew at a large aerospace company in Ohio that made machine parts for NASA.
Woodward, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Minnesota, said he worries that the pressure to be the most advanced country technologically has lessened significantly since the space race. He said he fears that Americans are more interested in sports and entertainment than science, falling behind more driven countries such as China or India.
Space programs have recently produced increasingly interactive and dynamic social media content to reach future explorers. But is that outreach succeeding in piquing enough interest in a field that is losing government funding and news coverage?
There are indications that it is.
The Mars rover Curiosity, an endearing WALL-E-like robotic vehicle, has become one of the most recognized NASA projects in recent decades. The rover’s twitter account @marscuriosity has more than 1.54 million followers.
Its first tweet “I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL” got almost 70,000 retweets and 14,000 favorites.
Part of its appeal, Woodward said, is in the design. The front cameras on the rover are intended to look like eyes, the computer box like a face. He said the rover needed two front cameras for specific functions, but that there were several ways to arrange them. NASA elected to choose the design that looked the most appealing to people to create interest and even affection for the machine, and consequently, for the project.
That interest has not waned much since the project’s beginning. These days, @marscuriosity still at times gets between 6,000 retweets per post.
Other social media outlets have also been successful: NASA’s video about the difficulties of landing the rover, “Seven Minutes of Terror,” has attracted more than 3 million views on YouTube.
And NASA isn’t the only group publishing videos about space. A clip created by a user called Satire published the video “We’re NASA and We Know It” sung to the melody of “I’m Sexy and I Know It” has gotten more than 2.8 million views.
“It’s cool to be a geek,” Lucy Fortson, a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota, said.
She submits that TV shows such as “The Big Bang Theory” have perpetuated a new ‘geek chic’ culture, elevated in our technological society.
The idea of a scientist celebrity is hardly new. Television shows such as “Cosmos,” from 1980, featured Carl Sagan explaining the origins of the universe and some of its many mysteries.
Astrophysicists and scientists today, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, are featured on television shows, podcasts, conventions and other events.
Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut and YouTube celebrity, published a song called “Space Oddity” that has more than 21 million views on the website.
And “Star Trek’s” Spock used his vast knowledge of science and technology to riddle out some of the Starfleet’s many problems long before Sheldon of “The Big Bang Theory.” Woodward said Spock was his favorite scientist to look up to as a child because he was an explorer and “science wizard.”
NASA’s social media outreach isn’t limited to the traditional media design of production and consumption. People are able to earn badges on Foursquare, a social media website focusing on locations, when they check in at a NASA visitor center, science museum or planetarium.
Fans can watch events live, then post and comment. They can repurpose content and post creations on their timelines, Twitter accounts and Instagrams.
NASA last year sponsored a voting contest to name a new station module that would be sent to the International Space Station. TV comedian Steven Colbert promoted the event on “The Colbert Report” and jokingly encouraged viewers to vote for the module to be named Colbert.
And “Colbert “won.
NASA elected to name the module Tranquility after an Apollo mission, but they went on Colbert’s show and announced they would name a gravity treadmill on the module after him.
Not only can citizens have an influence on scientific projects, they are also able to appreciate and actively participate in new advancements without a Ph.D. They can now feel as though they are part of the adventure.
Citizen science, or crowd-sourced science, is research assisted or conducted by nonprofessional scientists.
The Zooniverse project is a group of 12 web-based citizen science projects ranging from astronomy to biology. Galaxy Zoo is one of those projects and uses crowd-sourcing to identify types of galaxies observed by the Hubble telescope. The website suggests an inside scoop into new discoveries.
The headline reads: “Few have witnessed what you are about to see” and underneath it tells viewers they will “experience a privileged glimpse of the distant universe”.
Galaxy Zoo is easy to navigate with pictures of different shapes and types of galaxies to click on and identify. After each identification, the website gives users an option to discuss their findings with other citizen scientists.
This builds community and a sense of attachment, Forston said, and it encourages users to continue to participate in the classifications.
She said participants often protest the completion of projects because they become emotionally invested in the work and community they have created together. That can be beneficial when advocating for more funding or support for the continuance of an exploration, but can become an issue if the project has been completed but those who have invested so much time don’t want it to be taken down.
Fortson said Zooniverse often tries to promote new projects and encourage reliable citizen scientists to work on another project after their current research has been completed.
There has also been no change in enrollment of college astronomy courses, Woodward said.
So why all the fear of falling behind?
America is no longer capable of deep thought and enduring hours of calculations, Woodward said, citing a novel by Nicholas Carr titled “The Shallows.” The wealth of information available is too vast. The interest in space exploration is there, some students simply can’t muster the discipline required to make it a career, he said.
Evan Skillsman, a professor of astronomy at the University of Minnesota, disagreed. He argued the wealth of information published by NASA and other programs allows people to more easily acquire information on topics such as supernovas or habitable planets. He said the Internet allows him to find research much more efficiently, rather than hindering him.
Fortson said the disconnect could be society’s “surface interest” in technology and the time commitment needed to understand and use that technology. I
In other words, it might be cool to be a nerd, but studying difficult, lengthy equations may not be.
Woodward recalled a conference he attended where the host turned off the wifi in the building to encourage participants to focus on speakers rather than tweet or send out instant messages. He said the participants were so upset the host turned the wifi back on after only three hours.
Short attention spans and the inability to step away from the Internet are not exclusively a problem with members of the Millennial generation, those born since the early ‘80s.
Woodward predicts NASA and other programs will continue to educate and reach out to citizens through social media because it is a cheap and effective tool able to reach a wide range of audiences.
Programs will also continue to utilize crowd-sourcing to identify new galaxies and planets, Fortson said, noting the use of citizen science may increase as data rates continue growing.
“That’s where the social media aspect is critical. Because if you’re sort of a lone wolf sitting there and you are an untrained person and you’re just going through and finding something that looks strange, if – say you don’t have the time or effort or energy- So what? So, that’s just gone.” Fortson said.
“[Now] all you have to do is post in 140 characters ‘I found something strange, #strange’.”
The online discussion rooms on various Zooniverse projects allow users to compare and collaborate, she said, turning an anomaly into a pattern. Crowd sourcing creates communities within projects while making discoveries that are impossible to program into a computer.
Americans might not need specific events like the Apollo missions to rally behind, as long as they can connect through shared astronomical interests online, Fortson said.
Alanna Norton is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.