Rice Teams Up on Next-Generation Planetarium

CONTACT: Lia Unrau

PHONE: (713)
831-4793

E-MAIL: unrau@rice.edu

RICE TEAMS WITH HMNS, NASA ON

NEXT-GENERATION
PLANETARIUM

When visitors enter the redesigned
Burke Baker Planetarium at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, they will
experience the result of a collaboration between the museum, Rice University and
NASA aimed at bringing to life the most current knowledge and images of space
available.

The world’s first immersive, full-color planetarium, which will
open at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) on December 11, was made
possible in part by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) grant
administered by Rice University.

Rice’s contributions to the planetarium are two-fold: to supply
funding for the new projection equipment, and to supply source material and
graphics for the new planetarium programs.

Through the NASA funding, Rice supplied the planetarium’s four
new projectors, which create high-resolution, color, panoramic video, and six
computers, four of which drive the projectors. One of the computers is used for
rendering images, and another manages the links between the computers and source
material at Rice, NASA, on the Internet and elsewhere.

Rice uses real-time data about earth and space gathered from
the Internet and from NASA missions to create computer-generated images for use
in planetarium programming. The most current images available will be fed to the
planetarium via a Rice server.

“Rice is the interface between NASA and the museum,” says
Patricia Reiff, professor and chair of the Department of Space Physics and
Astronomy at Rice and principal investigator of the grant project. “We take an
image and put the audience in the middle of it.”

Reiff leads the NASA-funded project of which the planetarium is
a part, called “Museums Teaching Planet Earth,” a collaborative effort of Rice,
the HMNS and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. The Johnson
Space Center, the Department of Geography at the University of California at
Santa Barbara and TERC, Inc., are providing content expertise, with projection
system expertise from Sky-Skan, Inc., and image display software production by
Sybil Media, Inc.

“This represents the first of the next generation of
planetariums,” Reiff says. “Rather than using one computer and one
black-and-white display, this technology uses six computers and four
high-resolution color projectors driving the imagery.” New planetarium shows
will envelop the visitors in a wrap-around panorama of earth and space images,
some taken by astronauts or telescopes, others created with computer
graphics.

Some of the imagery will be taken from images that astronauts
have taken and will be taking on future flights. In addition, the theater will
feature new video and still imagery from shuttle astronauts as they orbit Earth
and assemble the International Space Station.

“We are re-creating the astronaut experience for the public,” Reiff says.

“The advantage of this new system,” she says, “is that anything
that you can imagine or create on a computer, we can fly you through it. We are
the first university-museum team in the world to provide this. Unlike virtual
reality displays, which only one person at a time can enjoy, the museum provides
a venue for nearly 200 visitors to share the experience at once.”

In addition to space and astronomy images, some of the future
imagery will include earth and space weather, volcanoes, fires, global
deforestation and ocean surface temperature changes.

The materials that Rice helps develop, along with new
interactive software for museum displays, will also go to other planetariums
around the country, once they are established.

The partnership is an outgrowth of an $850,000 “Creating the
Public Connection” NASA grant, administered by Rice, in which Rice and the HMNS
collaborated to bring earth and space information to the public, the first such
real-time museum display suite, now on display at a number of other museums and
at many schools around the country.

###