Some short words from the opening of the 28th Planetary Congress, as they call
it, from the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) which is taking Place in
Sweden right now, until the 27th of September. The full program in English is
below, including the school visits in the middle of the week, and the sessions
which will take place around weekend at the Linnéaus University. The opening
was held in the Stockholm Concert Hall, the Grunewald saloon (near the bigger
hall for the Nobel Prize ceremonies) and in the afternoon andtomorrow there
will be sessions at the Royal Technical institute (known in Swedish as KTH). I
plan to attend, if I can get a seat.
The hall was packed. I believe lots of family members to the 100 astronauts
gathered took up many of the chairs.
https://www.ase2015.se/kongressen/openprogramme/
Moderator waas the Swedish astronaut and now professor at the Royal Technical
Institute, Christer Fuglesang. And sang some people did. We haad a small group
of mucisians from KTH and songs by Gunnar Lundberg ("What a Wonderful World")
and Gunilla Backman (from the Mamma Mia! musial; she did "THe Winner Takes it
All"). Among speakers we had the ASE president, Japanese astronaut Soichi
Nogushi, The Swedish Space Board's president Peter Gudmundson and the KTH
president Peter Gudmundson. I sat next to a professor (Leif Kari) from KTH and
Clas Svahn from the DN newspaper, who I know from Before, and sat and took
notes like mad on my laptop, and snapping Pictures with my lousy mobile. But
the pics will be good enough for the web - the Europa SF site I write for will
hopefully get a report. (They expressed interest to know what's happening in
Swedish space activities. Sweden hopes to upgrade the northern Esrange research
base to launch small polar satellites, there are hopes for a Virgin Galactic
"Spaceport Sweden" there, and the government has just announced new space
policies, though not radically new. I'll havee to get back to that.)
The Swedish minister for Higher Education and Space, Helene Hellmark Knutsson
also spoke, eg about the importance of space to keep an Eye on who things are
going with Earth's Environment. After a coffee breal (where I bumped into Carl
Mikael Zetterling, former editor of the Scaandinavian SF Association zine who
is now working wwith high-temp curcuits which could be used on Venus, the
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield held a very inspired speech, about the
importance of visions - eg from films like "2001" and books. It makes people
want to know mor about the universe and pushes our mental frontiers - or
something to that effect.
Two women astronauts then talked about their recent missions to ISS, Elena
Serova, Russia, and Samantha Cristoforetti, Italy (who BTW now is the woman
with longest space stay, 200 Days!). They mentioned the Beautiful views they
had from ISS of our planet, and explained some of the experiments the ISS crew
did.
But the most interesting thing this far was professor Anders Ynnerman from
Linköping University, who demonstrated his and his group's space visualisation
software. You begin on Earth and then you can zoom out to virtually the edge of
known space, with *realtime* data. IE he demonstrated how we in this program
could see the latest Pictures from Mars and Pluto, and then we could zoom and
zoom out, se all the systems with known exoplanets, and the latest rendering of
our galaxy super Group, and the background radiation sphere... Very, very
impressive. There's a planetarium dome in Norrköping where you can see this in
3D (with glasses) and I guess that would be absolutely stunning.
I'm off shortly to the afternoon session, "Advances in European Space
Exploration".
--Ahrvid
...hm, this became a longer report than Ihad intended. (I write fast. With
probably lots of typos.)
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