The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Photos show enduring traces of man’s lunar visits Posted: 08 Sep 2011 01:18 AM PDT  Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) image shows the Apollo 12 landing site on the moon. LRO captured the sharpest images ever taken from space of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites. Images show the twists and turns of the paths made when the astronauts explored the lunar surface. — Reuters/Nasa pic The National Aeronautics and Space Administration released three pictures on Tuesday snapped over the past month by its two-year-old Lunar Reconnaissance Vehicle.  The Apollo 14 landing site on the moon, and paths left by astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell on both Apollo 14 moon walks. — Reuters/Nasa pic "These images remind us of our fantastic Apollo history and beckon us to continue to move forward in exploration of our solar system," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at Nasa Headquarters in Washington. The LRO has been taking pictures of the moon's surface for more than two years. But scientists made an adjustment to its orbit in August that helped produce the higher resolution images. The manoeuvre temporarily lowered the LRO from its usual orbiting altitude of about 50km from the moon's surface to as low as 21km. The spacecraft remained in the lower orbit for four weeks, long enough for the moon to completely rotate and for the LRO wide angle camera to get the pictures of the three landing sites and the trails astronauts left in the moon's thin soil as they stepped out of the relative safety of their lunar modules and explored the moon on foot. As lawmakers in Washington move to cut federal spending and reduce the deficit, the US space agency is fighting to retain funding for human spaceflight. In July, Nasa's 26-year-old space shuttle programme completed its last flight. The agency had hoped to resume its moon programme but that programme was shelved last year because of budget cuts. — Reuters |
| Curators make hard choices at 9/11 museum Posted: 07 Sep 2011 06:46 PM PDT  A recovered FDNY Squad 252 helmet belonging to Kevin M. Prior. Prior, a firefighter with Brooklyn's Squad 252, can be seen in video footage of the North Tower lobby recorded after the first plane hit getting ready to go upstairs. Responding to a mayday call sent out by fellow firefighters encountering breathing problems, he and five other members of the squad are thought to have been on a floor in the 20s when the tower collapsed. Prior's body was found three weeks after the attacks and buried on Long Island, but his mother was troubled that his helmet had not been returned to the family, and said as much in a television interview. An employee at the city's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner recognised Prior's squad and badge numbers, and hand-delivered the badly damaged helmet to his grateful family. — Reuters pic "We're not here to traumatise our visitors," said Alice Greenwald, director of New York's 9/11 Memorial Museum, which is due to open in its underground home at the Ground Zero site next year on the 11th anniversary of the attacks. "Monumental artefacts are one thing, but we also have a human story to tell," Greenwald said. Some of the most potentially disturbing exhibits are being set aside from the main exhibition spaces in special alcoves to allow visitors a chance to decide whether or not to view it. It is here that museum curators have placed material such as images of people plummeting from the burning towers after the buildings were struck by airliners hijacked by al Qaeda militants, and a recording of the measured voice of a flight attendant aboard one of the planes moments before her death.  A helmet belonging to Chief Joseph Pfeifer. The battalion chief of Engine 7, Ladder 1, was on a routine call in downtown Manhattan when he heard the roar of American Airlines Flight 11 passing overhead on course for the North Tower of the World Trade Center. His unit was one of the first to arrive at the scene, and he set up a command centre in the North Tower's lobby. That day, he was being followed by two French filmmaker brothers, Jules and Gedeon Naudet, and their footage from the scene shows Pfiefer's brother Kevin, a firefighter in a different unit, preparing to head upstairs for the unfolding rescue mission. When the South Tower collapsed, Pfiefer radioed evacuation orders to his officers in the North Tower. Pfiefer, along with the rest of Ladder 1, survived that day. His brother did not. — Reuters pic It's a familiar problem for people aiming to memorialise wars and atrocities. "We're not just a history museum, we're also a memorial institution and so the tension that happens between commemoration and documentation is a flash point," Greenwald said in an interview at the museum's offices overlooking the ongoing construction of a facility that will occupy seven stories below ground at the World Trade Center site. Greenwald is no stranger to these debates. For almost two decades she helped create exhibits at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington memorialising the murder of millions of people at the hands of the Nazis during World War Two. 'The 9/11 story' Greenwald and her colleagues are aware that there are countless objects that might overwhelm a visitor. There will be photos of the 19 al Qaeda hijackers, although Greenwald said they would be presented as "criminals". Another difficult question for curators was whether to include disturbing pictures of victims who jumped or fell from the towers. Excluding such pictures would be a serious omission, Greenwald said. The photos would be located in an alcove clearly marked with a warning, and none of the people pictured would be identifiable, she added. "It is one of the aspects of the 9/11 story that if you didn't include it, you're not telling the story," she said. In choosing audio recordings of the last words spoken by some victims, the museum avoided some of the most distressing calls to the 911 emergency phone number. "That's a form of human remains," Greenwald said. "We will include nothing that feels like a moment when we shouldn't have been there."  Blood-stained shoes worn by Linda Lopez as she evacuated from the 97th Floor of Tower 2. Lopez was at work at the Fiduciary Trust Company on the South Tower's 97th floor when the first plane crashed into North Tower, sending a fireball past their window and radiating a heat that she said felt like being sunburned. There was quickly a sense of confusion: Was it a bomb? Were the rumours that it was a plane crash true? Should people in the South Tower ignore the advice coming over the public address system to stay put and evacuate instead? Lopez felt she had to get out. She had reached only as far as the 61st when she was thrown against a wall as the second plane crashed into the floors above her. Taking off her shoes, she continued to head down the stairs, passing firefighters heading in the opposite direction. She ran barefoot out of the building, across broken glass and other debris. "Lady, your feet are bleeding," someone said to her as she paused a few blocks away in relative safety. She put her shoes back on, and began learning the details of what it was she had just escaped from. — Reuters pic This includes the remarkably composed voice of Betty Ong, a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, as she relays details of the bloody hijacking to colleagues on the ground in the minutes before the plane crashed into the North Tower. The museum has acquired hundreds of items belonging to victims, survivors and first responders. The significance of a horribly crushed fireman's helmet is obvious. Other items might be more subtle in their importance: dust-caked shoes, a crumpled wallet, clothing, a never-finished knitting project, a blackened doll — all commonplace items that have taken on the air of relics. The museum has been sculpted out of the vastness of the World Trade Center's foundations, and incorporates part of the slurry wall, originally built to hold back the waters of the Hudson River and which survived the buildings' collapse. There will be a memorial exhibition for the 2,982 people killed in the September 11 attacks and in the 1993 bombings of the World Trade Center that were a prelude to the later event. The exit of the museum has been designed so that visitors emerge at the heart of the 9/11 Memorial — cascading waterfalls set into the footprints of the fallen towers surrounded by bronze panels bearing the names of the dead. "For every heart-wrenching story you have 10 stories about the goodness of human beings," Greenwald said. Referring to future visitors to the museum, she added, "They're going to come out with a lot to think about." — Reuters |
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