Intrepid Museum
Virtual Astronomy Live
The Hidden Heroes of Space Research
Past EVENT
Thursday, Nov 18th, 2021
5:30 PM EST
Space travel brings fully into focus a set of sense organs that most of us take for granted—the vestibular organs that give us much of our sense of body orientation. Up is up, down is down and ok, gravity is there, but we take it for granted. These “labyrinth organs” sit right next to our organs of hearing in the inner ear. In space flight lift-off and return, and in some other maneuvers, unusual forces impinge on the labyrinthine organ detectors of linear and angular acceleration. The result can be disorientation and also often motion sickness that can be debilitating. People with defective labyrinths (so-called LD individuals) do not suffer from these problems—and they could be ideal space travelers for that reason. They are already the unsung heroes of research on body orientation. Studying them has given so much information about the orientation control of our bodies. Most LD individuals are deaf. A brave group of LD subjects from Gallaudet College, the famous US school for the deaf, were key to developing measures of balance and orientation.
In the 1960s and early 70’s an extraordinary body of research was done by Ashton Graybiel, Head of the Navy’s School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Graybiel brought Gallaudet students to Pensacola. His work was crucial to preparing for the early American space flights. Now, in a center at Brandeis, Dr. James Lackner heads the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory, where advanced work probes how to predict vulnerabilities to space flight problems, and at the same time uncovers the remarkable power of combinations of vestibular and touch-pressure signals to influence our daily lives. An important part of this work continues to be tied to Gallaudet College, and now extends to far-flung fields including driverless vehicles, combatting falling in older populations, and disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. This Intrepid Virtual Astronomy Program will sing for the unsung Gallaudet heroes and show how the physiology of space flight now extends to many fields.
A 5:00pm pre-show will take place with an interactive talk from an Intrepid Museum Educator about the “Making History Accessible” exhibit on display.
American Sign Language Interpreters and Live Captioning (CART) will be available for this program
The event is hosted and co-produced by John “Das” Galloway, founder of the Kerbal Space Academy.
This program is supported through a NASA Cooperative Agreement awarded to the New York Space Grant Consortium.
Participants
Ann Graybiel
Institute Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ann Graybiel is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she heads a laboratory devoted to advancing understanding of the neural circuits related to the control of mood and motivation. These circuits engage the deep forebrain and are implicated in a wide range of neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders. These range from Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disorders, to depression and anxiety, OCD/ ASD spectrum and even schizophrenia/bipolar spectrum disorders. The circuits are vulnerable in aging, exhibit markers of early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and affect key neuromodulators in the brain and their sensitivity to many drugs of abuse. The laboratory is dedicated to discovering the neural mechanisms and genes underlying the functions of these circuits in order to help individuals with such problems.
James R Lackner
Director
Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory
James R Lackner is the Director of the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory and Riklis Professor of Physiology at Brandeis University. He received his BSc and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Graybiel laboratory has the only live-in, rotating artificial gravity facility in the United States as well as comprehensive facilities for studying virtually all aspects of human movement control and orientation. Its experiments in parabolic flight, space flight, and artificial gravity environments, and with labyrinthine-loss, deaf, and blind individuals, have revealed how rapidly humans can adapt to unusual force conditions and how surprisingly complex our sensory-motor adaptations to Earth gravity are, although we do not directly consciously sense or plan them.
Summer Ash
Moderator
Summer Ash has been both a rocket scientist and an astrophysicist. She is a freelance science writer and communicator whose work has been published in The Atlantic, NBC News, Smithsonian, Now.Space, Scientific American, Slate, and Nautilus.
John “Das”Galloway
Host and Producer
“Das” is a science outreach communicator who specializes in live, interactive video content. He is the creator of the Kerbal Space Academy, where he uses video games as a tool to start science and engineering conversations with viewers of all ages, and VECTORS Virtual Field Trips, which brings real-time interactive video to museums, events, and historical locations. “Das” also serves as a host and producer for NASASpaceflight.com.
Produced by Intrepid Museum in partnership with Kerbal Space Academy and Egress Productions, LLC.