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Mahesh

10/09/22 06:23 AM IST

NASA’s sonification project

In News 
  • The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on December 25, 2021, and the first set of images taken by the powerful telescope was released in July 2022.
Data Sonification 
  • It refers to the use of sound values to represent real data.
  • It is the auditory version of data visualisation.
  • In NASA’s Chandra (sonification) project, for instance, data is represented using a number of musical notes.
  • The birth of a star, a cloud of dust or even a black hole can be ‘heard’ as a high- or low-pitched sound.
Process of images into sound translation
  • Telescopes in space collect digital data, in the form of ones and zeroes (binary), before converting them into images.
  • The images are visual representations of light and radiation of different wavelengths in space, that can’t be seen by the human eye.
  • The Chandra project has created a celestial concert by translating the same data into sound. Pitch and volume are used to denote the brightness and position of a celestial object or phenomenon.
  • Pitch is related to frequency of sound waves. Changing the number of vibrations per second changes the pitch.
  • Volume, or loudness, is related to the strength, intensity, pressure, or power of the sound. Bigger/amplified vibrations result in bigger/louder sounds.
Chandra X-ray Project
  • The Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched by Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999.
  • The Chandra X-ray Observatory is part of NASA's fleet of "Great Observatories" along with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope.
  • The "X-ray universe" refers to the universe as observed with telescopes designed to detect X-rays. X-rays are produced in the cosmos when matter is heated to millions of degrees. Such temperatures occur where high magnetic fields, or extreme gravity, or explosive forces exist in space.
  • The telescope is named after the Nobel Prize-winning Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
Source- The Hindu 

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