At JPL’s site in Second Life, you can walk around displays from Victoria crater or the Phoenix landing site, or sit in on a real NASA organizational meeting. Just watch out for those dust devils!

JPL Gets a Second Life

I’m perched on the edge of Mars’s Victoria crater, squinting to make out the sediment stratification in the walls across the way. Actually, it’s my avatar—my virtual persona—dodging a Martian dust devil as I amble through the alternate reality created by Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the online world called Second Life. Since JPL’s mission is to explore worlds outside the one we know, it’s only fitting that it should be breaking ground here. Second Life is an Internet portal to . . . anywhere. In this virtual world, users pick a character to walk or fly through spaces designed by other users. JPL’s piece of real estate is called Explorer Island. Like the ceiling of the Great Hall at Hogwarts, Explorer Island’s sky mirrors JPL’s real-time weather; the deer that wander JPL’s grounds in real life graze in front of the simulated visitor center. Except on Explorer Island, they can fly.

At the entrance to Explorer Island, you’re greeted with a pop-up memo listing upcoming NASA events. These workshops, exhibitions, and launches from the real world are open to audience participation on the island. In the “virtual world auditorium,” you can even participate in NASA meetings through your avatar. Of course, says Charles White, senior member of JPL’s technical staff and creator of Explorer Island, “social norms of real life apply.” You can contribute your input to the meetings, but scientists reserve the right to mute or even eject anyone who misbehaves.

Every Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. in the adjacent NASA neighborhood, called CoLab—the Collaborative Space Exploration Laboratory—NASA researchers mingle with the public. These meetings were originally designed to gather scientists from different parts of the world into the same virtual meeting room, but now any visitor is invited to sit in. The discussions can range from designing spacecraft to creating software for the virtual world or anything in between, as long as the members avoid topics that fall under the ITAR—International Traffic in Arms Regulations—umbrella.

But the coolest thing for most people is exploring places that JPL missions have visited. The magic of JPL’s presence in what White calls a “persistent synthetic environment” is the use of real data. (White, aka “Jet Burns” on Second Life, welcomes each new visitor with a pop-up card full of information. For example, those dust devils “. . . can be three times larger than a full tornado on Earth. In Second Life, you and two other friends can ride them around Mars Mountain.”)

White likes to tell of an avatar who said he cried for 10 minutes when he realized he was standing at the edge of Victoria crater. This is the story that brought me to the crater, which is no artist’s interpretation, but the real deal—or as real as you can get without actually going to Mars. It’s built from photos taken by the rover Opportunity, which crawled into it last September to explore the layered sedimentary rocks that are thought to have been deposited long ago, when water flowed. You can also trudge over rugged red terrain to various exhibits, but watch out for those dust devils and the giant airbag that sweep by every so often. If you’re quick, you can catch a ride on the airbag, whose route will change once you hop aboard.

As you descend from the Mars mock-up, you climb a ramp carpeted in the latest
views of Titan’s methane lakes. From there you can ascend the scaffolding of Explorer Island’s launching pad, highlighted with glowing red spotlights. The Mars Phoenix lander was carried aloft by a Delta II rocket on August 4, 2007, in the first simulcast launch on Second Life, says White. Around 40 avatars attended, filling the program’s capacity. The Dawn spacecraft, which will visit the asteroid Vesta and the former-asteroid-now-dwarf-planet Ceres, followed on September 27. The pad now has room for 100 avatars, and it filled to capacity on January 31, when Explorer I lifted off on the 50th anniversary of the real-life event. An audio tape of the 1958 launch accompanied the rocket’s ascent, giving visitors the realest taste they’re likely to get of America’s entry into the Space Age.

Visitors can still follow bright yellow signs to the Phoenix landing, which was celebrated on May 25 in Second Life as it was in real life. In the large display area, you can investigate a mockup of the lander to your heart’s content, check out real images of Phoenix on the surface of Mars and its first scoop of Martian soil, and even pick up a free Phoenix T-shirt for your avatar.

For the time being, Explorer Island is still in the research phase. White anticipates that interactions like the ones facilitated in this virtual world—where anyone can talk to a NASA scientist and scientists can meet “outside the lab”—are as inevitable as e-mail. “Virtual worlds will just get better and better and more powerful. We need to explore this,” he says. “The world is virtual, but the communication and the experiences are real. People talk about it as if they were there.”

Caltech Professor of Astronomy George Djorgovski agrees. He was recently featured at Second Life’s SciArt Media Learning Center, where he regaled an audience of around 50 avatars during “A Special Online Event: The Richard Feynman 90th Birthday Party / Astronomy and Physics Virtual Conference,” otherwise known as “Dick’s Digital Nonagentennial Commemoratory Colloquium.” After his lecture, Djorgovski received an e-mail from one of the attendees, who wrote, “You’ve had a big influence on my son. We listened to your talk together, and the day after, he insisted that I buy him a physics book (he’s seven). Since then he’s been asking me quiz questions on black body radiation, entropy, force, and quarks!” Says Djorgovski, “I’d say it was worth it, if I got a seven-year-old interested in physics!”—EN