July 20, 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of Man's landing on the Moon, a truly impressive accomplishment especially considering the distances involved and the engineering resources that were available at the time. The complex calculations to make the 240,000 mile journey were made largely by hand using slide-rules and room-sized computers with less power and versatility than the device that brought you here.
At GZ, in Sheridan Park, you will see the beautiful memorial dedicated to our veterans. This piece is called "ETHOS" and was conceived and installed by a local artist named Robert Smart with the help from a grant by the City of Minneapolis and others. Please take a few minutes to walk around the sphere to read the pillars surrounding it, the inscriptions on the plaza around it and appreciate the history as well as the sentiments expressed. There will no need to touch or physically interact with the sculpture or the pillars as there is no container here.
The idea behind this cache is to give one an idea of how far away the Moon is from the Earth. The sphere, about 28 feet across, will be a scale representation of our home planet. The final is located about where the Moon would be at a scale distance from GZ and would be about 6' across.
THE PUZZLE
Standing at GZ next to the sculpture's title pillar (#0) and facing the sphere, move to your right, that is to say counter-clockwise or satellite-wise, to the next pillar. This will be #1, the next one is #2 and so on to the last one which should be #10. Your task is to read about the remarkable space related events below and note the # of the pillar that fits the time frame for that statement.
A) Landing on Mars on giant balloon cushions, the Spirit rover settles down near the crater Gusev on January 3, 2004. Her sister rover, Opportunity, lands on the opposite side of Mars near Meradiani Planum a few weeks later on January 25, 2004.
B) On July 21, 2011, the Atlantis Space shuttle STS 135 lands at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ending the 30 year Space Shuttle program.
C) Aboard the Russian spacecraft, Voshod 2, Alexi Leonov performs the world's first spacewalk on March 18, 1965
D) After 2 previous failures, on October 21, 1942, Germany successfully launches the first rocket to reach suborbital altitudes, 62 miles above the surface of the Earth, paving the eventual way for the Saturn V which took Man to the Moon.
E) October 29, 1991, NASA successfully achieves the first asteroid flyby by the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter past asteroid 951 Gastra.
F) On July 20,1969, men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. They came in peace for all Mankind.
N44 59.ABC W93 16.DEF
SOME NOTES ON SCALE
Using the sphere here as a model for the Earth yielded some interesting scale distances of some well-known things in space. To make the math a little easier, I rounded some of the numbers up or down slightly as needed, so the scale is approximate but still close enough for illustration.
~The International Space Station (ISS) would be about 9" away from the surface of the sphere
~The Hubble Space Telescope would be orbiting 16" away
~The GPS satellites that led you here are in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth and would be about 37' from the surface, about where the pillars surrounding the sculpture are.
~The Moon .. well, that's why we're here
~Mars, at its closest point to the Earth, would be 20 miles away
~And the Voyager I spacecraft having already passed Pluto's orbit in its 35+ year journey would be more than 8,000 miles away in this scale
-{an appropriate but completely optional and not terribly related Web Video}-