At 5:00pm on Friday, Brian McLaughlin and Sara Mitchell presented their fascinating panel on Bringing Space Exploration Down to Earth. While not officially representing NASA at Intervention, both Brian and Sara work at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and were happy to share details on the wealth of science information available for free on the Internet.

Some of the sites mentioned included:

* The Earth Observatory Website, which provides images from weather and earth-observing satellites. It also provides worldwide maps of radiation, temperature, and other factors which can be used to monitor climate change.

The NOAA National Environment Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), provides information on geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites.

* The NASA Lunar Science Institute provides data on various lunar missions.

The High Energy Astrophysics Archive Service has terabytes of mission data available to access in an a standardized format (FITS files). It also provides tools for analyzing the data.

The panelists noted that NASA images and mission data are public domain. For those of you looking for awesome desktops, NASA has many “pictures of the day” sites that can be found by searching on Google.

However, NASA’s data is useful for so much more than cool pictures. Since sending up your own satellite can be extremely expensive, many groups use NASA and NOAA data for their own applications. For example, Google Earth’s cloud data comes from NASA GOES satellites. Commercial vendors also use weather data provided for planning supply and demand.

To help budding astronomers learn how to analyze the wealth of data available, Brian and Sara spoke of a site called Imagine the Universe. This NASA-created site is geared towards high school students, with general information on astronomy and a variety of tools for teachers. It also contains a program called HERA, a fairly simple analysis program for FITS files, with tutorials on how to use it.

The panelists encouraged attendees to take advantage of the opportunity to perform Citizen Science. Citizen Science – the idea that anyone can access data and do research on it – has exploded in the last five years. They mentioned that NASA often works with amateur astronomers on projects, and regularly has college students make unguided discoveries based on publicly-available data. There are still some tasks (such as pattern matching) that are difficult for computers, and require human intervention. Because of this, there are sites dedicated to asking the public to help contribute to science. (They mentioned one, called GalaxyZoo, where users could help to classify galaxies.)

At the end of the panel, Brian and Sara both said they could be contacted for more information.

You can find out more about Sara by reading her blog at http://universe.nasa.gov/blueshift.

Brian, who in addition to working at NASA, is a writer for Wired’s GeekDad blog, can be found at http://www.wired.com/geekdad.

Intervention 2011 is happy to announce the following premieres and special launch events happening at the event this year:

Travis Surber, creator of the webcomic Hainted Holler, will be debuting his second collection of strips, Hainted Holler 2:Redneck Boonaloo at the event. Check out his table in the Vendor Room to get a copy.

Studio Unseen, the team behind the webcomic Sledge Bunny will be launching their own sculpted armadillo characters at the event–they were sculpted by one of our other Vendor Room artists Kelsey Wailes (eattoast), who has already been written up for her incredible work on io9.

Peej and Bengie, the team behind the new comic Slackjaw will be having their official launch party at Intervention 2011 on Saturday September 17th at 7pm in Panel room 1. They are also running our famous Interfection LARP as well, so expect both hijinks and horror.

Bree Rubin, from Nerd comics, has also let us know that she will be launching their new compilation “Washington” at the event, and may have a, *ahem*, “small”, *cough*, room party to celebrate it at some point during the weekend. You’ll want to catch her in the Vendor Room for more details.

We wanted to make a mention of some of our video room showings that you might want to make plans to attend: Ninjas Versus Vampires and Working Class Nightmare.

Ninjas Versus Vampires is the 2nd movie in the “Ninjas Versus” series (the first being Ninjas Versus Zombies) and it delivers exactly what you think: Ninjas beating the crap out of Vampires, and vice versa. We’ll be doing 2 showing of the film at Intervention: Friday the 16th at 9pm, and Saturday the 17th at 3pm–followed shortly by a panel by the creators Endlight Entertainment at 5pm in Panel room 2 to discuss the making of the film and any other questions you might have. Endlight also has a table in the Vendor Room, so you can buy the movie or other merch from them.

Then we have “Working Class Nightmare”, a new horror web series that will be making a debut of sorts at Intervention–a “Work In Progress” showing that will be hosted by it’s director Jay Joseph on Saturday the 17th at 1pm in the Video Room, and he’ll be available to take your questions about it’s development after the showing.

We’re really excited to have these two new independent films at the event this year.

Blue, of Hello, The Future! who is one of our music guests this year, has released a new song talking about Intervention (and Dragon*Con) based on the Britney Spears song “I Wanna Go”. If you didn’t remember, She also released a song last year about us, which you can see on her site here.

Here’s the new song, check it out below:

We’re honored to be the subject of such great work by such an awesome artist. You’ll definitely want to check out her concert at Intervention this year, it will be even more epic than last year for sure!

Woo hoo! Click here to see the Children’s Programming so far. The only changes we might make is that we may be adding more things.

This track is a new addition this year that was created in response to the many requests we got last year. Parents were telling us how much they loved our con, but wished that there was something for their kids, too. Of course, we were listening – Now the whole family can come and join us at Intervention 2011. Thanks to art teacher Corinne Simmers, GeekDad Managing Editor Matt Blum, GeekMom blogger and ex-NASA employee Helene McLaughlin, and GeekDad blogger and NASA employee Brian McLaughlin.

The age group being targeted is 4-12 (though older children won’t necessarily be excluded), and children 12 and under get in free with a paid parent.

Please note: Parents must accompany their 12 year old and under children at all times.