At One NASA Lab, Art and Science Share the Same Orbit:

Nestled among palm trees at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens near Pasadena, Calif., there's a mysterious, metallic structure that curls like a nautilus shell. It's called the Orbit Pavilion, and it was created by a team of artists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories, or JPL. Step inside the 17-foot-tall structure and you'll hear otherworldly sounds triggered by the tracking signal of 19 orbiting satellites above Earth. "All day long they move all around you," says artist Dan Goods. "It's much like listening to a bird sort of flying across the sky. And in this particular case, it's satellites that are helping us understand the Earth." Back in 2013, during its mission to Jupiter, NASA's Juno space probe was set to make a brief pass near Earth, and Goods hatched a plan: Ham radio operators around the world would team up and contact the spacecraft in Morse code. "We ended up getting thousands of people all around the world to all signal at exactly the same time, and we had them say, 'Hi,' " he recalls. "... We got the data back, and we could actually hear them. But when you hear the sound, it's beautiful because it really is these thousands of people from around the world all working together to do something. And it says 'Hi.' "

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