Every day, an army of computers and human operators toil in control rooms, providing electricity to a city, guiding planes across the sky, or searching for the Higgs-Boson. These rooms are all extremely important, whether they’re making breakthrough discoveries or just keeping the lights on.
These are a couple of examples of the most awesome control rooms we’ve come across. We we want you to share your own, too.
The control room of the coal-fired Battersea Power Station in south London, built in the 1930s, was decommissioned in 1983. But it’s still one of the city’s famous landmarks, thanks in part to its appearance in the Beatles’ 1965 movie, Help! and on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals. Photo: Fox Photos/Getty Images
[clear] Engineers at Chernobyl test a reactor’s control panel in March 1986, about a month before one of the plant’s four reactors failed, leading the worst nuclear disaster of all time. Photo: Efrem Lukatsky/AP
[clear] The control rooms at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, is much more tranquil in this image than on August 5 — on that day, the people here helped successfully land the Curiosity Rover on the surface of Mars. Photo: Bill Ingalls/NASA
Those are just three shining examples of many. Now, you show us the coolest control rooms you can find.
Photo: NASA/GRC