Another interesting project from Market Forces, the fifth edition of Piemonte Share Festival, guest curated by Andy Cameron. This one is called “Audience,” by Chris O’Shea.
Please contact Wired as soon as is convenient regarding the $8,000 needed to build a death ray in space.
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A clip:
A TubeSat is basically a space-going Pringles container, a shell and kit that’s sent to you for assembly. And the wonderful thing is that you can stick anything you like in it so long as it doesn’t break the mass or volume restrictions. Pack it up, send it back and those nice people at Interorbital Systems will combine it with 32 other TubeSats in the nose of a Neptune launcher and bang the lot up into low Earth orbit. The TubeSats are then deployed, in a controlled sequence, into their own orbits, which are designed to degrade in three or four weeks and cleanly incinerate upon re-entry.
The basic kit is absolutely Sputnik-level, allowing you to broadcast a repeating message or having the satellite function as a private orbital ham-radio relay station. But Interorbital does provide a list of suggestions for customisation: video cameras for Earth imaging and tracking; a private email server (in space!); biological experiments and more. The space available is quite small, but if you cut some bits off a tiny puppy first, it would probably fit. Even space burials are feasible (I once wrote a story wherein astronauts confess to having found Timothy Leary’s ashes in space, thawed them out and snorted them).
I don’t think, however, that Interorbital Systems has fully embraced the science-fictional condition. There is one important omission in its list, and it’s the reason why I need to borrow $8,000 from you.
Orbiting death rays.
Images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the asteroid Pallas should be grouped along with two other big space rocks as protoplanets - “planetary embryos” that were big enough to stay pretty much as they were during the formation of the solar system, but too small to progress to the next stage of development.
From Morbid Anatomy:
I am celebrating my return to the luxury of internet-in-the-home with this lovely photo found on the ever-rich National Museum of Health & Medicine’s Flickr page. The caption reads: “(Anatomy, comparative.) Australian bear or koalas. Phascolarctos cinereus. [Bones.] Reeve 1780.”
You can visit the museum’s Flickr page by clicking here. Click in image to see much larger version.
![From Morbid Anatomy:
I am celebrating my return to the luxury of internet-in-the-home with this lovely photo found on the ever-rich National Museum of Health & Medicine’s Flickr page. The caption reads: “(Anatomy, comparative.) Australian bear or koalas. Phascolarctos cinereus. [Bones.] Reeve 1780.”You can visit the museum’s Flickr page by clicking here. Click in image to see much larger version.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kr4251Z7FS1qzw5oyo1_500.jpg)
From WIRED:
Planetary scientists have reported a slew of new findings about the first asteroid ever spotted before pieces of it fell to Earth. The space rock contained a number of amino acids, had a flattened shape and appears to have been blasted off the surface of a larger body…The asteroid, 2008 TC3, first came into the limelight in 2008 when researchers spotted the body just 19 hours before it broke apart in Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into northern Sudan (pictured above).
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