That cylindrical object you see pictured above is a roughly school-bus sized structure which was deployed into space in 1984. It orbited the Earth for five and a half years with nothing expected of it other than to float there, getting battered about by whatever the great black yonder saw fit to throw at it.
For the World is Hollow… and I Have Touched the Sky!
Phobos - an artificially created relic? Could 2010 be the year we make contact?
Wow, this is amazing.
from WIRED:
The unfurling of a Japanese solar sail, the first demonstration of a new space propulsion technology, went exactly according to plan.
Wow. Nimoy with a mustache! But this is fun…
MOSCOW — An international team of researchers climbed into a set of windowless steel capsules Thursday to launch a 520-day simulation of a flight to Mars intended to help real space crews of the future cope with confinement, stress and fatigue of interplanetary travel.
Russia: Mission Mars 500
Earth-Moon-Earth (EME), or “moonbounce,” is an experimental kind of radio transmission first proposed in 1940 by a British communications engineer. With EME, messages are sent in Morse code from Earth, reflected off the surface of the Moon, and then received back on Earth. Later realized by the US military after WWII, today the technique is used by amateur radio operators across the world. Currently, EME provides the longest communications path for any two radio stations on Earth.
Fascinated with this curious mode of communication, artist Katie Paterson translated Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code and sent it to the Moon via radio waves. Ostensibly “remixed” as it bounced off the contours of the Moon’s surface, the sonata was then retranslated into a new score and played by a grand piano at Modern Art Oxford. You can listen to the remixed sonata here: http://www.katiepaterson.org/sounds/katie_paterson_sonata.mp3
(via SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § The Ancient, Distant, and Dead)
Also check out here moonlight light bulbs: Lighting engineers, took painstaking measurements under a full Moon to recreate its exact spectral profile to make custom light bulbs.
Voyager Golden Record - awesome.
SEED:
Signal-to-noise ratio is the relationship between meaningful information (a signal) and external factors (background noise). In a broader theoretical sense, it can refer to seeking out meaning from complexity. We do this in our daily lives, constantly and without thought, each time we take mundane actions and, ultimately, whenever we attempt to make sense of the world we live in. The young Scottish artist Katie Paterson toys with this balance. Whether it’s hacking a mobile phone and burying it deep in the Arctic to capture the dying murmurs of a melting iceberg, or working with astronomers to capture the earliest known light of the universe, Paterson’s work—with a nod to scientific research—explores the curiosities within some of our universe’s infinite blips: remote ones, old ones, ones long gone.
By Hiroyuki Hamada (and interview here)
More on this project at BLDGBLOG:
A mind-bogglingly awesome new project from MIT called Flyfire hopes to use large, precision-controlled clouds of micro-helicopters, each carrying a color-coordinated LED light, to create massive, three-dimensional information displays in space.
Spacewalkers Viewable from Backyard Telescope!
From WIRED:
With a big enough telescope and some good fortune, an amateur astronomer can look into the sky and see humans at the space station.
Here’s the proof. On March 21, 2009, astronaut Joe Acaba stepped into space for some extravehicular activity. Down on Earth, Ralf Vandebergh was in his backyard, pointing a 10 inch-telescope at the International Space Station as it passed over Europe.
In reviewing the photos he shot, he saw a few bright pixels appear precisely where the work was going on at exactly the moment it was being conducted. In other words, he was looking at an astronaut!
He posted this new video of his images to YouTube earlier this week.
|#