{"id":9576,"date":"2017-09-28T06:45:57","date_gmt":"2017-09-28T14:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/28\/news-3349\/"},"modified":"2017-09-28T06:45:57","modified_gmt":"2017-09-28T14:45:57","slug":"news-3349","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/28\/news-3349\/","title":{"rendered":"An Artist Is Launching a 100-Foot Satellite That Will Be Visible to the Naked Eye"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Credit to Author: Samantha Cole| Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2017 14:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

In space, nothing frivolous is tolerated. There’s plenty of beauty<\/a> in the abyss of the universe, but relatively little of it is human-made. We build habitats, rocket ships, and satellites that can be beautiful in their own utilitarian ways, and we gain a lot of inspiration from what these devices see for us: Distant stars, awesome nebulas,<\/a> our own home world<\/a>. But art, made by humans, and actually installed in space? It’s not a thing. These is no space-based art world.<\/p>\n

American artist Trevor Paglen hopes to change that next year. With Orbital Reflector<\/a>, he’s planning to launch a sculpture into low-earth orbit, for terrestrial viewers to watch and track with an app. It’s a useless satellite, serving no purpose beyond the aesthetic.<\/p>\n

It looks like a giant lawn dart or a hiltless sword flinging through space. The original prototype shape was a sphere, but he and his team redesigned the satellite to be a 100-foot-long stretched-out diamond shape for maximum reflective surface area, so it will be visible in the night sky with the naked eye from Earth. Around April 2018, it’ll be folded into a brick-sized package and packed into a CubeSat, which will be strapped to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, blasted beyond the atmosphere, and then released to orbit roughly 350 miles above the surface of the Earth.<\/p>\n

After two months, the sculpture will de-orbit naturally, slowed by the atmosphere and dragged back down by Earth’s gravitational pull. It’ll disintegrate on the way down.<\/p>\n

This isn’t the first time Paglen’s experimented with putting things into space. In 2012, he launched The Last Pictures<\/i><\/a>, a silicon disc holding one hundred photographs representing life on Earth, into geosynchronous orbit. A recurring theme in his work involves watching those powers that watch us, with photography exhibitions on the surveillance state<\/a> and machine-learning algorithms<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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