Plan B for Outer Space

'the time has come let go of last century's space dreams and start working toward a more contemporary future' sais Russell Saunders, Jr.

via centauri-dreams

Io, a moon of Jupiter. photo via kinetikonpictures

3D map of the Universe’s dark matter

This three-dimensional map, offers a first look at the web-like large-scale distribution of dark matter, an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the Universe’s mass. and what a poetic way of describing it: 'The map reveals a loose network of dark matter filaments, gradually collapsing under the relentless pull of gravity, and growing clumpier over time.'

This confirms theories of how structure formed in our evolving Universe, which has transitioned from a comparatively smooth distribution of matter at the time of the big bang. read more

via Robert Horvitz (don't miss his drawings - via dataisnature)

future moon

US plans for Moon base- this article examine possible strategies for how a future lunar base may come about, and what benefits could be reaped from it.

via baddaystudio

In Colonizing The Moon article, some senarios seems just too good to be true, "A number of sources have made a point of mentioning that on the moon, the average person is light enough to fly under his own power, if given wings and air to fly in. Some space entrepreneurs envision enormous inflatable domes where people could strap on oversized, lightweight polymer wings and do just that".

From KurzweilAI.net - and article about Imaginative new ideas for using space to protect civilization against existential risks, such as killer asteroids, nuclear war, global terrorism and seeing the Moon as backup drive for civilization .

walking on the moon

interactive QuickTime VR Panoramas in full-screen from the 6 Apollo Missions who landed on moon. All panoramas includes original audio clips. and i must say it looks more fictional then real...

via thingsmagazine and kottke

France opens secret UFO files

via Yahoo news

France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades.

The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists.

The website itself -- which crashed host servers hours after it was unveiled due to heavy traffic, and still not working...remains to seen...

space-banana

This is for real. The aim is getting a 300-meter banana to float over 30 km up in the air, somewhere in the stratosphere. To be seen from all around Texas for a month.

The work, Geostationary Banana Over Texas, is by a known Canadian artist, Cesar Saetz. Its budget is about 1 million dollars. So far, they have a little more than 1/8, but the work keeps developing.

via new-art

The Surface of the Moon

by Steve Roden's site {and blog}

'The Surface of the Moon' was inspired by a list of «craters, mountains, and other objects» on the moon from a turn of the century map in an astronomy book called Celestial Objects for common Telescopes, by Thomas William Webb that was published for the first time in 1859.

The number of objects (sculptures) that make up the work is 490 - the same number of land formations on the list - all that were known to exist around 1910.

The Surface of the Moon, 2001approx. 24" x 1" x 840"wood, wire, wax, gesso, pencil, tin foil.

I'm still amazed about how many artists out there are inspired by the moon, and Art in the Age of Orbitization - Gotchi Universe

Over Roswell

Gábor Kerekes - OVER ROSWELL-2 / 2005

CCC

The town of Roswell lies in the state of New Mexico in the United States at latitude 33.4° N and longitude 104.5° W. In 1947 locals found three dead aliens in a crashed UFO on the outskirts of the town. The FBI and the CIA kept silent and hushed up the incident. The murkiness surrounding this mysterious case has been a source of scandal and controversy ever since. Gábor Kerekes came across a computer program called "U.S.A. Photomap". With this program you can download a photo-quality satellite image of anywhere in America by giving the geographical coordinates.

OVER ROSWELL-2 / 4 / PIGMENTED PRINT 15X16 CM

The maximum resolution is 1 metre/pixel, so on a 17 inch monitor with a resolution of 1,024 pixels you can see 1,024 metres. This sparked his imagination. Casting himself in the role of the Roswell aliens, he wondered how this place would look from space.

CCC

"I gave the coordinates. Slowly, square by square, the monitor was filled by the full image. What luck! I overshot the centre of the town, ending up about 600-800 metres away from the inhabited area. A curious, exciting sight greeted my eyes. Lines, circles and squares in a geometrical, abstract arrangement of symbols.

OVER ROSWELL-2 / R 12 / PIGMENTED PRINT 18X12 CM

You couldn't help but think that these geometrical symbols on the surface of the Earth were intended to convey a message or information. The sight offered an exceptionally varied and almost undecodable configuration. If I were an alien, I'd land here! I cut out details of the picture by "screenshoot", added pixels due to the low resolution and printed them. I photographed the print-outs by large film format, and contact printed the negatives on pigmented print. This is how this Roswell collection was made. "

OVER ROSWELL-2 / R 11 / PIGMENTED PRINT 16X12 CM

OVER ROSWELL-2 / R 20 / PIGMENTED PRINT 17.5X cm

100 SUNS

Between 1945 and 1992 the United States detonated 1,149 nuclear test explosions. Until 1962 the tests were conducted in the atmosphere and oceans. 106 of the 216 above-ground blasts were exploded 63 miles from Las Vegas, Nevada. The remain-ing were detonated at the Enewetak or Bikini Atolls in the Pacific Ocean.

100 SUNS present 100 photographs , the artist rephotographed from the U.S. National Archives and therecords of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

those archive images, crediting the original cameramen in captions.

The re-photo-graphed images depictabove-ground tests at or shortly after themoment of explosion.

015 Sugar, 1.2 Kilotons, Nevada, 1951, 2003, archival inkjet print, 20 x 16 inches

The Production of space

A visual essay on space, photography, archaeology - stressing how our experience of place is always prosthetic - mediated by instruments and by bodies that are not coincident with our sense of ego or self. [Link to the beginning of the series] and for more Entries