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posted by martyb on Wednesday September 26 2018, @03:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the It's-a-bird,-it's-a-plane,-it's-an...art-object? dept.

Less than a year after "Humanity's Star" was launched by Rocket Lab and destroyed in Earth's atmosphere, another art project aims to place a highly reflective object in the night sky:

Now, nearly 50 years [after the Apollo 12 mission], artist Trevor Paglen hopes to draw the public's eye back to the sky with "Orbital Reflector," a sculpture made of shiny material much like Mylar that will reflect the Sun's light while orbiting the Earth. The sculpture, contained in a small structure called a CubeSat, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, in mid-November. When it enters orbit about 350 miles away from Earth, the sculpture will detach and inflate to its full shape, a diamond that may shine as bright as a star in the Big Dipper. After about two months, it will re-enter Earth's atmosphere and disintegrate.

By sending an object with no military value into space, Paglen said he hopes to raise a conversation about who is allowed to operate past Earth's atmosphere. As artists and historians praise his effort as boundary-breaking, some people within scientific communities are saying it lacks a practical purpose.

Paglen, a 2017 MacArthur fellow, has long been preoccupied with the less-visible, or deliberately hidden, infrastructures that make up the world. For years, he tracked the movements of more than 180 classified U.S. military spy satellites, measuring and photographing their locations for his project "The Other Night Sky."

[...] The project has drawn some criticism and confusion from scientists who question the value of adding what they see as impractical items to Earth's orbit. "It's the space equivalent of someone putting a neon advertising billboard right outside your bedroom window," Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Gizmodo. [...] Paglen responded to criticisms in August in a Medium post titled "Let's Get Pissed Off About Orbital Reflector...," saying he hoped to provoke productive conversations.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 26 2018, @12:40PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @12:40PM (#740126)

    What else is human existence besides making stuff happen that wouldn't happen if we weren't alive?

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