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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.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 26 2018, @06:41PM (5 children)
There is no (manmade) object capable of reflecting sunlight from more sky than it physically occupies.
If you're doing a long exposure, sure this will be painting a stripe through the sky - but no more than any one of dozens of manmade objects already up there, and if you're really going after a 27 magnitude target, there are literally thousands of manmade objects that can spoil your fun - one more for a period of 2 months is kind of like getting pissed off at a streaker crossing the highway on your way to work in the morning... it's not like he's going to be snarling traffic every morning for years, or that thousands of people are going to copy him.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 26 2018, @07:00PM (4 children)
You forget or do you deliberately ignore the fact that access time to large telescopes is limited and expensive?
Let me use a car analogy: it's like you hire a Ferrari to have your one hour travel ruined by a streaker driving a tractor in front of you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 26 2018, @07:27PM (3 children)
If you live your life for one trip in a Ferrari, it sucks to be you.
Likewise, bitching about this single extra confounder is like bitching because there's ANOTHER lorry using the M1 when you get your Ferrari time.
Personally, those rolling advert trucks that intentionally drive slow during commute hours - yeah, those should be dealt with harshly, but this particular dot in the sky isn't actually any worse than dozens of others which will be there for much longer timeframes.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 26 2018, @11:33PM (1 child)
The difference between this and other lorries - all the other lorries point their shiny surfaces away from you and the rest of the surfaces are diffusive.
This bitch is:
- all glitz and glitter
- closer to your Ferrari (remember that inverse square with the distance attenuation?) than the lorries
- it serves no purpose other than showing its round form and inflating the ego and vanity of the pimp ( hey, yeah, I've done it! Now you have a robust discussion - aka talk about what I, me, look at me have done)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 27 2018, @10:52AM
Reminds me of the pink island wrap in Miami - similarly short lived for similar good reasons.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday September 27 2018, @12:01AM
BTW, remember that "publish or perish"?
Sucks or not, that one rule of academia; you know? the guys that bring you discoveries and theories and technology and whatnot that make possible that space flight you used to place the fucking good-for-nothing gizmo on orbit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford