6/22/2023 0 Comments Person finds ancient space shipAll will burn during reentry to our planet, sooner or later.īut satellites occupying a very specific space - geostationary orbit - have an estimated lifespan approaching infinity. The vast majority of satellites experience small amounts of atmospheric drag, and that drag accumulates over the years and eventually pulls them back down towards earth." For some it takes a few days, others a few hundred years. "There's no clear line that separates the atmosphere from space - it just kind of gets wispier and wispier and thins out. "Most satellites are in what are called low earth orbits, about 300 to about 1,200 or 1,400 kilometers" above the Earth, Paglen discovered. He began to wonder how long the satellites he was photographing - or, indeed, any satellite - remained in orbit. The seeds for "The Last Pictures" began germinating in Paglen's mind while working on such projects, he said during an interview in his New York apartment, the week before the space launch. For " The Other Night Sky," he produced a series of photographs between 20 documenting American spy satellites and other space debris, using tracking data culled from amateur satellite trackers around the world. For his 2010 project, " The Fence," Paglen photographed otherwise invisible electromagnetic waves produced by an immense radar system surrounding the United States, part of an early warning system against ballistic missile attacks. in geography, has a history of making art about cosmic-sized ideas. Paglen, who holds a master's of fine arts and a Ph.D. But for Paglen that ring of future space junk seemed the obvious place to put a public art installation: an archive of 100 black-and-white photographic images, built to last for billions of years, launched aboard a communications satellite into outer space from a site in Kazakhstan last week. Still, as Paglen's latest multimedia project, " The Last Pictures," underscores, we humans have created a legacy to outlast us: Billions of years from now, when the earth has erased all trace of our inhabitance, hundreds of dead satellites orbiting the planet will remain, immune to the terrestrial effects of rust, erosion, and decay - the last artifacts left to say "we were here." A dubious bequest, perhaps. We may someday build lives on other planets here, we're on a fixed-term lease. And he knows that life on earth is a few million years overdue for its next sweeping extinction event. He knows the sun will one day expand, torching our planet in the process. 004 percent of its 4.5 billion-year history. He knows, for example, that we homo sapiens have occupied the earth a mere. It's the sort of thing artist and author, Trevor Paglen, thinks about a lot. If humanity's earthly tenure isn't fated to end with the Mayan calendar next month, it is certain to end someday. Soyuz Fg Rocket Launch, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan (NASA/Carla Cioffi)
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