Tag Archive for 'satellites'

Dreaming of the future at 11km per second

Published on 22 October 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .


India launched its first unmanned moon mission on Wednesday following in the footsteps of rival China, as the emerging Asian power celebrated its space ambitions and scientific prowess.

Chandrayaan-1 (Moon vehicle), a cuboid spacecraft built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) blasted off from a southern Indian space centre shortly after dawn in a boost for the country’s ambitions to gain more global space business.

The project cost $79m, considerably less than the Chinese and Japanese probes in 2007 and ISRO says the moon mission will pave the way for India to claim a bigger chunk of the global space business.

The mission is also expected to carry out a detailed survey of the moon to look for precious metals and water.

Fresh on the steps of the confidence that comes to any nation that can launch a few thousand pounds of metal faster than the 11km/s velocity needed to escape the earth’s gravitational pull on towards the moon is the Indian culture industry. To be released this summer is what seems to be a Bollywood take on the intense, high budget, the future is now Hollywood sci-fi film.

But what would even the most Doc Brown, cyberpunk metropolis be with out an appropriate measure of dance sequences? (Answer? something to be rewritten with more song and dance sequences)

Tall tales emerging from the shadows

Published on 5 September 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Wow is this real? Or some sort of misinformation about US military technologies? Perhaps being spread in some attempt to reflect the total fear of terrorism that is nurtured within the US as a tool to demoralize those communities abroad that the US considers its enemies.

By analyzing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says, it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk – a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person’s walking style is very hard to disguise. [link]

It would be rather challenging to do, but quite interesting to see how stories like this propagate on the ground in places like Afganistan. That portion of the blogosphere that concerns itself with technoscience and national security have certainly been abuzz with this story, and there has been quite solid propagation of it. But at what point, if really ever, do these types of stories jump the fence, as it were, and enter the rumor mill of the third world? Do the US intelligence services study this sort of thing?

The implications of this are rather wild, in any event. On the one hand, it is another expression of the contemporary’s interest in reducing phenomena to a statistical trace. You are an aggregation of variables that correlate only in your instance. You went to that coffee shop today because there was an 80% chance of it.

Maybe terrorists will start wearing big puffy suits to obscure their shadows. Actually it sounds like a great market opportunity, selling surplus Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory costumes to terrorists…

Surfing on Titan and other saturnalian abandons

Published on 31 July 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Scientists have confirmed that at least one body in the solar system, other than Earth, has a surface liquid lake by using an instrument on NASA’s Cassini orbiter.

The 235km long lake, situated near the moon’s south pole, is ringed by a dark beach, where the methane rich lake merges with a bright shoreline.

Titan has long been considered the most likely location that microbial extra terrestrial life might be found. The environmental conditions on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, are thought to mirror those of an early earth. As such there is hope that proof may one day be found linking chemical interactions of amino acids and the emergence of biological systems.

[link]

Geospatial imaging and human rights

Published on 15 June 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Wired today featured a profile of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) efforts to bring satellite reconnaissance photography to bear upon human rights violations within closed societies like North Korea and disputed territories like the Gaza Strip. They work with NGO’s and regional groups to help provide and disseminate documentary evidence of acts of violence to the world community.

Visualizing human atrocities from the perspective that these images afford is a quite a complicated thing to do. One can look at an aerial view of Auschwitz, for instance, of prisoners lined up, tracing a curved line, to be processed through the gate. But the whole scene still resolves at such a clinical level. One can illustrate and argue from miles in the air, but can one provide the visceral force of documentation needed to rouse the world’s intervention? After the fact, when the picture has meaning and history behind it, certainly, it can be quite compelling and have an almost a voyeuristic magnetism to it. This was where they would shoot them. This is the creek that the ashes were dumped in. But how do we understand it, how do we relate to the reality in these images?