Week 9: Space Exploration and Art

I found this week's subject to be the most broad and ambiguous of all of our topics. That being said, there are a few individual projects that I found particularly interesting, starting with the film, Powers of Ten (1977). Space has always served to give us perspective on our existence. As Carl Sagan said, the entirety of our entire history - all the lives, memories, and concepts that have ever existed - has taken place on a pale blue speck in the Universe. The film gives us a great way to appreciate this scale. We might think that traveling from Los Angeles to Beijing is far, but that distance is microscopic as compared to any cosmic distance. Below is an updated video of Powers of Ten, which has some more smooth animation. Furthermore, here is a link for an interactive slider, courtesy of Htwins ("The Scale of the Universe 2").

Another fascinating part of space exploration and its merger with art is the very images that we get from our powerful space observation tools, especially telescopes. The Hubble Telescope's Deep Field (1995) is the most iconic of these. This image was taken using the Hubble telescope, at the time the most powerful imaging tool available to man, and is technically a composite of 342 separate images taken across a 10 day period. In this falsely colored image, there are over 3000 galaxies represented. The field of view is so small, that only a few of the many points of light are actually stars ("Hubble Deep Field"). There have been two updates to this: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 2004 and the Hubble Extreme Deep Field in 2012.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (2004)

Updates to the optic capabilities of the telescope have resulted in significantly improved photos, like the one below. These images have produced hundreds of citations in astronomy papers and are hung on the walls of scholars around the world. Though they were intended to serve a scientific purpose, their artistic quality has lead to their widespread popularity.

The difference in resolution between Hubble images due to optical improvements

The final way I want to discuss that space and art have merged is in the involvement many young people have in space nowadays. The space industry looks to be moving towards privatization, and many young people are becoming increasingly interested in the field of study (Autry & Huang, 2013). As such, an entire market has been created for people interested in space, but who have not necessarily received the education to immediately pursue work in the field. Thus, Kerbal Space Program, the massively popular rocket science simulator, was born.

A view of an orbiting space station in Kerbal Space Program

Kerbal Space Program (KSP) was created by a disgraced worker at Squad, a marketing company. The game has since exploded in popularity. The point of the game is design your own space program. The player has full control over every aspect of things; you actually have to build your spaceships piece-by-piece. The game has a renowned physics simulator, which accounts for gravity (which changes with altitude), air resistance, and crash impacts (Emanuelli, 2013)). Though it is not an art project (it is really a commercial video game) KSP has allowed millions of users to create, fly, and crash simulated rockets all over the planet. It has sparked an extensive modding community, wherein users make edits to fabric of the game itself, generally to improve the user experience, suggesting a great amount of collaboration. It also costs much less than testing actual rockets, which has allowed many young people to see if the industry is something they could ever see themselves doing. I believe that KSP represents the perfect union between science, art, and popular media: it is an interactive and engaging game, based on scientific principles, that excites and inspires each of its users.


References

Autry, Greg, and Laura Huang. "Houston, We Have a Market: Privatizing Space Launches Pays Off Big." Forbes 2 Oct. 2013. Web.

Emanuelli, Matteo. "Kerbal Space Program, the Spaceflight Simulator that Conquered JPL." Space Safety Magazine. 12 Aug. 2013. Web.

"Hubble Deep Field." HubbleSite. NASA. Web. 30 May 2015.

Powers of Ten. Cuisenaire Co. of America, 1977. Film.

"The Scale of the Universe 2." The Scale of the Universe. Cary & Michael Huang. Web. 30 May 2015.




The Hubble Ultra Deep Field In Optical Light <http://new-universe.org/zenphoto/albums/Chapter4/Illustrations/Abrams42.jpg>

The Hubble Deep Field Difference <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Improvement_in_Hubble_images_after_SMM1.jpg/1920px-Improvement_in_Hubble_images_after_SMM1.jpg?1433012296072>

Kerbal Space Program Orbit <http://seriousgamesresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/kerbal-space-program.jpg>