orbital cascade_57-46

2013

HD video 16:9, single channel, stereo, 6.00 min.

The work “orbital cascade_57-46” visualizes the demographics of defunct objects in orbit around the Earth from 1957 to 2046. This includes everything from spent rocket stages and old satellites to fragments resulting from disintegration, erosion, and collisions. Currently there are about 600,000 objects larger than 1 cm (0.4 in) in space, orbiting Earth at a velocity of approximately 28,000 kmph (17,400 mph) and posing a severe threat to satellites, space stations and manned spaceflights. Drawn from a data archive, each spherule in the video represents a real existing object orbiting in space starting with the very first object in space, the Sputnik 1 satellite launched in 1957. 2013 marked the start of a simulated worst case future scenario that assumes two realistic collisions that would dramatically increase the amount of space debris, collisions known in aeronautics as the “cascade effect”. The virtual camera flies up and down through various orbits, ending up deep in space looking down on Earth, which will be entirely covered by space debris in the year 2046.

The visualization was realized in collaboration with the Institute of Aerospace Systems @ TU Braunschweig, Germany.

Imprint

Personally liable:
Michael Najjar

Design concept & coding: Matthias Hübner, possible.is
with support by Marco Land

Disclaimer
Accountability for content
The contents of our pages have been created with the utmost care. However, we cannot guarantee the contents' accuracy, completeness or topicality. According to statutory provisions, we are furthermore responsible for our own content on these web pages. In this context, please note that we are accordingly not obliged to monitor merely the transmitted or saved information of third parties, or investigate circumstances pointing to illegal activity. Our obligations to remove or block the use of information under generally applicable laws remain unaffected by this as per §§ 8 to 10 of the Telemedia Act (TMG).

Accountability for links
Responsibility for the content of external links (to web pages of third parties) lies solely with the operators of the linked pages. No violations were evident to us at the time of linking. Should any legal infringement become known to us, we will remove the respective link immediately.

Copyright
Our web pages and their contents are subject to German copyright law. Unless expressly permitted by law (§ 44a et seq. of the copyright law), every form of utilizing, reproducing or processing works subject to copyright protection on our web pages requires the prior consent of the respective owner of the rights. Unauthorized utilization of copyrighted works is punishable (§ 106 of the copyright law).

Our newsletter

With our newsletter we inform you about us and our offers and events, art fair participations and exhibitions in galleries, museums and art institutions. If you register for our newsletter, we will save your e-mail address, first name(s) and last name, as well as any information you choose to provide on a purely voluntary basis. If you do not wish to consent to this, you can unsubscribe by using the link at the end of every newsletter.

You can revoke your consent to the storage of your data, e-mail address and the use of your data to send the newsletter at any time. This revocation can be effected by notifying us: studio@michaelnajjar.com

In the course of the further development of our website, changes to this privacy policy may become necessary. We therefore recommend that you reread this data protection statement from time to time.