This week’s care package will take you on a cosmic adventure of art in space!
First, we start in the Earth’s stratosphere with Makota Azuma’s Exobiotanica project. In this project, Azuma and his team recreate the still life at nearly 100,000 feet by launching a weather balloon with a bouquet of flowers from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. He also launched a bonsai tree to those heights! You can view the ascent and descent of these natural beauties at the Exobiotanica website.
After breaking through the stratopause, lets head up to where the astronauts hangout. Somewhere in the thermosphere, the Russian space station Mir orbited the Earth from 1986-2001. A part of the limited extra weight allotted on the craft was taken up by a 2.05 lb aluminum sculpture by Arthur R. Woods called Cosmic Dancer, the first sculpture to be created for space and realized in space. See it in action here
Now we move past the orbital limits of Earth and into the vastness of space. But we aren’t just hopping over to Mars—we are going past our solar system into the unknown! Somewhere out in interstellar space are two spacecrafts called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and each craft holds a very special golden record which, when played by an extraterrestrial being, emits the sounds of life on earth, including music. Find out about what all is on that record here and listen to its samples of Earth’s varied music here.
Time to return to Earth’s atmosphere! Thank you for joining us on this space and art mission, come back next week for a new care package.