chang'e

Via Slashdot, we learn that the Chinese space agency has successfully landed a probe, Chang’e 4, on the dark side of the Moon. Because of the impossibility to communicate directly with the lander, a relay satellite called Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) is orbiting the Moon and can exchange readings and instructions with mission control on each pass.
The landing site, the Von Kármán lunar crater, was a practical location as well as one with an important symbolic message, as the Hungarian-American astrophysicist and polymath Theodore von Kármán, its namesake, was the academic advisor of Hsue-Shen Tsien (*1911 – †2009), the rocket scientist and cyberneticist who founded the Chinese space programme. Though previously studied and charted, this hemisphere of the Moon that is tidally-locked and always faces away from the Earth has never been the subject on direct exploration and this achievement is in follow-up to the Chang’e 3 mission and its Jade Rabbit Rover (read more about Chinese lunar mythology and its connection with the space missions here)—paving the wave for permanent human colonisation by 2030.

thread and transistor

As a heuristic exhibition to explore the shifting definition and value of craft in modern society and commerce, Dezeen highlights some of the best instalations during the Istanbul Design Biennial that employed stitching and weaving recontextualised in electronics and as a store of value, as in an heirloom quilt to hand down from one generation to the next.
Looms themselves prefiguring mechanical computational relays, we really enjoyed discovering the functional universal computer whose circuitry was embroidered out of gold and the yarn spindle whose spooling action can actually save a spoken yarn as an audio recording. I wonder if future electronic devices will be decentralised and once again a cottage industry. Moreover, given the value assigned to block-chain cryptography—secure and sturdy though mathematically also relatively simple, it struck us as particularly delectable that there is one gaming circle that calls for players to produce their own knitcoin to advance. Check out the link above to learn more about the individual works from Ebru Kurbak and others.

мечта

On this day in 1959, the Soviet space programme launched the first interplanetary probe known as Luna 1—or with the alternate designation “Dream” above—and although due to a miscalculation on the burn-time of the last stage of the booster rocket, it over-shot its target, the Moon, but still in the process became the first spacecraft to escape Earth orbit.
The probe was able to take pioneering measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field (and the cosmic rays it protects the Earth from) and flying-by at a distance of some six-thousand kilometres was able to detect the absence of one on our satellite. In transit, the probe released a trail of sodium gas and scintillated like the tail of a comet and was to ultimately crash land on the lunar surface and release two metallic pennants and coat of arms of the Soviet Union on 4 January but veered off course (Luna 2 accomplished this mission of planting a flag in September of the same year) and remains in heliocentric orbit (along with some later cosmic interlopers) between Earth and Mars, designated according to the minor planet naming-convention, like Ultima Thule, as 1959 Mu 1.

we will control the horizontal. we will control the vertical.

Via Boing Boing, shake your head slightly—as if signalling no (or affirmation in some parts of Greece and the Balkans) to reveal a hidden image in the seemingly uniform bars plus a brilliant tutorial on how to make one’s own with any image. Perhaps a clever engineer could using this method—which is a variation on the Bezold effect in gradated contrast, slip in a secret subliminal message into one of the sections of picket fence steel slats of Trump’s Border Wall.

i’m a shooting star, leaping through the sky—like a tiger defying the laws of gravity

Barring any unexpected interference, the space probe New Horizons—already having accomplished the incredible feat of beaming back imagery of distant Pluto—had completed an encore mission in the small hours of New Year’s Day by venturing to the outer reaches of the Solar System to explore a minor planet in the Kuiper Belt.
Incredibly (486958) 2014 MU₆₉ nicknamed Ultima Thule (something beyond the known world) was only discovered nine years after the mission was launched and after the encounter with Pluto and course was corrected afterwards to afford the chance for another fly-by as it prepares to leave the bounds of the Solar System and join the Voyager probes in interstellar space. No one is quite sure what to expect on this icy world, but after being approached by the chief scientist behind the mission, Queen guitarist and noted astrophysicist Brian May composed a single about the voyage and discover to help us while away the time, with the signals taking upwards of six hours to reach the Earth, even traveling at the speed of light.