The Space Junkies

You can now adopt space debris and listen to the sounds they make in real time!

Our curiosity as a species has taken us places, be it beneath the earth or beyond it. But wherever we go we have ensured that we leave a trace in the form of sculptures, hieroglyphics, paintings etc. But from the last few decades we have been leaving a trail, a toxic one at that, which possibly no other species can. I am of course referring to debris. Yes we love littering wherever we go and it seems like earth is not the only place where we have been doing so. We have successfully managed to drop dirt in space as well, which is slowly but steadily turning out to be a greatest threat for humanity. There are around 100 million pieces of space junk. And NASA defines space debris as ‘any man-made object in orbit about the Earth which no longer serves a useful function’. Project Adrift, a brainchild of filmmaker Cath Le Couteur and Nick Ryan an audio specialist, sound designer, composer and artist, aims to educate us about this threat through innovative means. These artists have worked for over 2 years to make this happen. Adrift through audio (Machine 9), visual (Film) and social media (Adopt space junk on Twitter) lets us see, hear, feel and communicate with these pieces of junk making it a unique experience.  Out of the millions of piece of space debris out there Adrift throws light upon the 27,000 individual pieces of debris currently being tracked as they orbit above us. In an exclusive interaction with Prashanth Vidyasagar, Nick Ryan speaks about their out of the world project, how they brought their ideas to life and how this could affect us all.

How did the idea for Project Adrift come about?

The idea for Project Adrift came though Cath who is interested in space which I guess stems from the fact that her grandpa was an astrophysicist. She got interested in space debris when she read an article about an astronaut losing a spatula in space while he was working on outside and that astronaut was Piers Sellers who became one of the most important figures of NASA and he was an environmental scientist by trade. We were lucky enough to film him as part of project Adrift. That’s where she got the idea, through this story. Cath invited me through an organization called The Space, which has nothing to do with space (laughs) it’s a digital arts organisation. So we discusses about this and eventually this split into the film, sound (Machine 9) and the twitter page (adopt process).

What we both wanted to do was by interpreting space debris artistically create all sorts of unexpected interpretations and draw people’s attention to space debris

What were your thoughts and approach about space debris?

I have never been particularly interested in space until Cath got me into this, it is fascinating. It’s a lot of delicious paradoxes and is a serious matter as well. The core of what we wanted to do with is not scientific, we wanted to approach it from an artistic point of view given that we are artists. And most of my collaborative work has been with scientists, I’m very interested in the combination of science and arts. I am always keen for the science to be good and robust. The beauty of being as artists is that you don’t have to play the rules of rationale. What we both wanted to do was by interpreting space debris artistically create all sorts of unexpected interpretations and draw people’s attention to space debris as not only potentially catastrophic environmental disaster but also something of beauty and something poetic, we both felt that there was something very sad about space junk.

We (humans) can’t seem to do anything without leaving a trail of destruction behind us.

Why the different mediums?

These space debris all sort of reflect us in some way, and our attempts to advance ourselves beyond earth but also very clearly indicate that we can’t seem to do anything without leaving a trail of destruction behind us. We sort of fell in love with them as objects, that’s what made us want to approach it artistically. One was to create narrative that was the job of the film, which features people involved in space debris with this and notably Chilean female astronomers, one of the only female run observatories in the world. Cath’s film is cognitive and thought provoking, the instrument (machine 9) is intended to create a sensation for space debris, and transform that into a feeling, the twitter experience was designed to create a sort of empathy with individual spaces of space debris, give the audience a feeling of getting to know the space debris like they were people. Machine 9 (Machine 9 is an electromechanical sound instrument that transforms the movement of 27,000 tracked pieces of space debris into sound, in real time.) and the adopt process i.e. the twitter experience are partially driven by live data, we really wanted to create artwork that in some way is driven by real time information.

How did you go about identifying these space junk?

We were pleased to discover that there is a huge data on space junk, huge lists of telemetry information in spreadsheets, it is nonetheless freely available for public to see. One of the catalogues that we use publishes the positions of 27,000 of debris at least once a day and that catalogue also tells us what every piece is called, how big they are, their origins etc. We wanted a minute by minute report so what we did was build our own software called Orbital Mechanic Simulator and it was built for us by creative technologist on the project, Daniel Jones. What it does is aggregates public open source data sets and gives us a second by second indication of where the space junk is in the sky, so what we can do is not only interrogate individual pieces of space debris but find out where they are over earth. That’s providing us the data stream that is useful.

Can you tell us more about the ‘sound’ aspect of project adrift and how Machine 9 and the relative sounds came into being?

There are numerous ways to transform space junk into sounds, what I wanted was for each piece to generate sound. I’m all about feeling, what the most physical way of generating sound would be?

When I looked pathways of the space junk as they went around the earth they leave these traces which very much reminded me of the grooves on the vinyl record. So I decided to make a record player, because it’s a real physical manifestation of sound reproduction and I felt that by making sounds physical you would actually sense space junk. I needed a big record player so with the help of David Cranmer an incredible engineer from UK I built a giant cylindrical phonograph with 8 motorized styluses and 1000 grooves and that’s Machine 9, which is connected to live debris feed through a control feed. So whenever a space debris flies directly overhead (600 km circle drawn directly over the where the machine is located) the program finds the groove and plays the sound for that piece of debris.

I asked people (family & friends) what they thought space debris was like so and asked them to send any material they thought represented space junk

Space junk doesn’t make any noise it travels at about 4 miles per second as it is passing through vacuum, so I could give it any sound. Realism doesn’t exist there. So I asked people (family & friends) what they thought space debris was like so and asked them to send any material they thought represented space junk, could be metal, something that was futuristic. Some people sent me things that were more poetic like stones, feathers from dead birds, gold balls, so what I did was make 1000 recordings of those object by doing all sorts of things with them with contact and normal microphones.

For example I used a flat metal spring by suspending and hitting it gently with a xylophone beater and attaching a contact microphone, the object produced really interesting sound, another object I used was a piece of polystyrene, which I created a sound from breaking it very slowly against a microphone. I did this with 250 different items, which generated a 1000 recordings/sounds. It took a couple of weeks of solid recording another week to edit and make sounds. Because the cylinder is rotating each sound is only three and half seconds longs. All of the sounds are ranged in order of pitch and that pitch is mapped to the size of the space debris. So if a tiny piece of space debris is flying over then one of the styluses at the high end will find a tiny sound for it and if a massive piece comes you’ll hear a sound from the low end, giving you a sense of the size of the object. The association is very very abstract.

Lot of people don’t realize how close space is actually is, its only 63 kms to International Space Station, like a short train journey.

Many might ask, why this is relevant for us on earth. Your response to them? 

That’s a good question. There were times when I thought the same, how relative is this for us on earth. Lot of people don’t realize how close space is actually is, its only 63 kms to International Space Station, like a short train journey. Some space debris starts at a distance of 160 kms which is a very short distance as well so I think people don’t think of space as our environment they think of it as belonging to the universe. It is our environment and until you get out into much further field i.e. 10,000 kilometers the atmosphere sort of disappears but in the orbital zone called low earth orbit where most space junks exists there is still some atmosphere. Though way too thin to even transmit sound there are still atom and molecules of oxygen, Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide out there so it is still our environment and we have done with space what pretty much the same as we’ve done with the oceans. And all space junk came into being since 1957 before that it was pristine (with the exception of meteoroids).

Space debris very literally threatens life on earth, the main threat it poses is to satellites. On a daily basis satellites are being hit, a tiny piece of space debris hit one of the windows of the International Space Station in September/October. The International Space Station is very often moved to get out of the way of space debris in what are called collision avoidance maneuvers, most satellites are given an extra amount of fuel to also allow them to move out of the way of potential collisions, so if our satellites were taken out satellite communications are potentially destroyed on earth, no mobile connections, no weather reports etc. . A theory by Donald Kessler called The Kessler Effect, says that discarded debris could cause a domino effect by crashing into each other creating more debris which could possibly make space travel impossible in the future.

Is there a way to clear the space debris?

There are lots of ideas from magnetic technology to attract space debris, to using giant nets to capture and use of also harpoons. . The idea of all these is to slow down the space debris, , as pace decreases the debris slows down and gets deorbited by its natural momentum and burns out there are other ideas as well to use it as fuel for International Space Station and onward journey of spacecraft.

How did the interactive and adopt bit come about?

With the Twitter bots the objective able is to be able to follow one or all 3 pieces of space junk. We’ve collaborated with 3 writer to write narratives, you follow them on twitter and they communicate this narrative over a course of 2-3 months. Their stories are full of live data for example they might say I’m flying over Afghanistan, how are you doing? Let me tell you about this story.

Vanguard is the oldest dead satellite which was launched in 1957 and is still orbiting the earth and will so for 240 more years, it’s the size of a grapefruit with a little antenna. Its territory is very stately, it’s proud and old fashioned.

Fengyun 1c which is a fragment of Chinese weather satellite and it was targeted by an experiment that the Chinese wanted to do which is to see what happens when they fire a sort of kinetic vehicle at another satellite and unfortunately it disintegrated and created huge amounts of space debris. One of these fragments of the original satellites, is one of our characters and we picked it, because it will in reality fall out of space sometime this month, so the story is designed to follow that. It’s a very angry and has a confusing of sense of lost identity as it was one of the 1000 pieces so it’s part of a bigger family, it get confused about weather as it was originally a weather satellite, it tries to tell about the weather but gets confused as it was originally supposed to be a weather satellite so it is quite funny.

Suitsat is an empty space suit pushed out by the Russians pushed out of the International Space Station in 2006 with an AM dicom radio inside and you could tune into it from earth, actually that burnt up and what we’ve taken is it’s trajectory and it exits as a ghost in our database. It has an existential crisis all the time, it’s very lonely and philosophical.

What next for project Adrift?

For the first time Machine 9 is going on public display at the Science Museum in London from Feb 14-16. We plan on taking the machine to various parts of the world and would love to bring it to India as well. It would be amazing to get India’s audience involved it that. It sounds completely different in every part of the world because you’re looking at a different bit of the sky. Taking it around the world was our plan.

To watch the new Adrift film, hear the sounds and adopt a piece of space debris, please visit projectadrift.co.uk