The Hammock Papers: Mapper.

23 March 2018

Mapper.

The European Space Agency has a program called PANGAEA which is aimed at developing geology training programs for astronauts. As a part of this program a new technology was recently deployed and tested in Spain’s extensive La Cueva de Los Verdes lava tube. It’s actually a pair of technologies called the “Pegasus Backpack” and the “Leica BLK360."

The Pegasus Backpack is a wearable “3D mapper”. This is something that could be used to map out street views similar to the Google Street View. What makes it so cool though is that the backpack doesn’t require a satellite connection, enabling it for use inside places with poor connectivity.

The Leica BLK360 is a LIDAR camera (Laser Imaging, Detection and Ranging). What LIDAR does is it shoots out a beam of laser light and thanks to the speed of light, is able to get an extremely accurate measurement of the distance from the camera the laser beam hit something and bounced back to the LIDAR camera. The camera detects this bounce back and does it again many more times, putting together a scan of the surrounding space: essentially an image of the room you’re in (or for many spacecraft, of the topographic features of the planetary surface below it).

When combined, as researchers with PANGAEA did, they were able to go deep inside the La Cueva de Los Verdes lava tube, away from both satellite connections and light, and create a detailed, 3D map of the entire lava tube.

Here is a fly through ...

No comments:

Post a Comment

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL