A while back I posted a short film called Wanderers created by Erik Wernquist, you can check it out here. In that film Erik used recreations of actual NASA imagery depicting the exploratory nature of humans. Set to Carl Sagan’s words from the past:
“Herman Melville in Moby Dick spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote, I love to sail forbidden seas.”
At the time the film did the rounds on the interwebs it seems that it was’t just the public that showed an interest… wholly crap, NASA also noticed. They commissioned Erik to take on another short film to celebrate and promote their work on the Cassini satellite and it’s planned spectacular ending by sending it in to Saturn. The image above is a screen grab from that film, you can check out the full 3min here on Vimeo. Saturn is 1.2 Billion km from earth however Cassini is not the most distant man made object, this title goes to Voyager 1 which is now approximately 18 Billion km from Earth at the edge of our solar system but also about 300 years short of the Oort Cloud. Voyager was launched in 1977 and is expected to stop transmitting in 2025. Cassini was launched in 1997 and will burn up in Sept of this year. I love the work of NASA and all the other international space programs and I hope one day that Australia gets more involved.
