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Coming soon: Space Selfies courtesy of ARKYD

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posted on Jun, 27 2013 @ 11:27 PM
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ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone

My mind has just been blown, so I'd like to share the subject with you, ATS. ARKYD has been developed by Planetary Resources. This telescope is the first of several they wish to develop. Their end goal is the mining of asteroids, but that wasn't what astounded me. The first ARKYD telescope will be crowd controlled. Through Kickstarter donations access is granted to the website as well as mobile apps that will allow those involved to vote on which pics to take, which institutes get access to them, and you can take your own selfie IN SPACE. The telescope is, of course, a large telescope meant to take high-resolution pics of asteroids, exoplanets, etc., but the telescope is also equipped with an external screen and a camera arm....

Yes, indeed, I'm a narcissist - I can send my picture to ARKYD and it will take a picture of my picture being displayed in space. How simple! Why hasn't NASA done this as a fundraising activity? Awesome. More than awesome. I want it.

Planetary Resources also has admirable goals for ARKYD to give students access to advanced technology their schools systems would not and could not otherwise provide. That, too, is awesome, but does not blow my self-centered mind like the previous.

This is the sort of mission... goal... objective... thing that has the potential to get people excited about space exploration again. Something I think is in very dire need.

Some of the engineers from Planetary Resources did an AMA on Reddit and wrote about their end goal of being able to mine asteroids. They were questioned about the difficulties of the smelting process in space. They believe they can use a 3D printer concept and modify it heavily to create the necessary equipment in space. That, also, is mind-blowingly futuristic. It would change space exploration as we know it, removing the need for large spacecraft to reach escape velocity, which in turn removes much of the cost.

The first ARKYD reached its Kickstarter goal - and then some - but it doesn't close until June 30th, so we can all still participate. The target flight to launch the first of the planned ARKYD fleet is a SpaceX flight - CRS24.

Are you driven by narcissism and egotism to see a picture of yourself in space?
What say you, ATS?



posted on Jun, 28 2013 @ 07:45 AM
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wow, I think it´s a nice project and hell, 25$ is okay if it helps building it , why not. We spend 25$ for nonsense sometimes so...



posted on Jun, 28 2013 @ 02:09 PM
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reply to post by verschickter
 


Exactly my thoughts, verschickter.

When I did the math last night on their Kickstarter site, if the contributions were spread equally over everyone who had contributed, each person gave $84. Not bad. I've wasted more than that on momentary entertainment that didn't benefit anyone - let alone schoolkids and the rest of society.

NASA needs to catch up with this thinking or resign themselves to simply monitoring private space exploration.



 
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