“One day a student said, ‘What about stuff in space?’ Bing. Responding to what was happening at Morgantina, the class focused on cultural heritages that need to be protected. We are revealing aspects of a habitat that people have lived in for over 20 years, and that the very people inhabiting it 24/7 have not been aware of.”īack in 2008, when the extent of that looting was just coming to light, Walsh was teaching “Cultural Heritage in the Art World,” an ethics course for graduate students who might eventually work in the culture industry. “What we are showing with this project is the potentially practical side of archaeology as a science.
“So, the question of when and where is irrelevant,” he says. In his view, archaeological techniques can be used to understand what happened at a distinct time – including the present – and what humans did in that location to adapt to it. “The past is right now – what happened 10 seconds ago is the past and is equally available for archaeological research as something a millennia ago,” explains Walsh. But at its core, the discipline is primarily concerned with a type of evidence – material culture – regardless of when that culture existed. People tend to understand archaeology as dealing with the distant past. Walsh, an archaeologist by training, is using archaeology’s methods of inquiry and analysis – in which the objects and spaces of a culture are analyzed to provide insight into how humans adapt to their environment – to reveal new understanding of human activity in space.Īlong with co-principal investigator Alice Gorman of Flinders University in Australia, Walsh just completed Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE), the first archaeological study ever performed outside the Earth. “It’s a microsociety in a miniworld,” says Chapman University’s Justin Walsh, associate professor and interim chair of the Department of Art. How do crewmembers on the ISS interact with each other and with equipment and spaces? And how do the spaces, interactions and objects inform conflict or cooperation among the crew? The ISS has been fastidiously designed to maximize the health, productivity and comfort of the crew while optimizing the efficient use of space and supplies.īut even as the mundane aspects of daily life are accounted for, questions remain about the more elusive but nonetheless riveting topic of culture.
#Special project ancient space station free#
How do the astronauts wash their hair? (rinseless shampoo) sleep? (in a bag and attached to the wall) spend their free time? ( mostly looking out the window, according to NASA). Their research is well documented on NASA’s ISS blog and includes such wide-ranging topics as the effects of space travel on the human body, materials science, dark matter, spacecraft systems and countless other topics over the station’s over 21-year history.īut an additional source of endless fascination is the astronauts’ daily life in a vessel about the size of a football field, floating in microgravity with an international crew of seven people. R esearchers from five international space agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), live and work on the station in what is one of the world’s most ambitious multinational collaborative projects.
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