43 A WISPR Falls Upon the Sun 2021 960 x 1024px, JPEG

In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, a research spacecraft equipped with a two-telescope device known as a WISPR (wide-field Imager). This satellite would end up being the first man-made object that humans have cast into the Sun. But before meeting its fiery fate, WISPR sent a trove of data as it orbited the Sun's Corona, capturing images of coronal streamers, our solar system, the milky way and beyond.

The extreme conditions of outer space require the toughest and most advanced computational imaging technology that can withstand the limits of temperature as well as obscene amounts of radiation. WISPR managed to capture image data in .fit format via a 2000 x 2000 pixel CMOS sensor. It was processed into black and white stills after several rounds of data correction. Those stills were animated into .mpg video files, encoded with the mpeg 1/2 codec, one of the first video standards to come out in the early 1990s.

Within the images captured by a death bound satellite in 2021, the ghosts of Méliès witnesses the past and future collapse in streaks of sun flows.

mpeg 1/2 codec databending with Audacity, then baked in Adobe Media Encoder, adding an additional layer of glitch source: wispr.nrl.navy.mil/wisprdata

// Artwork by Sabato Visconti // www.sabatobox.com // @sabatobox on Twitter //