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” ABOUT THIS SITE ”
When you click on various parts of the animation of the top page, you can see pictures and explanations, and also can listen to the thunder or the sound converted from the radio waves emitted by lightning discharges. The lightning may induce sprites.
This site introduces Micro-Etching Art (dry etching) attached onto a micro-sat and the pictures (original digital pictures) gathered from 14 countries around the world. Monochrome digital pictures and messages were submitted by artists. These art pieces were miniaturized and fabricated on a silicon wafer using photolithography and dry etching technology. Additionally, you can write a message on this website to the world.
This is different from a message to space aliens such as the golden record that accompanied Voyager or the metallic board on the Pioneer.
There are two types of etchings. One is dry etching, which uses gases, and the
other is wet etching, which uses liquid to form the patterns. The dry etching
technique was used to shrink pictures to as small as 2.5 mm square. After we
shrank all the pictures, we could attach them to the satellite.
Etching is a kind of printing technology but here it is applied to semiconductor engineering to shape the wafer-thin film on the semiconductor. After the thin oxide film forms on the semiconductor wafer, and the photoresistor forms patterns, the oxide film is no longer necessary and is removed by the etching.
This time, dry etching was used. This is a kind of space art expression using such technology to send the work to space, and to show it as an expression on the Web. We hope to contribute to developing a new field of art expression.
Micro-Etching pictures@and messages on a standard silicon wafer
After we shrank all the pictures, we attached them to the satellite, which was successfully launched into orbit on January 23rd, 2009.
Its nickname is "RISING." "RA-I-JI-N" is the god of thunder and lightning in Japanese mythology. The nickname plays on the similar sound of the English word "rising" and the Japanese god "Raijin." The SPRITE-SAT (RISING) will observe upper-atmospheric lightning called "sprites," as well as terrestrial Gamma-ray flashes (TGF) and very-low frequency (VLF) electric waves, possibly generated by the lightning.
If successful, both looking down images of sprites from outer space and the
simultaneous observation of TGF and VLF will be world-first achievements.
Reference: Raijin (wiki)