Monthly Archives: May 2014

Eyes in the Sky, Living in Space, Real-time space

Video: Streaming earth imagery from HDEV cameras on the ISS

One of the payloads recently delivered to the Int. Space Station recently by the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is the High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment. It consists of cameras attached to the exterior of the station that stream views of the earth. You can watch the feed at ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment



Live streaming video by Ustream

Caption:

The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) was activated April 30, 2014. It is mounted on the External Payload Facility of the European Space Agency’s Columbus module. This experiment includes several commercial HD video cameras aimed at the earth which are enclosed in a pressurized and temperature controlled housing. Video from these cameras is transmitted back to earth and also streamed live on this channel.

While the experiment is operational, views will typically sequence though the different cameras. Between camera switches, a gray and then black color slate will briefly appear. Since the ISS is in darkness during part of each orbit, the images will be dark at those times. During periods of loss of signal with the ground or when HDEV is not operating, a gray color slate or previously recorded video may be seen. 

Analysis of this experiment will be conducted to assess the effects of the space environment on the equipment and video quality which may help decisions about cameras for future missions. High school students helped with the design of some of the HDEV components through the High Schools United with NASA to Create Hardware (HUNCH) program. Student teams will also help operate the experiment. For a display of the real time ISS location plus the HDEV imagery, visit here: eol.jsc.nasa.gov/HDEV/ To learn more about the HDEV experiment, visit here: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/917.html

Emphasis mine. At the moment of this posting the display is gray.

Space Policy

Space policy roundup – May.3.14 [Update]

Today’s selection of space policy/politics links:

Update:

 

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Rockets, Space participation

Video: A tribute to the prototype Falcon 9 reusable booster

The latest SpaceX test of their 2nd generation reusable first stage prototype rocket is combined with the monologue and Hans Zimmer music from the trailer for the movie Interstellar:

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Here’s a compilation of videos of the reusable first stage  test flights: SpaceX Grasshopper 1. 2 & F9R test flights – YouTube.

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At NewSpace Watch I help provide daily coverage of the activities of SpaceX and the many other entrepreneurial space companies doing amazing things.

History, Multiple media, The Moon

Video: “In the Shadow of the Moon”

Here is the complete video of the award winning 2007 documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, directed by David Sington and Christopher Riley. The film

follows the manned missions to the Moon made by the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The documentary reviews both the footage and media available to the public at the time of the missions, as well as NASAfilms and materials which had not been opened in over 30 years. All of this has been sourced and remastered in HD by the stock footage company Footagevault. Augmenting the archival audio and video are contemporary interviews with some survivingApollo era astronauts, including Al Bean, Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, John Young, David Scott, Charlie Duke, Eugene Cernanand Harrison Schmitt. The former astronauts have the only speaking roles in the movie, although occasional supplementary information is presented on screen with text and archival television footage presents the words of journalists such as Jules Bergman and Walter Cronkite. Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the Moon, declined to participate, the only surviving moon walker at the time to do so.

The documentary shares its name with a book by space historians Colin Burgess and Francis French, and both include many original interviews with Apollo lunar astronauts. The documentary offers a view of the Apollo program that is complementary to the book and is neither a source nor a tie-in.

Space Arts

The science fiction vision of artist John Harris

The marvelous art of John Harris has made the cover of many science fiction books: Fantastic Sci-Fi Art Shows You a Beautiful, Bewildering Future – WIRED

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(Copyright John Harris)
The Last Theorem: Space Elevator
Commissioned by Harper Colllins for the special edition
of the book by Arthur C Clarke

Harris has a new book coming out titled, The Art of John Harris.

And here is a segment of a documentary about him:  The Secret History Of The Earth

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