In 1981, CNES, the french space agency, envisionned an "automatic" space station dubbed SOLARIS.
The basic idea was to have a manufacturing plant in orbit to produce advanced material and pharmaceutical products in microgravity that can be brought down through unmanned capsules.
I guess the project was scrubbed when the orbital produced materials turned out to be not so promising after some experiments done in SpaceLab from 1983.
A beautiful artwork of Hermes on the launchpad taken from a October 1979 magazine .
The variant of the spaceplane depicted here is the original version presented by CNES at the Paris Airshow the previous spring.
Interestingly, the launch vehicle envisioned is an
Ariane 1. The maiden flight of that rocket was just 2 months after the
issue of the magazine and this may have influenced the artist.
However,
in no way an Ariane 1 would have been able to throw Hermes in orbit.
The first operational rocket of ESA was designed to deliver payloads in
GTO (1 800kgs) not to LEO. But even with a reduced 3rd stage, the
booster capability would have never fit with the 10 tons mass of Hermes.
Instead, CNES planned to use an uprated version of
Ariane 4, dubbed "Ariane 5" with an enlarged 2nd stage. That rocket
would have been very different from the Ariane 5 that will eventually be
built and fly 15 years later.
I think that the Hermes program, that runs from 1977 to 1993, is one of the longest, most passionate and eventually the most frustrated development of a spacecraft ever started.
There was a lot of hiccups all over this project.
Some technical issues first, that added some weight constantly over the time. It gave challenges to both the airframe and the booster.
Some political fights then between the main fund-raisers of ESA the European space agency in charge of Hermes. The British, the French and the German strongly disagree on the direction to go.
And last, some financial issue that put a stop to the work when the budget over exceeded all initial forecasts and the fundraisers decided to close their wallets.
But let's go back to 1977.
That year while the space shuttle Enterprise underwent its first free atmospheric test flight, CNES, the French space agency initiated a pre-study of a tiny space plane that could carry European astronauts into orbit.
The plane was to be launched atop an Ariane rocket à la Dyansoar/Titan booster. But while the Ariane 1 was at that time in its final development stage (its maiden flight was in 1979) CNES envisionned a much more powerful launcher variant, the Ariane 5/H, to lift off Hermes.
In 1979, CNES presented a set of blueprints and artist rendering to the press.
The plane was 12,5 meters long with a wingspan of 8 meters and weighted 10 tons. It could carry 5 astronauts or 2 astronauts and a 1,5 tons payload. While much smaller it had a similar double delta wing shape as use on the US space shuttle.
I based my CAD modelling on this 1979 material and tried to imagine what would be that small bird into orbit.
I am fascinated by time lapse videos of earth at night shot from the
ISS. Several of these videos were made and uploaded on streaming sites
in the past months and they precisely depict earth in all its beauty :
city lights flybys, dancing auroras and lightings that are striking the
dark ground of continents and oceans.
But
all of these movies are not based on videos footage. Instead, they were
patiently built by artists by stacking thousands of long exposure
pictures made by the ISS astronauts using Nikon digital cameras. The
Nikon cameras are usually bracket mounted in the ISS cupola to keep a
stable framing. An automatic remote control system is then plugged to
the camera in order to take continuous long exposure of around 2s during
a flyby of earth at night that the ISS will cover in about 40 minutes.
The
artists have then to manually stitched the photos (most of time after a
despeckling/ denoising operation that will improve the quality of each
pics).
The main issue with the use of video camcorder
to record at night from the ISS is the same as you will have shooting
the sea from a cliff on a moonless night : Very low light condition and
no way to use projectors to better render the scene.
But what
about building a dedicated video camera that push the sensitivity border
enough to film in the dark and make possible to get real time videos of
earth at night ?
That is what JAXA the Japanese space
agency made with the help of NHK broadcasting company. They built the
SS-HDTV, the super sensitive HDTV video camera and flew it to space.
JAXA SS-HDTV
1 : Lens (shown here is a Fujinon HA18x7.6ERM/ERD lens), 2 : Camera body, 3 : LCD screen, 4 : SD card recorder
(credit : JAXA)
The
camera was delivered to the ISS by the Progress M-10M on 29 April 2011
and transferred to the Kibo module. It then waited for its operator,
the japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa who boarded the station in June
2011.
Within the next 2 months, Satoshi prepared and set up the
camera. He then transmitted videos during a period that culminated with a
four-segment live TV show in September 2011.
Satoshi Furukawa recorded lightning, auroras and the islands of Japan at night with the SS-HDTV
(credit : JAXA/NHK)
The
camera is built around a 2/3" EM-CCD sensor, EM stands for Electron
multiplyer. This CCD technology is quite new and its main advantage is
to deliver a very good signal to noise ratio as well as low light
capabilities. Therefore, EM-CCDs cameras find growing use in astronomy
and scientific application where light become scarce.
Thanks to its sensor, the SS-HDTV can work with a minimum illumination of 0,05 lux.
Surrounding
the sensor is a thoughened body that give protection from the solar
radiation level that is higher in the ISS than on ground level. On one
side of the body is a liveview LCD monitor, on the other is a SD card
reader that records the video sequences on 32GB interchangeable SD
cards.
An interchangeable lens is used to focus the image. A set of 5 lenses is available in the ISS :
Four fixed focal lens : 4,8mm, 8mm, 17mm, 25mm and one zoom lens : 7,6 ~ 137mm 16X.
The
video sequences are encoded using the MPC (Multi-Protocol Converter) at
27Mbit/s before downlinking it to earth through the Ku-band data flow
of the station. The MPC, developped by NASA, ESA and JAXA is used to
compress HD video stream and therefore limit the use of bandwidth. This
operation is achieved either in real time or by processing
The camera was extinsively used by Satoshi until October 2011. No activity is reported in the ISS status since this time.
Here is a composite 3 views of the model in order to depict the overall shape of the capsule.
The front part hosts a Common Berthing Mechanism. It includes a large hatch of 127 cms wide that would have allow astronauts to carry large piece cargo to the Freedom station.
Beside the hatch, on each side of the capsule are located 2 RCS units in order to steer the spacecraft to and back from the station.
The bold red line is the edge of the reentry heatshield that ends the Command Module.
The back side of the ship is the service module. It protects the heatshield upto the reentry sequence, durig launch and maneuvers in orbit. But its main purpose in space is to hosts both the electrical production through solar panel and the telecommunication equipment to send data, voice and video back to earth or through relay satellites.
ISS crew has the great chance to use top of the line Nikon cameras. Here is a view of some of the gears available in the space station.
Some D2s and D3s are waiting to be used and are stored on their articulated monopods in the ISS cupola.
When you consider that each camera has a price tag of roughly 5000$ and the ISS cost is said to be above 100 bn$, one can say that either the station is the most expensive place to hold Nikons or these cameras are most probably the cheapest pieces of hardware flying around the earth...
