The maiden launch of the brand new GSLV Mark III was a great success this morning.
This rocket is powered by two large Solid Rocket booster S200 that lift it in the air. About 2 minutes later, the center stage L110 is ignited and carry the laucher into space. The 2nd stage was just a dummy stage on that flight and will later rely on its cryogenic engine to give an orbital speed to the payload.
This 1st flight carried a mock up of future human capsule that splashed down in the India Ocean 20 minutes after lift off.
The rocket reminds me of a Titan IV that would have been thicker and shorter. It looks definitely massive and powerful.
I built a full model of that rocket in Sketchup in order to draw exploded views and cutaways of that little beast.
So SpaceX built a sea platform to land the spent 1st Stages of future Falcon 9.
Elon musk leaked a picture of that barge that looks like a small aircraft carrier seen from above.
But how big it is compared to the stage that will hover and hopefully safely land on it ?
Here are some screenshot of a model I made that put things in perspective.
With 65meters high the first stage is huge, so huge that the barge looks tiny and it will be a really challenge to aim at it and land the stage.
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.
