Cameras Made in Canada to Be Reinstalled on International Space Station on Jan 27
There will be another effort to be made for installing cameras on the International Space Station in the next couple of weeks. The previous endeavour in December 2013 was halted due to cabling issues. The couple of cameras that will be installed were developed in Canada.
UrtheCast Corp. is a Vancouver based company which was responsible for developing the camera. The company claims that those will be placed on Jan 27. Scott Larson, CEO of UrtheCast, issued a statement that the second spacewalk was expected to complete the process of installation of the cameras which would photograph the earth. UrtheCast had plans to broadcast the images on their Web site.
The previous effort on Dec 27 was made by Russian cosmonauts Sergei Ryazansky and Oleg Kotov. Even though the process went on smoothly, there were issues after the installation. The Mission Control Centre, which is placed near Moscow, said that there was no data received from any of the two cameras installed. It could not be confirmed if the cameras were able to receive any power. It could also not be confirmed if the cameras could endure fluctuations of temperature in space. The cameras, which had been installed on the Russian service module Zvezda, were then kept inside the ISS store so that it could be determined why the cameras did not receive any power.
One of the cameras will capture photos after getting installed while the other will stream video. The earlier part of 2014 will see the transmission of the earth images through the Internet. The cameras will capture photos of stadiums, outdoor events, planes and boats. The cameras can be in the fields of forestry, environment monitoring and agriculture. On the other hand, capturing images of the faces of people or license plates may not be possible enough as they will be too small.
The cameras are capable of capturing images in the range of 5 kilometres.