ISS HDEV
d3k0y
Loveland, OH Icrontian
NASA installed some HD cameras on the outside of the ISS, now you can stream Earth! 24/7!
7
d3k0y
Loveland, OH Icrontian
NASA installed some HD cameras on the outside of the ISS, now you can stream Earth! 24/7!
Comments
Glad y'all like it!
That's awesome. I wish my laptop here wasn't such crap, or I'd just leave it up all the time.
Awesome. I just checked it and it was crossing over the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Of course, the feed went gray and it changed cameras. I'm sure the NSA didn't want me seeing anything I shouldn't.
Word on the street is that you guys sent it up. Good work! Also, you probably have one of the coolest jobs of any icrontian anywhere.
Watch the feed today to see Soyuz book it with the Expedition 39 crew:
https://plus.google.com/+NASA/posts/J75Hcj5HCmo
ISS departure attitude is no good for HDEV reception tragically. You can still watch on NASA TV though:
http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv
So this is probably a stupid question, but why isn't the ISS flying in a straight line? Relative to Earth, that is. I mean, I know that it's got a slanted orbit, but is there any reason why?
I believe it is.. the up and down is because of the style of map they have shown underneath it. The continents are all layed out flat, so to actually show you the path, it looks like a sine wave.
Sorry, I asked that in a profoundly stupid way. Let me try again.
l337 Microsoft Paint Skillz
Is there any reason the ISS doesn't fly around the Equator and instead is slanted to the poles?
Yes. The ISS flies at a 52 degree inclination so that payload to orbit is maximized on rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome (46 degrees N latitude). To reach the ISS from there, the rocket launches essentially due east. If the ISS inclination was 0 (orbiting above the equator) then the launch vehicle upper stage would need to provide two burns: first burn to ascend and enter a low orbit at an inclination of the same latitude as the launch site and then a plane change maneuver as that orbit crosses the equator to neutralize the north-south component of velocity and increase the west-east component to maintain orbit. This maneuver is called a plane change and is extremely energy-intensive. It's the same reason why Shuttle typically orbited at ~30 degree inclined orbits; Cape Canaveral is located at 28 degrees north latitude so orbits of that inclination maximize payload to orbit from that site.
ISS orbits in a convenient orbit for the Russians so that they could launch heavy parts like the first few modules. Vehicles launching from lower-latitude sites like Cape Canaveral must launch on a northerly or southerly trajectory when the ISS ground track brings it over the launch site so that they launch into the same plane. This restricts the launch windows to be only a few seconds wide for ISS-bound missions from Cape because the Earth rotates out-of-plane at a pretty good clip. The payload-to-orbit performance is not seriously impacted though because no plane change maneuver is required even though Earth's rotation is not contributing as much to the required energy to get to orbit. Practically speaking, all US east coast launch sites can only launch on the northerly pass to avoid overflying populated areas so the launch opportunities are halved.
All I thought of when reading that is "SCIENCE MUTHAFUCKA, DO YOU SPEAK IT?"
In actuality they launch a little bit north of east so that the great circle ground track doesn't result in any of the launch vehicle stages falling to the ground in China (they fall in Mongolia instead). This is why the ISS orbital inclination is slightly higher than the latitude of Baikonur.
Also, Kerbal Space Program (http://icrontic.com/discussion/93074/kerbal-space-program). Although there you don't often have to worry about large plane change maneuvers as the launch site is at 0 deg. N and because reasons.
Did not realize Russia was the reason it was so heavily inclined. Thanks drasnor!