NanoAvionics has revealed a 4K satellite selfie captured by a GoPro Hero 7 as the company’s MP42 microsatellite drifted 550km above the Coral Sea and Great Barrier Reef.
Space selfies are almost new. Buzz Aldrin snapped a picture of himself during 1966’s Gemini 12 mission, and successfully getting a picture of a spacecraft can be priceless when diagnosing issues.
The MP42 microsatellite was initiated through a SpaceX Falcon 9 earlier this year. The camera sprung out to snapshots to illustrate techniques to search for payload deployment, micrometeoroid impacts, and extensive fault detection.
The GoPro Hero 7 has undergone a few modifications to become suitable for space. It had to go through some trials to see if it would survive the vacuum and temperature alterations experienced during orbit, and the software was built in such a manner that it could communicate with the spacecraft’s systems.
The consumer camera was chosen since space-grade cameras require a lot of time to develop and can prove very expensive. The significant chunks of data that are generated by the hardware were also a helpful way of confirming that the beefed-up Payload Controller 2.0 was capable of running advanced applications needing to assess large amounts of data “Transmitting several GB of images and videos when operating the camera with pre-programmed starts and stops from the ground was as data-heavy as it gets,” explained Ernestas Kalabuckas, chief technology officer of NanoAvionics.
