NanoAvionics has unveiled a 4K satellite selfie taken by a GoPro Hero 7 while the company’s MP42 microsatellite flew 550 km above the Coral Sea and the Great Barrier Reef.
Space selfies are not very new. Buzz Aldrin took a picture of himself during the 1966 Gemini 12 mission, and being able to get a picture of the spaceship can be invaluable in diagnosing problems.
The MP42 microsatellite was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 earlier this year and the camera (mounted on a space-grade selfie stick) emerged to take photos to demonstrate techniques for checking payload deployment. , micrometeoroid impacts and general fault detection.
And also to take some awesome photos of the spaceship with Earth in the background.
The microsatellite selfie … Click to enlarge. Source: NanoAvionics
The GoPro Hero 7 has had some modifications to make it worthy of space. The device was disassembled and a custom housing was made for its electronics. It had to be tested to make sure it would survive the changes in vacuum and temperature experienced during orbit, and software was written so that it could communicate with the spacecraft’s systems.
Youtube video
The MP42 includes version 2.0 of the NanoAvionics payload controller. The hardware is the SoC Zynq-7015 (with an Arm Cortex A9 processor) with 256 KB of RAM on the chip and two banks of 512 MB of DDR3 RAM. Up to four microSD cards will be needed and the firmware can be updated while it is in orbit. The operating system is PetaLinux.
The consumer camera was selected as space-grade cameras usually require months of development time and can be very expensive. Substantial hardware blocks (both fixed and moving) generated by the hardware were also a useful way to demonstrate that the enhanced Payload Controller 2.0 was capable of running advanced applications that needed to process large amounts of data.
“The transmission of several GB of images and videos when using the camera with pre-programmed starts and stops from the ground was as heavy as data can be obtained,” said Ernestas Kalabuckas, director of technology at NanoAvionics.
Land taken from the ISS by the AstroPi (ESA / NASA)
Taking photographs of the Earth from space has become more important in recent years. In addition to being a benefit to environmental monitoring, satellite imagery has been used in conflict tracking. While NanoAvionics microsatellites represent a relatively inexpensive way to get into orbit, for ad hoc encoders there are alternatives: I can think of the high-quality 12.3 MP Raspberry Pi camera, which goes go to the International Space Station (ISS) with some new AstroPi units (Pi 4 Model Bs with 8 GB this time) for the European Astro Pi Challenge 2021/2022, which is an ESA Education project carried out in collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
NanoAvionics is confident that its satellite selfie stick and associated technology will come in handy as operators consider their uses. Vytenis J Buzas, co-founder and CEO of NanoAvionics, said: “In our increasingly visual culture, it’s important that investors, students, customers and the general public see it to believe it. Millions of people see releases of rockets but barely see satellites. moving in orbit or deployable structures in operation. That will change with live or recorded images. ” ®