- Black Image = International Space Station (ISS) is on the night side of the Earth.
- Gray Image = Switching between cameras, or communications with the ISS is not available.
- No Audio = Normal. There is no audio added to the stream
On the 1st of may 2014 at about 1:00 EST SpaceX tweeted that the HDEV experiment was successfully transferred from Dragon’s trunk to ISS. This is a cool experiment with four High definition camera’s. These four camera’s are streaming real HD video footage of Earth.
The camera isn’t always online. It has to in range of one of the high bandwidth ground stations and ISS needs to be in daylight. Your best change is when ISS is flying over near or over the US. You can check ISS’s position in the realtime ISS tracking Widget on the right. Dark area means night, light area is day. You can move the map with your mouse cursor to locate ISS.
The HDEV experiment is build with commercial of the shelf cameras and one of it’s purposes is to test how these camera’s hold in a space environment and are suitable for prolonged use in space, e.g. on a trip to Mars.
- The forward facing camera is a Hitachi
- The downward facing camera is a Toshiba
- The first aft facing camera is a Sony
- The second aft facing camera is a Panasonic
Resources:
- You can see some cool photos of the HDEV camera experiment on the Nasa Website
- More information on the HDEV Wikipedia page