Yesterday, Commander Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy, two Russian cosmonauts who are part of Expedition 38 on the International Space Station, performed a spacewalk to install a high-resolution video camera and a medium-resolution still camera on the Zvezda module of the Station but they had some problems. Specifically, the still camera didn’t send the expected telemetry signals.

These sophisticated instruments have been built by UrtheCast (written as “You are the Cast” but pronounced “Earth Cast”), a Canadian company that wants to sell the streaming broadcasts and the photographs of the Earth taken from the International Space Station. You can create a free basic profile on UrtheCast website to have some services, premium users will enjoy additional paid services.

UrtheCast signed an agreement with the Russian space agency, which can use all the images taken by the cameras. The images seen from the International Space Station can be useful for many purposes, ranging from agricultural to urban ones but also to control areas of difficult access.

The activation of the two instruments was scheduled for December 27, 2013, when Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy performed a spacewalk to install them. However, the activation of the telemetry links necessary to ensure the broadcast of the pictures failed, forcing the two cosmonauts to bring the instruments back inside the Station.

A trouble-shooting led to the conclusion that the failure was due to the connection cables inside and outside the Station. The fault was supposed to have been repaired and yesterday the two cosmonauts have reinstalled the two cameras. The high resolution video camera works but the still camera gave problems with the telemetry again.

Now they’re trouble-shooting the issue again to try to understand where the problem is but at least for the moment no more spacewalks are scheduled. UrtheCast and the Russian space agency will assess the various possibilities along with the cosmonauts to see if they can activate the telemetry from inside the International Space Station. In the meantime, the testing of the high-resolution video camera will also start, to have what will be an extraordinary show in streaming.

Edit. Today UrtheCast issued a press release that states that the troubled camera transmitted telemetry data as well. Therefore success seems complete.

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