An astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has shared a rarely seen view from the orbiting outpost that shows our planet from horizon to horizon.
The video, captured by Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, was made possible by recording Earth through a fish-eye lens. Covering a distance of about 4,300 miles, the video (below) starts just south of Ireland before passing over France, the Mediterranean islands of Sardinia and Sicily, the Nile, and the Red Sea before reaching the Horn of Africa.
“Fly with me! From Ireland to the Horn of Africa through a fisheye lens,” Cristoforetti wrote in a tweet accompanying the video. “It distorts the geometry a bit, but it allows me to show you the almost entire view we have from Space Station, from horizon to horizon!”
Fly with me! From Ireland to the Horn of Africa through a fisheye lens – it distorts the geometry a bit, but it allows me to show you the almost entire view we have from Space Station, from horizon to horizon! #MissionMinerva @Space_Station @esa pic.twitter.com/ORKUNYouKQ
— Samantha Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) August 31, 2022
Cristoforetti has been keeping her one million Twitter followers up to date with her space station activities since reaching orbit five months ago. Besides offering advice to wannabe astronauts, past posts have also included a gorgeous view of a moonlit Earth, a lunar eclipse from space, a time lapse showing how the sun sometimes doesn’t set for astronauts on the station, and, just last week, an investigation into a strange bright light that she spotted on Earth.
Cristoforetti even took time out to recreate a moment from the hit 2013 space movie Gravity.
The International Space Station has been in operation for two decades and orbits Earth at an altitude of about 250 miles. For more on how visiting astronauts live and work aboard the space-based laboratory, check out these videos made by various crews over the years.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.