Posted by
chrisd
on from the sorry-no-wishlist dept.
mpd2014 writes "When the next shuttle takes off to the space station on October 2nd it will have a new webcam attached to the external tank that is sure to provide spectacular images. If you're interested in the schematics and technical details NASA has also made those available."
personally, i'm looking forward to alien/spacewoman upskirt shots...
It has been onboard already
by
jukal
·
· Score: 5, Informative
According to this release by the company which makes the RocketCams: "2002 Aug 21: Two Ecliptic RocketCam(TM) systems have provided launch-to-orbit onboard views during the inaugural launch of the Atlas 5 rocket. The launch was a complete success, taking Eutelsat's Hotbird 6 comsat from Cape Canaveral and placing it into the desired transfer orbit. Both RocketCam(TM) cameras captured dramatic views looking aft: one from outside the Atlas 5's second-stage skin and one from inside the aft end of the second stage. "
Apparently, this is just the first time it can be publicly accessed.
Re:It has been onboard already
by
FrostedWheat
·
· Score: 5, Informative
And this section of there website, you can view these videos. Very much publicly accessible.
They even provide MPEGs for those Quicktime-impared.
Re:hope it doesnt get /.ed
by
billstr78
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It will. Unless the frame rate is extremely low, an event of this popularity will quickly consume a 100Mb/sec line. This was the max Ames Research Center (NASA) could host a couple of years ago, but they are probably going with a 3rd party provider. Let's hope they have lots of high bandwith mirrors load balanced and sprikled accross the country. This is the inherernt problem with a popular live event comensing at one specific moment and using at least 20Kb/sec per viewer. I am not saying it won't go off without a hitch, but when I interned at Ames, every event we hosted saturated the 100Mbit/sec line we had that went straight to an OC21 backbone pipe.
This, after looking at the specs and designs they have online, is a regular camera with a regular NASA style live RF feed back to ground control... The only thing that could possibly make it a webcam would be that someone would take that video feed and encode it for the web. Something they did not mention was going to happen.
calling that a webcam is the same as calling a studio camera and camera crew a webcam... It is another monitoring camera / eye-candy camera added to the shuttle launch vehicle.. IT is identical to most cameras that NASA uses on it's launch vehicles.
Too bad that it's a throw-away one time use item.... it's built like a tank and would probably last 100 years at a weather station or pointing at my back yard.
Slashdot Mirror
personally, i'm looking forward to alien/spacewoman upskirt shots...
Apparently, this is just the first time it can be publicly accessed.
It will. Unless the frame rate is extremely low, an event of this popularity will quickly consume a 100Mb/sec line. This was the max Ames Research Center (NASA) could host a couple of years ago, but they are probably going with a 3rd party provider. Let's hope they have lots of high bandwith mirrors load balanced and sprikled accross the country. This is the inherernt problem with a popular live event comensing at one specific moment and using at least 20Kb/sec per viewer. I am not saying it won't go off without a hitch, but when I interned at Ames, every event we hosted saturated the 100Mbit/sec line we had that went straight to an OC21 backbone pipe.
This, after looking at the specs and designs they have online, is a regular camera with a regular NASA style live RF feed back to ground control... The only thing that could possibly make it a webcam would be that someone would take that video feed and encode it for the web. Something they did not mention was going to happen.
calling that a webcam is the same as calling a studio camera and camera crew a webcam... It is another monitoring camera / eye-candy camera added to the shuttle launch vehicle.. IT is identical to most cameras that NASA uses on it's launch vehicles.
Too bad that it's a throw-away one time use item.... it's built like a tank and would probably last 100 years at a weather station or pointing at my back yard.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.