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GoPro Footage Gives You A Rocket's-Eye View Of Spaceflight (gizmag.com)
Eloking quotes a report from Gizmag: Action cameras have been strapped to dogs, chainsaw-wielding drones and everything in between, but there's a new benchmark for homegrown heroes and their action-cam videos courtesy of UP Aerospace. Having strapped a GoPro HERO 4 to the outside of its SpaceLoft-10 sounding rocket, the company launched it into the thermosphere, gathering some footage that's simply out of this world along the way. The footage is incredible and begs the question: how did they fasten the cameras to a rocket traveling at 3,796 mph? You can watch the footage here on YouTube.
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Right after WWII they took footage on captured V2 rockets. This is hardly new or exciting.
So a rocket breack up into 4+ parts and 4 of those stay in 30 meter proximity to each other, floating in space? With the right angle for the go pro to film? ... ... To sceptical I am?
It looks cool but I though at times it looks to good to be true.
Your opinion please.
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manage to get them started? (wifi?) Did they have extra battery / external power source? More information please. Looks great bit TFA lacks all the REALLY interesting information. :)
. . . is not how they affixed the cameras to the rocket and RV.
What *I* would like to know is how they protected the cameras. Because the drag and heating effects of a ~3800 mph slipstream are going to be noticeable. After all, the leading edges of SR-71s expand substantially, and have been reported to glow from air-friction induced heating. . .and a Blackbird tops out at 2200 mph.
THOSE details would be far more interesting. . .
I agree. It totally begs the question.
Mostly time. Blackbird has heat expansion issues because it flies in atmosphere at 2200mph for a long time. The rocket may have peaked at 3600mph, but you only get seconds of that before the atmosphere is too thin to cause much heating.
Watch old manned launch videos and listen for the term "Max Q". That's the point where atmospheric drag is at its highest (factoring in acceleration and atmospheric density), and it's surprisingly early.
How does the pilot not get sick when the rocket spins like that?
Umm ..
1) The pilot is knocked unconscious by the high launch forces, so never sees anything?
2) The pilot spends hours and hours training on a merry-go-round?
3) The pilot doesn't directly look out the window. Instead he/she watches the video after they de-spin it?
4) The pilot spent man-hours training on FPS video games?
5) or maybe because there is no pilot?
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Probably all of the above!
It looks cool but I though at times it looks to good to be true.
Actually you get a hint as to how they did it when they show a very brief clip of video at full speed in space and everything is spinning rapidly and its hard to see anything. So clearly these clips of things majestically floating there are slow motion and in reality each piece is spinning and tumbling rapidly on the edge of space before it falls back down to Earth.
I kind of assumed the go-pro was mounted inside the rocket aimed through a quartz window towards a very small angled mirror, itself protected by a small faring, to see down the side of the ship. that way there would be minimal additional drag. At least that is how I would do it.
how did they fasten the cameras to a rocket traveling at 3,796 mph?
I'm reasonably certain that they didn't. They attached it to the rocket while it was stationary.
Or watch the recent video of the Falcon 9 launch. Max Q is reached about 1:24 after launch at 1900 km/h, 14km altitude. This is about the same altitude as the Apollo missions and a little bit later than the space shuttle, which reached Max Q at about 11km altitude.
Or in this case, when it was spinning very quickly, I'm moderately sure the video was playing in fast forward and not actually spinning all that quickly. Later in the video it stopped spinning so quickly and without any sort of engine to stop it spinning, it would have continued.
Perhaps if people were better educated, they would care about using the language properly.
It didn't appear to be "in space" very long, and as convection heat loss drops along with the pressure and density of the atmosphere, the inside of the rocket should stay plenty warm for it's brief duration up there.
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I don't know how they did it, but an educated guess, based on other sounding rockets I've seen (and some I've built...), is that the cameras are mounted inside the body and look out through a small window (horizontally). A mirror inside an aerodynamic shroud (to reduce drag) allows the camera to see down the body tube.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
how did they fasten the cameras to a rocket traveling at 3,796 mph?
They didn't. They used a bit of foresight and attached the camera before the launch,when it was stationary.
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Would be the roller coaster pulling its stock price.
My question is why (how) does the rocket suddenly stop spinning at the top of it's flight?
but you only get seconds of that
Maybe. On the other hand, during the development of the VT Fuse, the heating due to the shell's short flight was sufficient to melt the solder connection to the antenna in the nose cap. Until high temp solder was used.
I think the solution (as others have pointed out) is that the GoPros are mounted inside the rocket casing, looking out through high temp windows.
Have gnu, will travel.
A -453F temperature is only a problem at higher pressures, when there's lots of stuff (air) at that temperature to carry heat away. In a thin or non-existent atmosphere, the outside temperature may be that low, but the rate of heat loss is near zero because there just isn't enough air to conduct heat away. The problem spacecraft have is actually cooling their electronics. Usually it's sent via heat pipes to radiator fins or panels, where it's rejected as EM (infrared) radiation.
Hmm, ads disabled, check.
Hmm, article listed as paid story, no. So it should be safe to read - oh, wait, it's a blatant slashvertisement with a link to a GoPro ad video? Whaaat?
I love being monetized.
A -453F reading, unless you went to great cryogenic pains, means your temperature gauge is either broken or being used under conditions where it doesn't work. The atmosphere never gets below about -130F, and by the time it gets that cold, it's so thin that it has very little impact on the temperature of big solid objects. At that point, objects interact thermally with the outside world entirely by radiation, which is a very slow way to reach low temperatures. Not to mention the flight was in sunlight and had a warm Earth occupying almost a hemisphere of the view, which would keep things nice and warm.
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I sure wish I can just watch one camera footage uninterrupted from start to finish instead of constantly jumping from one camera to another, jumping ahead (ok I get it, they have to fit it all in a 3 minute youtube vid). Even NASA does this with virtually all the footage they post but occasionally you can find the raw footage and watch it in entirety. Yes, it takes longer but let me piss away my time please.
mfwright@batnet.com
Camera is inside the rocket facing a small downward pointing mirror.
They put the cameras inside the rocket, pointed out a port in the side of the rocket tube. Just outside the port there is a small mirror angled at 45 degrees. The mirror is aerodynamically protected. In the shot at 1:50 in the video when two rocket sections separate you can see some of the mirror housings, they are the little blue smooth bumps sticking out the side.
The pilot is seated on a centrifuge rotating the opposite direction at the same rate.
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But seriously, even after watching this video, flat earth "truthers" will probably come up with some excuse.
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I wondered about that.
1. Wouldn't that rate of spin cause problems? I assume this rocket isn't quite as fragile as the recent Japanese satellite, which tore itself apart due to spinning at 78RPM instead of 33.
2. I thought the stabilisers/fins were there to stop that kind of thing?
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Spin is a simple method of stabilizing a rocket by gyroscopic forces (conservation of angular momentum), if the craft and payload are able to withstand and perform as intended while spinning. It works for rifle bullets, where the projectile is spun up by spiral grooves in the gun barrel. It is very simple and robust; in a model rocket you just mount the fins at a slight angle tilted off the axis of the rocket body.