Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 17—The Green Hills of Earth

Green—a word associated with jungles, a description of newbies, in songs sung by muppets about the difficulties of being it, and songs sung by fictional spacefarers about the qualities of their homeworld. Those spacefarers might be fictional, but for certain real space imagery operators, green describes a capability of a satellite payload. Green is one […]

Old footage of Soviet rocket launch attempts

Here’s at least one video, on Jalopnik’s page, of a failed launch. Note, Jalopnik’s accompanying post of why the Soviets failed to get to the moon before the United States seems to be supposition, but likely true. The Soviets made their equipment more complicated (see the article), giving Murphy (or perhaps the Imp of the […]

Space cloud mystery answered

Remember that picture an International Space Station astronaut shot of a mysterious cloud in space I posted about on 11 Oct.? There was a bit of guessing on what exactly that was, but it turns out all guesses were correct, for the most part. A mobile Russian intercontinental ballistic missile, the Topol/SS-25, caused the cloud […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 16—“Blue are the streets, And all the trees are too”

Who could forget 1999’s most famous dance single? But does anyone remember the song’s group?? Enough dancing—time to talk about satellite operations until we’re blue in the face (sorry, couldn’t resist). As mentioned in the previous lesson, this lesson is about DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-2 satellite and the blue spectrum of its imagery payload. Mainly, what is […]

Missile cloud in space

It must be interesting to be an International Space Station astronaut for all sorts of reasons, but one of the more intriguing ones, I’m sure, is being able to see all the activities going on below. So this article on Universe Today’s site points out a very rare photo-op one of the astronauts took advantage of yesterday. […]