Camera Questions: Mission Space Lab; Life on Earth

[D O Sullivan]

Apologies if these questions have been asked and answered but unfortunately DuckDuckGo does not work on the school network.

1. Some of the target areas my students are interested in photographing are at high latitudes. Above what line of latitude is beyond the range of the ISS camera?

2. Re: the images that show the photosynthetic activity of plants. Are the images taken as normal with the blue filter during the mission and after the mission the images taken are then coded by the students to display photosynthetic activity?

3. In what folder should the images be stored? (Additionally all photos will be stamped with team name, coordinates and time taken.)

Thank you

[Davespice]

Hi Darren

You don't have to use Duck Duck Go on the Pi (it's just the default), you can navigate to the www address of whatever search engine does work on your network. To answer your questions:

1. Some of the target areas my students are interested in photographing are at high latitudes. Above what line of latitude is beyond the range of the ISS camera?

The ISS orbit is inclined at 51.6 degrees relative to the equator, so that just means it will go 51.6 degrees north of the equator and 51.6 degrees south of it. This page has a good explanation of the orbit and some great pictures which illustrate it.

2. Re: the images that show the photosynthetic activity of plants. Are the images taken as normal with the blue filter during the mission and after the mission the images taken are then coded by the students to display photosynthetic activity?

Yes, usually you just need to run the image acquisition code on the ISS - which runs on the NoIR camera with the blue filter and later when you get the data back you can post process it using whatever tools you like. There's really no point to processing it in flight.

3. In what folder should the images be stored? (Additionally all photos will be stamped with team name, coordinates and time taken.)

Please just save them in the same folder as your Python code files, we modify the output folder slightly when we prepare your code for flight.

I hope this helps!
Dave

[D O Sullivan]

Hi Dave

Thanks for that. It is the DuckDuckGo search box on this forum that doesn't work on the school network.

My students are putting finishing touches to their code. One idea they have which they have been unable to code and I have been unable to solve is that in the 'downtime' between taking photos they would like the LED display to show the distance between the ISS and our school. They have coded for the distance using the Haversine formula and can display the distance in the shell window but cannot display it on the display.

Re: Mission Zero yesterday, my students involved were chuffed to know that their code ran in space yesterday. Thanks for making it possible.

[Davespice]

You can show the number on the LED matrix using the show_message function;

Code: Select all

dist = haversine(iss_long, iss_lat, target_long, target_lat)
sense.show_message("%s km" % round(dist))