It allows taking 20 photographs per second, weighs 15 kilos – it is the lightest of the optical space cameras ever designed – and has the highest image precision achieved to date. The iSIM170, manufactured at the Satlantis headquarters in Bilbao, in the science park of the University of the Basque Country, will take off tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. (Spanish time) on a Japanese Space Agency ship from Tanegashima island, near Tokyo.
Your destination will be International Space Station where it will be installed on the exterior balcony of the Japanese module. This is the first time that the Japanese have introduced foreign technology into their facilities on the ISS. ‘At 400 kilometers vertically above the Earth, the camera’s mission will be to demonstrate its precision by capturing high-resolution images of the land and sea surface, has told in La Ventana the CEO of Satlantis, Juan Tomás Hernani.“With it you could detect a car perfectly, a pixel is equivalent to about 80 centimeters, any object that exceeds three pixels could be identified, a person could not, it would have to be a big big head”, he joked.
This Spanish startup awaits with expectation what will be the culmination of seven years of work And that will take place at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow, Wednesday, Spanish time, when the launch allows the coupling of the Japanese ship and the International Space Station at more than 30,000 kilometers per hour.
‘From there, and depending on the rotation of the International Station, it will be able to capture successively images of the entire planet. The special circumstances we are experiencing due to this crisis, with the cleanest skies in recent decades, are a unique opportunity to document in images the correlation between industrial activity and pollution, C02 fluctuations, etc. ‘, has detailed Hernani.
In fact, one of the most valuable functions of the iSIM170 is the information that it will be able to provide on the effects of climate change, meteorological phenomena or the environmental impact of polluting activities on the land or sea surface, from spills, algae pests or proliferation of plastics in the oceans.
Tomorrow’s launch had to postpone two months due to the coronavirus crisis,“The takeoff was scheduled to be from Houston in March, but the camera had to be flown back to Japan to reschedule the flight.”
The Satlantis team had to cancel their flights to Japan to attend the launch due to the pandemic. ‘As an alternative, we will have an event tomorrow that can be followed through our website and where we will have a live signal of the launch. Senior representatives from NASA, ESA, Hispasat and leading companies from the aeronautical and space sector will participate in it. ‘ A milestone for Spanish R&D that will allow us to look at the Earth from the stars.
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