Soon the rest of humanity will get to watch what astronauts see when they look out of the windows of the
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"There's something that astronauts have that's described as the overview effect," says Wade Larson, co-founder of Urthecast. "They often get very philosophical, and even emotional, when they describe this effect when they step out of the Earth's gravitational pull, and looking back and seeing what the planet looks like. It's a sense of connectedness and you know, the big picture in the sense of ecological fragility."
Larson launched Urthecast, a company that will send HD video cameras up to the International Space Station later this year. The cameras will be the first of their kind at the Space Station, and will be streamed "almost-live" as opposed to the static images on Google Earth. In that way, says Larson, it's really "Google Earth plus YouTube."
We are the cast
The video will be used in several ways. First, it will be streamed to the Internet in a compressed form and available to anyone with a computer (or phone or tablet) and Internet connection. There are two cameras that will the sending down data.
The first is a medium resolution camera which will just monitor the Earth. The second is an HD video camera that will take short videos as the ISS heads past specific regions, about 150 a day.
The resolution of the images and videos is similar to that of Google Earth — buildings and roads can be seen clearly. Groups of people would be seen, but faces can't be made out. The videos will be searchable, so you can find them by location, video type (nature, cities, etc) or theme.
The website will even have a tracking feature where you can check when the cameras will next be visiting your area.
"You come to the website and you will be able to see exactly where the space station is right now, and you will know when it will come over you," Larson said. "You can start doing interesting social stuff, you can get your friends out in a field and spell something out."
It won't be long until someone spells out "Will You Marry Me?" in a field.
The data will take anywhere from a half hour to a few hours for the videos and images to be downloaded from the ISS, processed and put on the website, where they will be free to view and share.
Other applications
Because the cameras will be sending data to Earth in almost-real-time, the photos and videos can be used to see how the world is changing. They will be made available to researchers, who might want to study things like say, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and used by news organizations to give a birds eye view of natural disasters like tsunami or fires, and will even be able to make out large gatherings, like riots.
The video and pictures and other data from the cameras will also be available to purchase for use in remote sensing applications. This could be farmers monitoring their crops, or the government monitoring forest fires in California. People and corporations would pay for the raw or processed images, instead of the compressed information that's streamed on the site. Companies can also buy exclusivity rights, so no one else can use it.
"We will have a huge amount of data, I mean, obscene volumes of data," Larson said. "There's plenty to meet the data requirements of our customers, as well as put this out on the Web.".jpg)
The data can also be used by other companies who might want to make apps with the data — which may be funny, or games, or something else entirely.
Origins
The idea came from the mind of Larson who was at the time was working for the Canadian Space Company, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates.
He was in a meeting with Russian officials to work on a partnership with the group. Inspired by the "Eagle Cam" which chronicled the life of an eagle's nest, he thought live video would be the way to go: "We were in a meeting to brainstorm this and I proposed to them – let's put a video camera on the space station and stream it live on the Internet."
While the Russians loved the idea, Larson's employer didn't. The project didn't work out, so Larson went off on his own to found Urthecast with his brother.
The logistics
Springing from that meeting, Larson has developed a partnership with the Russian government's space program Roscosmos, which will transport the cameras to the space station in Russian shuttles. In exchange for this lift, the Russians get access to the camera data that covers Russia. Urthecast gets all the rest of the data..jpg)
The cameras are currently being built, and should be ready to go up by October and December of this year. They are also working on building the social and streaming technology into the website for when the data to start rolling down.
They will be the first permanent Earth-observing cameras on the ISS. The space station is actually a really great place to post some cameras, because its orbit is so different from traditional Earth-observing satellites.
The satellites that currently monitor the Earth spend most of their time near the poles, so there is a large swath of the Earth that isn't actively imaged.
The cameras Urthecast will be putting on the ISS, on the other hand, will be able to cover the middle latitudes, including the entire continental US, circling the globe multiple times a day: "In those regions we have way more data and way more capability to do applications that demand high revisits," says Larson. "What's great about that for us is that most of the world's populations actually live in those temperate mid-latitudes. Big cities, business centers and economic activity."
The effect
When the video cameras are up and working, Larson says they will give the world a completely different perspective on ourselves, hopefully something akin to the "overview effect."
"We want to bring this to everyone," Larson said. "Of course it's not going to be as spectacular or as profound as being in zero g, but to be able to make it available to schoolchildren in Mali who will be logging on and seeing what the Earth looks like and the artificiality of national borders and all that sort of stuff, and the fragility of the planet."
Larson says he has every confidence that when big news events like the Tahrir square riots, or the Pacific Tsunami, Urthecast will catch it on video and that video will go viral.