A satellite belonging to Lithuanian space company NanoAvionics took a selfie of itself from a GoPro Hero 7 the company modified to be used in space. The camera wasn’t just used to bolster its Instagram.
Last month, a satellite belonging to Lithuanian space company NanoAvionics took a selfie of itself in 4K resolution from a GoPro Hero 7 the company modified to be used in space. The camera wasn’t just used to bolster its Instagram–the photos also helped the company test and verify the operation of systems on the satellite itself.
“When the satellite is observing itself, in some cases that might be very valuable,” explains NanoAvionics cofounder and CEO Vytenis Buzas. “You can get confirmations of the deployable elements, if your solar panels have been deployed or antennas have been deployed.” Mounting a GoPro camera on a satellite is not standard operating procedure for a space mission, because most equipment that goes to space needs to be “hardened”—that is, protected from solar radiation that has the potential to knock out delicate electronics equipment. But in this case, Buzas, 36, explains that it was something of a necessity. ‘The time frame was too short to get space-grade cameras,” he explained.
However, the company had tested GoPro cameras for stratospheric flights before, and thought it might work for this particular mission, which was primarily geared toward testing how well the company’s new payload controller could handle the generation and transmission of large datasets, like the kind produced by high-resolution cameras.
Putting the two cameras on the satellite wasn’t as easy as just fastening the cameras down. The hardware had to be stripped down to accommodate space requirements on the satellite, and then the cameras had to be interfaced with the payload controller and software. There was also a certain element of risk involved in using nonhardened equipment, Buzas explains, especially since the sun has been relatively active lately. “This is a matter of statistics,” he says.
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