Fans of Google Earth have surely wished for a view of our planet from an astronaut’s perspective, and it seems that wish will be coming true thanks to an initiative announced Monday at the UK Space Conference in Warwick. The project will bring the first HD streaming video camera to the International Space Station where it will be installed and provide video of the Earth’s surface.
The camera will be built in the UK, and science minister David Willetts said the pictures will actually be better than in Google Earth. The project will involve Russia and Canada as well. The HD camera and a medium-resolution camera will be built and tested by the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s RAL Space department at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
The cameras will be installed within a year on the Russian module of the ISS. The footage will be shown in almost real-time on the web. Canadian company UrtheCast, pronounced “Earthcast,” will be in charge of the web platform.
The HD streaming video cam will let you ogle over the Blue Planet as well allowing searches for videos of particular locations. You’ll be able to zoom in and out, and basically steer the camera from side to side. You can also rewind and fast forward as you investigate further into specific areas of the Earth. You’ll also be able to constantly track the location of the ISS to anticipate when it will pass over a particular location.
Willetts also said that the content will be viewable via smartphone, so we may be seeing a dedicated smartphone app in the near future.
It’s a pretty cool concept. We’ll be able to zoom into the Earth from space and check out what’s going on in real-time. Storms, rallies, outdoor concerts? The possibilities are really exciting.