How long do commercially available HD video cameras work under the conditions in space? Answering this question was the main goal of NASA's High-Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) project, for which four cameras were attached to the International Space Station (ISS). In space, they are mainly exposed to aggressive radiation, which is why it was assumed that they would provide images for one to three years at most. In the end, they reliably and continuously sent video material to Earth for over five years.

It is only since 22 August 2019 that communication with the four cameras is no longer possible. At the end of May 2020, they burned up after being dismantled during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Tens of terabytes of images are their legacy. More than 318 million people have watched their videos on livestream. The images are still being used: A cooperation of NASA with the German Aerospace Center, the RUB and the University of Bonn archived and used the video material for the "Columbus Eye" project. "Even though this video source on the ISS can now no longer provide data, we archived over 60 terabytes of video material in the project and used it to create numerous teaching materials and over 350 highlight videos," says Clemens Kramm from the project team at RUB, who is responsible for sifting and processing geographically relevant scenes. The teaching materials have been and will continue to be presented at teacher training courses and can be downloaded from the homepage.

"Although the HDEV mission has officially ended, we are currently developing further Earth observation sensors on the ISS in order to make them accessible to the public, but above all to schoolchildren, and to vividly convey interesting phenomena of the coupled human-environment system," says Prof. Dr. Andreas Rienow, who coordinated the project first from Bonn, then from Bochum.

To the press release of the RUB