How NASA Captured the First Artemis Moon Images with Hacked GoPro Cameras

Speaker 1: NASA has released the first images of the moon taken on the Artemis mission and they are spectacular. Early on Monday morning, the Orion spacecraft did a fly by of the moon passing roughly 80 miles above the luer surface. The images of the moon were captured by Orion, thanks to cameras installed on the vehicle's solar wings. There weren't any astronauts onboard the crew capsule for this Artemis One mission, but these images show us what astronauts will see when they fly to the moon on Artemis two in just [00:00:30] a few years time. And the best part, the images were captured by hacked GoPros, but not the kind you can buy off the shelf. Speaker 1: When humans first traveled to the moon on Apollo eight back in 1968 and then landed just seven months later with Apollo 11, the images they sent back were historic. But now, 50 years later, we are no strangers to images from space. Whether it's shots taken [00:01:00] by astronauts on the International Space Station or SpaceX live streaming, a mannequin riding through space in a Tesla. But the first images from Artemis are still mind blowing. This is the first time NASA has sent a human rated spacecraft into deep space in 50 years, and it's going further than any crew rated vehicle has ever gone before. When it finally lifted off in the early hours of November 16th, the Artemis launch went off without a hitch. We got an amazing view as the space [00:01:30] launch system blasted off from launch complex 39 B at Cape Canaveral sending Orion into space. Speaker 1: But the action didn't stop there. After the SLS core stage was jettisoned and aion unfilled its solar wings. We got our beautiful first images of Earth, but that was just the start. After journeying through space, Orion did what's known as an outbound powered flyby to latch onto the moon's gravity and sling Orion into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon. Retrograde means orbiting [00:02:00] around the moon in the opposite direction to the moon orbiting around earth and distant essentially just means it's at a high altitude above the moon. It'll fly about 40,000 miles out past the moon at its furthest point. But during this powered flyby, that's when we got up close and personal with the Moon Orion buzzed roughly 80 miles above the surface of the moon. It's closest flyby on this whole journey. But I wanted to know more about the hardware behind these images. And so with a couple of calls to [00:02:30] the good folks at nasa, I managed to track down the person who could tell me. Speaker 2: Well, my name is David Melendres and I'm the imagery integration lead with the Orion program at NASA Johnson Space Center. Speaker 1: Melendres job is to oversee operations for Orion's cameras. There are 13 cameras installed across Orion inside, outside, and on the spacecraft, stretch out solar arrays. There are a mix of industrial cameras from a Canadian company called Pixel Link, as well as GoPros. NASA opted for the the GoPro Hero Black [00:03:00] for this mission, but with a lot of adjustments Speaker 2: By Frank and TAs. Some of them are highly modified GoPros, I would not say you can go out and get them because you can't. They've been taken apart, reprogrammed. There's a new lens. They've been basically completely rebuilt In order to survive deep space and rocket flight environment, Speaker 1: NASA has been sending cameras into space for decades, but on this mission they had to survive launch inside the rocket. Then once their protected [00:03:30] covers were jettison, they had to survive out in the open. In deep space, Speaker 2: You have to take care of the circuit boards and make sure things aren't going to fall off cuz they do have to go through vibration testing. Um, we've had to attach heaters to keep them warm in deep space and uh, just generally do our best to make sure they're not gonna ke over. When you're on the far side of the moon, you simply cannot go down to Radio Shack that even exists anymore, fries or whatever, [00:04:00] you know, and buy a camera and bolt it onto a rocket and just expect it to work. Um, you might get lucky, but chances are the vibration, the thermal radiation environment will choke that camera pretty Speaker 1: Quickly. So when you're going out past the moon, how do you get the images back to earth? Well, the answer is radio for this, NASA is using its Deep Space Network. The same network that's been talking to the James Webspace telescope. The Deep Space Network is a network of telescopes in Madrid, Goldstone, [00:04:30] California, and drum roll please. Canberra, Australia. I didn't need to necessarily mention where they all are, but I will mention Australia Time. I get a chance. Hi Mom and dad. Anyway, even with the dsn, getting the image back to Earth is no main feat. Speaker 2: So to go all the way to the moon, it's not like Station Station. We're used to getting mega tons of video that's in low earth orbit. It's right across the street from the moon to get a live stream video at what folks would expect as 4K video quality. Well, I can get four 4K [00:05:00] video on my iPhone, but you're not doing it from the moon. Speaker 1: The images are sharing bandwidth with other really important communications and telemetry data that's coming down from Artemis. So there's a lot to squeeze through this down link. That's why a lot of the live video has been reasonably low res. But there is an upside to all of this. NASA is going to be recording several hundred gigs worth of data and about two thirds of it will stay on board the Orion spacecraft. But when Orion splashes [00:05:30] back down off the coast of Hawaii in mid-December and it's brought back to the Kennedy Space Center about two weeks later, we are going to have a huge amount of amazing footage to see beautiful high resolution footage of Earth, the moon and everything in between, all captured using Frankenstein cameras in deep dark space. And frankly, that is a pretty cool holiday present. All right, that's all from me. I'm glad you could join me to geek out a a bit on these cameras. If you are interested in more about the Artemis mission, [00:06:00] then make sure you check out our deep explainer on the launch at its path around the moon, as well as our trip to the Misute assembly facility where we got to see where the rocket is made. In the meantime, subscribe to CNET for more space news. As it happens, I'm Claire Riley for cnet, keeping an Eye on Earth and everything happening in space.