Interstellar Docking
Keith’s note: You have got to watch this. Full screen. Sound turned up – footage of the docking of Soyuz with ISS using the docking sequence from the “Interstellar” soundtrack. (Corrected, it was not a Cygnus.)
Keith’s note: You have got to watch this. Full screen. Sound turned up – footage of the docking of Soyuz with ISS using the docking sequence from the “Interstellar” soundtrack. (Corrected, it was not a Cygnus.)
Wow, Will play that on the big screen Tuesday as astro students for class.
Um, that’s a Soyuz, not a Cygnus.
You might like this one too. Atlantis/STS-122 doing the rendevous pitch maneuver before docking with the ISS – set to the Blue Danube Waltz
https://vimeo.com/742629
Ya, I put the two together.
I think Kubrick synced the visual motion & musical meter a little better…
Nice nonetheless.
What this reminds me of is when ISS assembly was still going on there were hours of coverage on NASA TV. But not always a lot of commentary, just basically a live stream of the station with seemingly not much going on, just the Earth passing below, with parts of the station in the background. So I would fast forward using my DVR to get to the next event and suddenly there was motion. The solar arrays tracking the sun. A robotic arm moving a module into position. Approaching Soyuz and Shuttles seemed to dance, like in this video. There was so much otherwise unseen motion, it was like like watching a time lapse of a flower blooming or a seed coming out the ground. Maybe not that extreme in terms of time, but so much of what happens in space is like the hour hand of a clock, the movements are often barely perceptible. But speed it up and suddenly it all becomes alive.
I hope more videos like this are made. Maybe someone will go back through some of the ISS assembly videos and come up with some nice montages.
I’d have paid money to see that. I mean, beyond the 11 cents in taxes I paid for NASA last year.
Nice! I like that small shake when the vehicles officially touch – It’s so satisfying, never gets old.
What’s the rotating dish on the bottom right, and what’s going on with the lens reflections on the last third of the video?
I think i read somewhere that the rotating dish is a long/medium range radar, It needs to be folded in during docking.
Seems to me that in the last part of the video the ISS transitions into night, but is still lit up by the sun, and is overexposed. Then as it gets even darker the window that the camera is behind starts acting as a mirror.
That’s my guess anyway.
What impresses me the most about this sequence is the orbit-planar component of the approach, which is apparent from the observed motion of the ISS against the Earth below. For decades (and still as far as I know) US rendezvous trajectory design lived under the philosophy that one prefers to remove out-of-plane motion almost entirely before one commences the final (manual in Gemini, Apollo, & Shuttle) approach.
It is clear from this video that the Soyuz is performing it’s up & over approach fly-around while still possessing a significant out-of-plane (OOP) component to its motion which it seemingly nulls only when it arrives directly above the ISS. I’ve known for years that the Soyuz approach trajectory was relatively hot (at least compared to the ‘lumbering’ shuttle); I never appreciated that they were okay with such late-term OOP dynamics.
I suppose I should have suspected as much; on STS-71 they flew a Soyuz directly OOP (not too difficult when starting from an OOP undocking, mind you) merely to snap photos of the Atlantis undocking.