What Happens When A Camera Gets Too Close To A Launch
@NASA photographer Bill Ingalls is one of the best in the business. His launch photos are legendary. But he put this remote camera just a tad too close to the pad. Extreme closeup gone bad! Guessing warranty doesn’t cover this? pic.twitter.com/xtB8Sk8Cmo
— Peter King (@PeterKingCBS) May 23, 2018
Click below for the camera’s last picture
Reason for toasty remote camera, GRACE-FO, May 22, 2018. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Is that waxy stuff on the camera body melted plastic from the camera itself, or some sort of residue from the rocket launch?
It looks to me that there was a plastic bag over the camera. The body of the camera is unmelted. But the lens hood obviously melted.
Maybe it’s paraffin wax that had been left in the engine piping…
Maybe something bubbled/boiled out of the camera itself.
That’s one crispy camera. I guess you have to spend some serious money to get these amazing shots.
Oops…. LOL
Hot Shots Part Trois.
I saw a similar story a few months ago. I can’t find it now, but does anyone know if this would be the same photographer? If so, he seems to be making a career out of consuming optics to get really impressive images.
If it’s what I’m thinking of, it was a different photographer. John Krauss had his camera set up, and the lens had either debris or rocket fuel get on it that ate the lens (I can’t remember which it was)
A bit of TLC and it’ll be fine.
By the strangest of coincidences, when I first saw this set of images, I happened to be listening to a live version of Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez dueting on the anthem ” Joan of Arc”… where the Canon 5 camera sings to the Falcon 9 rocket ” If you are fire , I must be wood…”.
It wasn’t the rocket exhaust that did this… it was the secondary brush
fire the rocket ignited. Bill had cameras much closer to the Falcon
than this one. In some perverse way this one was sacrificed for the cause.