Space Station Lookout
Image Credit & Copyright:
Chris Hadfield
(CSA);
Annotation assistance: Vincent Berseth
If you glanced out a side window of the International Space Station, what might you see?
If you were Expedition 34 flight engineer
Chris Hadfield,
and you were looking out one of windows of
Japan's
Kibo Research Module on February 26, you might have seen the
above vista.
In the distance lies the
darkness
of outer space and the
blueness of planet Earth.
Large ISS objects include long
solar panels
that stretch diagonally from the upper left and the cylindrical airlock of the
Pressurized Module that occupies the lower right.
Numerous ports and platforms of the space station are
visible and labeled on an
annotated companion image.
Of particular note is what looks to be a
washer - dryer pair toward the image left, which are really
NASA's
HREP (near) and
JAXA's
MCE (far) research platforms.
The gold foil covered experiment in the rear of HREP is the
Remote Atmospheric and Ionospheric Detection System (RAIDS)
that monitors atmospheric airglow, while MCE includes the
Global Lightning and Sprite Measurements (JEM-GLIMS) instrument that monitors atmospheric electrical discharges.
The current Expedition 35
crew is now commanded by Colonel Hadfield and scheduled to stay aboard the space station until May.