This story was updated on May 8 to include details on the student participation in the HD Earth Viewing experiment.įollow Mike Wall on Twitter and Google+. UrtheCast also aims to sell its imagery to a variety of customers, including government agencies interested in tracking resource use and private companies that want to keep tabs on their operations (and perhaps the operations of their competitors). UrtheCast released the first images from Theia last month and plans to begin streaming near-realtime views of Earth from orbit soon, bringing lots of viewers to their website. These two cameras, which together cost $17 million, were installed by spacewalking cosmonauts in January. One of them, known as Theia, takes pictures with a resolution of 16.5 feet (5 meters), while the other camera records video that can resolve details as small as 3 feet (1 m) across.

The Vancouver-based company UrtheCast (pronounced 'Earthcast') has two HD cameras on the orbiting lab. Google Earth includes many images collected by satellites orbiting the planet.

HDEV isn't the only Earth-imaging project aboard on the International Space Station.

Real time satellite earth viewer