The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has developed a special camera capable of filming incredible slow motion videos of booming rocket engines.
Traditional high-speed video cameras can only shoot one exposure at a time, but the camera called the High Dynamic Range Stereo X camera, or HiDyRS-X, can record several high-speed video exposures all at once and then combine these into an HDR video that can expose all areas in the clip.
On Aug. 6, NASA released a footage captured by HiDyRS-X for the first time: a three-minute clip showing in an unprecedented detail the most recent test of one of the boosters for the U.S. space agency's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
The SLS, which is set to be the most powerful rocket in the world, will be used to launch the new Orion spacecraft that will take astronauts farther into deep space. The SLS will use two of the boosters, each measuring 17-story tall and can burn 5.5 tons of propellant per second to produce 3.6 million pounds of thrust.
Filming footage of rocket booster tests poses problems since the generated plumes of fires are extremely bright. As a result, camera operators would either expose the footage for the bright plume, leaving everything else looking dark and underexposed, or expose for everything else, which would make the plume appear void of detail. The new camera solves this problem since it can capture all of the details in one shot.
The team behind the HiDyRS-X project nonetheless acknowledged that the camera test did not go perfectly. For one, the automatic timer of the camera failed to go off, so the camera team missed to capture the rocket igniting.
One of the operators flipped the manual override switch, but the power produced by the booster was strong enough it shook the ground and knocked off the power cable of the camera from the power box.
Despite the failure, Howard Conyers, one of the chief engineers involved in the project, said that the technology works and that it is capable of providing unprecedented views of rocket motor tests.
The failure of the camera to work perfectly during its first test also provided the team insights on how to better prepare and use it in the future.
"Failure during testing of the camera is the opportunity to get smarter," Conyers said. "Without failure, technology and innovation is not possible."
