Canadian company unveils detailed images of Earth from ISS

TORONTO – A Canadian company with cameras aboard the International Space Station has released its first detailed images of Earth.

Urthecast (pronounced “Earth-cast”), a Vancouver-based company, had two cameras installed by two Russian astronauts on the ISS at the end of January. The Russian space agency supported UrtheCast’s installation and, under the agreement between the two organizations, Russia owns the data gathered by UrtheCast cameras for use in its borders.

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One was a high-resolution video camera and the other a medium-resolution still camera.

The images, released Thursday — showing incredible detail — are from the medium-resolution camera.

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One image is of Moneague, Jamaica, the other is of Santa Cruz de Mara, Venezuela.

The image of Santa Cruz de Mara covers about 260 square kilometres and was taken on March 28. The image of Moneague covers about 300 square kilometres.

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The camera, called Theia, captures six-metre, 50 km-wide swaths of imagery.

Eventually the still images will be released in live-streaming mode, likely by the middle of the summer.