Today, GoPro Inc (NASDAQ:GPRO) dished out some fantastic footage of a suborbital rocket launch that reached a height of 396,405 feet at speeds as fast as Mach 5.5.
The launch happened on November 6, 2015 from Spaceport America in New Mexico with a 20-foot long SpaceLoft-10 sounding rocket from UP Aerospace, a Colorado-based launch company.
It was the organization’s fourth launch for NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program, which chooses promising new space technologies from government, academia and industry and gives access to appropriate environments for flight testing.
As the launch starts, the rocket begins spinning quickly. This is called spin-stabilization; a popular strategy utilized for certain satellites or rocket launches to control altitude. Similar to a spinning top, motion on one axis of a rocket can be controlled if it’s spinning quickly enough.
After a flight time of 60 seconds the rocket releases the nose fairing and ejects Maraia the 11 pound re-entry module.
The Maraia capsule was designed and produced by NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center. With the launch, NASA evaluated the landing, descent and entry capabilities for the capsule.
NASA said that the capsule is anticipated to become a cheap, independent International Space Station-base vehicle to supply on-demand return of tiny engineering and scientific payloads.
NASA Flight Opportunities Program campaign manager, Paul De Leon said the fresh payload deployment ability from UP Aerospace was showcased, giving the opportunity for future landing, descent and entry know-how to be evaluated and matured.
Along with trialing the Maraia capsule, the UP aerospace launch carried four technology experiments from New Mexico State University, Purdue University and the NASA Ames Research Center.
The high definition video display’s the rocket’s launch and flight into near space, moving at 3,800 miles per hour and achieving an altitude of around 75 miles. Then footage shows the rocket floating in space with planet Earth in the background. A while later the descent to Earth occurs as a parachute enables a soft landing on the planet’s surface of the capsule.
This isn’t the first instance A GoPro was put high above the planet. Last September a GoPro camera was discovered after it went missing for couple of years and it had fantastic pictures of Earth as viewed from space. The camera was sent up by a weather balloon.
