MAI residents participated in international experiment aimed at taking pictures of the Earth from the ISS
Students of the MAI Institute No. 6 "Aerospace", members of the "RISKSAT" interregional project group, took part in the international space EarthKAM experiment. From September 21 to 23, MAI residents investigated the environmental problems of the Earth from images taken from the International Space Station.
– The EarthKAM project allows schoolchildren and students to program photographic equipment for shooting the Earth from the ISS, – said Alexey Kucheyko, lecturer of the MAI Department 610 "Operation Management of Rocket and Space Systems", General Director and scientific supervisor of the "RISKSAT" interregional project group. – Picture is made at the request of the participants of the experiment in their chosen areas. Using the images, the researcher may study various ecological, geographical issues, track the effects of climate change, areas effected by natural disasters, etc.
EarthKAM space experiment sessions are held four times a year. Teams of students and schoolchildren from different countries prepare working programs for shooting different areas of the Earth, process and examine the images obtained. MAI residents chose to study areas of the drying Aral Sea, deforestation of tropical forests in the Amazon, forest fires in Australia and Brazil, melting glaciers in South America.Sergey Korsakov, cosmonaut-researcher of Roscosmos, was the director of the experiment on board of the ISS.While examining the images, the students found the spacecraft "K.E. Tsiolkovsky" (“Soyuz MS-22”) on some of them, for it delivered MAI graduate student, Roscosmos cosmonaut Dmitry Petelin, and also Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio on September 21 to the ISS.Based on the materials obtained during the last two EarthKAM sessions, practical classes were conducted with students of six MAI groups. They studied the issues of automated access and the safety of the experiment, the organization of archive of images. The experiment in Russia is led by MAI Institute No. 6 "Aerospace" with the support of JSC "Central Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering" and RSC Energia named after S.P. Korolev.
