Space to Ground Video: ISS Crew Has Taken More Than 3 Million Images Over the Last 15 Years
By Space Coast Daily // May 9, 2016
ISS VIDEO WEEKLY UPDATE
ABOVE VIDEO: NASA’s Space to Ground is your weekly update on what’s happening aboard the International Space Station. Since the first crew arrived on the International Space Station more than 15 years ago, crew members have taken more than 3 million images from the platform.
On Oct. 31, 2000, a Soyuz spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 10:53 a.m. Kazakhstan time. Onboard were Expedition One Commander William M. (Bill) Shepherd of NASA and cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko of Roscosmos.
The trio arrived at the International Space Station on Nov. 2, marking the start of an uninterrupted human presence on the orbiting laboratory.
Over that time, the station has grown from a modest pair of U.S. and Russian modules, to a sprawling laboratory and home the size of a football field.
When the first crew docked with the station for Expedition 1, the science control center at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, was staffed and ready to support the first science experiments.
Back then, a smaller station and a crew of only three people meant a minor team on the ground compared to today. Figuring out how to support science around-the-clock and create the control room required late nights and a new way of thinking.
This eventually paid off with the creation of the space station’s Payload Operation Integration Center (POIC) — NASA’s science command post that started operating around the clock, 365 days a year in March 2001.
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