HEO Space has published an image taken by the BlackSky satellite. It shows the International Space Station.
HEO specializes in photographing various space objects, from active satellites to fragments of space debris. This data can be used to assess their condition and degree of danger. The company regularly publishes demonstration images to promote the growing capabilities of its satellites. They show a wide variety of objects, from the Hubble Telescope to the Chinese Tiangong space station.
But the most frequent “guest” in HEO images is the ISS — the largest structure ever built by humans in space. It is home to seven people. It is 109 meters long, has a sealed volume of 1,000 m³, and weighs over 400 tons.
The ISS was the first object photographed by HEO. The company began its work by manually calculating the station’s shooting capabilities and reviewing frame by frame in search of a single successful shot. Now, specialized software automates the entire process of shooting outside Earth, turning days of work into hundreds of images every month.
The new photo clearly demonstrates how much the capabilities for photographing spacecraft have grown in just a couple of years. It shows the ISS modules and the spacecraft docked to it in detail.
HEO Space is not the only company engaged in this type of photography. We previously published images from Vantor (formerly Maxar) showing the ISS and Tiangong.
