The stunning hour-long footage was captured by GoPro cameras attached to the spacesuits of Expedition 42 commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and flight engineer Terry Virts, during spacewalk missions conducted on February 25 and March 1 early this year.
If you are a fan of the movies Gravity and Interstellar, then prepare to participate via GoPro POV in the real-life wonder of spacewalk sans Hollywood make-believe.
The spacewalks were conducted as part of general maintenance work, and to reconfigure the ISS ahead of the arrival of commercial crew and cargo delivery vehicles, according to NASA.
“NASA astronauts Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Terry Virts completed [spacewalks to reconfigure] the exterior of the International Space Station for the arrival of future commercial crew vehicles.The EVAs are in support of the long-planned ISS reconfiguration from its current configuration, which was designed to support visiting Space Shuttles, to its new configuration optimized for future visiting commercial crew and cargo vehicles.”
The astronauts conducted a total of three spacewalks or EVAs (extravehicular activity).
The first of the spacewalks, designated US EVA-29, was conducted on February 21. The second, US EVA-30, was conducted on February 25, and the last, US EVA-31, was conducted on March 1.
The three missions involved a total of 12 hours of spacewalk.
According to RT, part of the video shows a Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, with the two U.S. astronauts. Shkaplerov, who has a large following on Instagram and Twitter, posted online photos of the two U.S. astronauts preparing for the spacewalk missions.
The videos above come from the second and third spacewalks by Wilmore and Virts.
During the three spacewalks, the astronauts serviced the ISS’s robotic arm, set up new communications systems and routed new power and data cable.
The incredible views of the ISS from space, enhanced by stunning views of the Earth in the background, have caused many viewers to ask NASA to release more of such videos in the future.
But this is not the first time that ISS astronauts have used a GoPro camera in space.
“NASA astronauts Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman explored the phenomenon of water surface tension in microgravity [by submerging] a sealed GoPro camera into a floating ball of water the size of a softball and recorded the activity with a 3-D camera.”
The video above shows a previous occasion in which ISS astronauts used a GoPro camera in space. NASA astronauts Steve Swanson, Reid Wiseman and ESA colleague Alexander Gerst, snuck a GoPro inside a water bubble during a space microgravity experiment.
