Space Station Science Picture of the Day: One of a Kind

 April 17, 2003



One of a Kind

Photo credit: Ken Bowersox, ISS Expedition
6 Commander, NASA

Explanation: Barn
door trackers.
Amateur astronomers on Earth love them because they’re cheap
and easy to build: Take a couple pieces of wood, a hinge, some
knobs and nuts and bolts. Put them all together and you’ve got
a device that can steer a camera and track
the stars.

International Space Station science
officer Don Pettit’s barn door tracker, pictured above, is a
little more sophisticated, but the spirit is the same. He assembled
it using oddments and materials at hand onboard the ISS. "It’s
based on the fine gimbal movements in the IMAX
camera mount for the Destiny Lab window. I figured out a
way to mount a threaded screw and nut (scavenged from a Russian
Progress
rocket) and drive it with a Makita drill driver." The
drill turns the screw, which moves the camera and its spotting
scope.

This barn door tracker is one
of a kind. But, of course, that’s true of almost all barn door
trackers. Ingenuity
is the ingredient that makes each one unique.

Just after ISS commander Ken
Bowersox took this picture of Don posing with his invention on
April 5, 2003, Don attached
the tracker to the Destiny Lab window and began taking
pictures of city
lights racing by on the
earth below. Perhaps we’ll get to see some of them in a future
Picture of the Day.