Image Follow-up: Fire Up Your Spacecraft Thrusters!

By Nancy Atkinson - June 6, 2013 at 3:40 PM UTC | Space Exploration
orionintheheadlights.jpg

Here's a follow-up on an interesting

image we posted last year

, during Don Pettit's stay on the International Space Station during Expedition 30/31. Pettit had posted this beautiful, sci-fi-looking image on

his Google+ page

, but didn't say what it was, only describing it as "Orion in the headlights." The constellation Orion is off in the distance, but there was some debate about what the light source was: was it light coming from a window on the ISS or a thruster burn?

It turns out this is likely one of the first ever-images of a thrust-burn taken (or released) from the ISS.

An Debris Avoidance Maneuver took place at 10.12 GMT (5:12 a.m. EST) on February 29, 2012 and G+ commenter

Peter Caltner

pointed out, "the scenic lighting effect ends exactly in [the

series of images

that Pettit took] at the end of the 76 seconds of the burn duration."

Engineers at Johnson Space Center confirmed to Universe Today this was in fact a thruster burn from the thrusters located on the aft end of the Zvezda Service Module.

The JSC team told us that during a burn, most of the windows are covered so they don't get damaged so there's not a lot of opportunity to take a picture like this. But the astronaut or cosmonaut that took this image was in the Pirs module looking toward the aft end of the Service Module, where the reboost engines are located. The "downward" -facing window (looks "up" in this image) is the large observation window in the Russian Zvezda Service Module.

But does this actually show a thruster plume?

Very likely, the light seen here is not actually the light from the rockets after igniting for lifting the station. Caltner, who regularly answers questions from the public on

Twitter

and G+ about images from space, said the light probably comes from the docking headlights, switched on deliberately for illuminating the exhaust gases of the booster rockets.

It's an intriguing shot, and the debate on it (and finding out more about it) has been fascinating and interesting!

The

NASA Crew Earth Observation site

is a fun place to lose yourself looking through all the wonderful images taken from space. You can find images from the early Mercury flights to the most recent taken, and you can also find those

extremely cool timelapse videos taken from the ISS

. Those NEVER get old.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com