Next Best Thing To Being There, If You Could See It

Well, this might have made that investment in your 60 inch HD LCD television and home theater all worthwhile, if NASA select was available in HD. NASA Television broadcast a high-definition tour of the International Space Station recorded by the Expedition 20 crew Wednesday, morning. Also broadcast in HD was be an explanation of a Canadian experiment on the station that examines how humans perceive up and down without gravity as a reference.

File Photo

The 20-minute tour, which documents the full 167 feet of the space station's pressurized modules, was recorded by NASA Flight Engineer Michael Barratt to show Mission Control how equipment and supplies are arranged and stored, and to provide engineers with a detailed assessment of each module-to-module hatchway.

A five-minute explanation by Canadian Space Agency Flight Engineer Bob Thirsk provides an overview of the Bodies In the Space Environment, or BISE, experiment. The experiment looks at the relative contributions of internal and external cues that allow humans to orient themselves in the absence of gravity. The principal investigator for the BISE experiment is Laurence R. Harris, of York University, North York, Ontario, Canada.

Unfortunately, NASA only made the HD version available to those with direct satellite downlink capability. NASA IS re-airing the tour in standard definition on NASA Select TV. And if you spent that TV money on your airplane ... well, that's a great investment as well.

FMI: www.nasa.gov