The 167-day mission of Expedition 22 has just concluded with the touchdown of the Soyuz spacecraft in Kazakhstan. According to NASA, this mission crew surpassed the previous record of 83,856 images (taken on Expedition 13 in 2006) to record more than 100,000 images of Earth. All together, space station crews have taken 639,000 images of Earth from it’s position 220 miles in space, with images being used for a wide variety of scientific observation purposes.
The recent delivery of a new observation deck known as the cupola offers the largest and clearest window ever flown on a spacecraft. The upcoming Discovery shuttle mission will deliver the Window Observational Research Facility (WORF), which will provide a new facility dedicated to multi- and hyper-spectral remote sensing and high resolution Earth observation photography.
