SPACE.com -- Internet Site Offers Peek at Space Station

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	Internet Site Offers Peek at Space Station By Craig Linder Special to SPACE.com posted: 11:00 am ET 12 July 2000

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WASHINGTON, July 11 - A new internet site will allow the earthbound to watch construction take place on the International Space Station (ISS).

Called EyeOnSpace.com, the site will use two Eastman Kodak cameras mounted on the Zvezda service module to capture the station's construction and send those images back down to viewers on the internet.

One camera was sent aloft into space early Wednesday morning with the Russian module and the second will be sent to the space station with a space shuttle mission in the fall.

Two Kodak cameras will provide images of the construction on the ISS.

EyeOnSpace.com will use Kodak DCS 460 digital cameras. Not much larger than a conventional camera, the DCS 460 is a professional-quality device often used by photojournalists. Each camera costs approximately $25,000.

The DCS 460, which weighs 3.75 pounds (1.7 kilograms), is actually a Nikon N 90 camera mounted onto a Kodak digital base with a 6 million-pixel imager. Before the cameras could be launched, though, NASA had to modify them for space conditions.

SPACE.com presents complete coverage of the Zvezda mission to the ISS.

The first camera will be installed in an external pod on the Zvezda and capture images of crews from 16 nations building the space station. The other camera will be mounted within the station, giving visitors to EyeOnSpace.com a peek inside the city-block-sized space station.

EyeOnSpace.com will be run by Dreamtime, the multimedia company that recently won a contract from NASA to digitize the space agency's archives of past missions and to place high-definition video cameras on space shuttle flights.

The website will go live when the Zvezda module becomes operational. The Russian Aviation and Space Agency, also a partner in the project, successfully launched the service module early Wednesday morning.

For Rochester, New York-based Eastman Kodak, the initiative is part of a continuing relationship with space exploration.

"Kodak has played a strategic imaging role in mankind's efforts to explore space, from the first days of manned spaceflight to more recent programs," Kodak chief technical officer James Stoffel said in a statement.