Question: Why do you need a specialised camera to be able to take photo's from the space station?

Mike Salter answered on 13 Mar 2012:

Hi Eddie,
Good question – there’s lots of reasons! Essentially we’re building a digital camera, but you couldn’t just go and bolt a regular digital camera to the outside of the space station.

The space station is about 230 miles above the surface of the earth, and we want to be able to see people’s houses in the photos. Imagine taking a photo of a house in London whilst stood in Manchester! So we’ve put a great big telescope on the front of the camera to solve that problem.

Space is also quite a harsh environment for electronics, depending if the space station is in sunlight it can be either be really cold or really hot. So we have some heaters on the camera warm it up when needed, and some big radiators that can take heat away from the camera when it’s too hot.

The other problem is something called radiation. I’m not sure if you’ve covered radioactivity in your science lessons yet? Basically there are lots of these radioactive particles flying around in space and these can be really damaging to electronics. So to make the camera we have to use special electronic components that aren’t affected by the radiation. Normal digital cameras on earth don’t use these components (as they’re really expensive) so the only way we can get a camera to work in space is to build it ourselves!