One of the great advances that technology has made has been that many countries can carry out their own space missions by building spacecraft. These are an engineering milestone since being able to make an aircraft take off from Earth, go through the atmosphere until it reaches space and then return to our planet without problem is something very complex and difficult to achieve.
Private companies like SpaceX not only do these missions, but they also broadcast them live and you can see the precision with which they manage to do everything. These companies have not only launched ships, but have also put satellites into orbit that give us a lot of information from Earth.
A very complex job
Getting a ship to descend steadily to a platform on the ground requires a lot of calculations and the work of a team made up of hundreds of people to be perfect.
The question is, how has this company managed to record these landings without damaging the devices in charge of recording? You have to take into account the enormous temperatures that occur when landing.
Before, this was tried to do, but in the end the cameras always ended up breaking due to all the heat it was doing or even because a lot of smoke was produced that made it impossible to see the landing operation.
However, it seems that SpaceX has finally found the key to being able to record its landings through a camera system , in addition to helping to improve communications between the spacecraft and the landing platform.
Communications have been improved
The first detail to take into account is that the ship communicates with the platform on which it is going to land. The problem is that in full descent and while the aircraft crosses the atmosphere, very high speeds are reached that make communication very difficult. In addition, a lot of heat is created and that generates a kind of layer that also makes communications even more difficult by creating noise that interferes with the signal.
Therefore, options had to be sought to aid communication and avoid a collision or loss of control of the rocket.
The key that SpaceX found to facilitate its landings was to use an S-Band transmitter, which is very small and is not affected as much by weather or clouds, helping to improve communications.
To further assist the rocket, several of these transmitters are placed on the rocket frame to ensure there are no signal losses or problems during landing.
Therefore, a camera system optimized to record the landing no matter how harsh the conditions and a series of transmitters that aid communications has allowed SpaceX to successfully show off its landings.
