Connexion
In space, no one can hear your storage card scream
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Perhaps the "Eject" button on the Nikon D5 was aptly named... |
It's an experience most photographers will be familiar with: you go to insert or eject your camera's card, fumble slightly, and the spring or ejection mechanism sends the card shooting out. If you're lucky, you catch it in time; otherwise, it tumbles to the ground.
It turns out that even astronauts aren't immune from this kind of gaff... but when it happens to them, the lack of gravity makes it all the more exciting. This week, a clip taken from NASA's livestream of the Artemis II mission around the moon has gone viral, showing what appears to be astronaut Christina Koch chasing after a card that shot out of her camera.
Unfortunately, you can only scroll so far back in NASA's official livestream (as it's still being broadcast), but the moment has been captured in several GIFs. You can also see it with the surrounding context on CBS News' archive, though it's only in a small part of the frame. Unfortunately, none of the clips currently available have audio of the moment.
Anyone who's been following the mission and looking at the photos taken during it will know that the crew is mostly using Nikon D5s, so the card is likely a CFexpress, XQD or CompactFlash model. (I'd guess the former, based on clips I found of another astronaut handling theirs relatively close up.) While I typically wouldn't expect this kind of slot to eject a card with much force at all, how things work on Earth isn't always a great indication of how they'll work in space without any gravity.
Thankfully, the Orion capsule is relatively small, so she was able to keep track of it and grab it within a few seconds and continue taking pictures. But it's a funny reminder of how things that are easy, or, at worst, little inconveniences on earth, can be much more difficult in a zero-gravity environment. Thankfully, Koch and her crewmates have been willing to put up with the camera-related difficulties they've encountered, because the photos produced by the mission have been incredible.
