NASA now has this super camera in their arsenal 🚀📹

You’ve never truly seen what a rocket plume looks like. They are extremely bright and therefore, have never been photographed properly and unless you want to stare directly into one, it will be nearly impossible to imagine. Although that’s difficult, considering there haven’t been cameras that could capture its image before.

NASA unveiled a new camera during its recent space launch test, which is able to show the detail in a rocket plume. And it looks pretty spectacular.

The new High Dynamic Range Stereo X (HiDyRS-X) project overcomes this by being able to record multiple slow motion exposures at once and combining them into a more high-quality video.

The HiDyRS-X gives researchers the best of both worlds, and this QM-2 booster test was the camera’s first real world dry-run.How the HiDyRS-X works, there’s not much info about that. A year-old memo from when the project was first moved into the Prototype stage says, “camera exposure will instead be controlled at the chip/pixel level and then integrated into a high-speed video camera.”

In fact, the HiDiRS-X team says it captured things never before seen during a rocket booster test.

Currently, this is just a prototype. Scientists plan to build a second one with more advanced capabilities, including with alignment.