The International Space Station (ISS) is a modular space station in low Earth orbit. It's a multinational collaborative project involving NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, and CSA. The ISS orbits Earth at an altitude of approximately 400-420 km, traveling at about 7.66 km/s (27,600 km/h), completing one orbit every 90 minutes.
The station serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory where scientific research is conducted in astrobiology, astronomy, meteorology, physics, and other fields.
Astro Pi is an ESA Education project that gives young people the opportunity to conduct scientific investigations in space by writing computer programs that run on Raspberry Pi computers aboard the ISS.
Our experiment uses the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera to capture images of Earth from the ISS. By analyzing the movement of features between consecutive images using computer vision (OpenCV), we calculate the orbital speed of the ISS. The algorithm detects keypoints on the ground (avoiding clouds) and tracks their displacement to measure distance traveled.