Staring Deep into a Rocket’s Plume, NASA Gets a New Vision

An image of the SLS test with a conventional camera. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

As the countdown began for NASA’s test of its Space Launch System (SLS), a massive new rocket meant to ferry astronauts to Mars and beyond, it wasn’t just the rocket scientists who were sweating the test. Aside from the engineers who harness enough energy to get a human off world, another team—a team of experimental camera makers—were readying themselves for a historic test.

Though it was outshined by the SLS’s mighty blast, several NASA engineers were trying out one of their newest toys, the High Dynamic Range Stereo X (HiDyRS-X) high-speed camera.

One the biggest problems that engineers looking to photograph a rocket encounter is that rockets, what with their awesome belches of fire, tend to be bright. When an object is bright, the exposure settings that a camera uses to register an image have be stopped down. In the case of filming a rocket plume, exposures have been reduced so much that the components of the rocket itself, which are pretty important for rocket analysis, become completely imperceptible as they’re drowned out by the camera’s focus on the flame.

An image of the SLS test taken with the High Dynamic Range Stereo X (HiDyRS-X) high-speed camera. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

To get around this problem, a team of young NASA engineers built the HiDyRS-X to record multiple streams of slow-motion video, each of which captures a video at a different exposure level. As the exposures were captured, they were merged together into a composite video that would show both the rocket and its plume in incredible, otherworldly detail.

As the call of “ignition” rang out from a bank of speakers at NASA’s remote test facility in Promontory, Utah, the HiDyRS-X team watched a live feed of their camera in action. Without a doubt, the camera was working, and the project was a success. Images of a quality never seen before were flashing across the screen.

But then, suddenly out of nowhere, the camera feed went dead.

Sequestered safely away from the rocket’s incredible blast, the HiDyRS-X team could do nothing to bring the camera back online. In a postmortem of the test, NASA’s young team realized that the vibratory forces created by the SLS’s roar shook one of the camera’s power cables loose.

It was a simple error really.

“I was bummed,” Howard Conyers, a member of the HiDyRS-X team, lamented. “Especially because we did not experience any failures during the dry runs.” But the young engineer wasn’t completely crestfallen from the setback. “Failure during testing of the camera is the opportunity to get smarter,” Conyers bounced back. “Without failure, technology and innovation are not possible.”

Though its first big test didn’t go as planned, the HiDyRS-X has demonstrated that it can in fact deliver unprecedented views for rocket analysis. For researchers in the field, the camera might be nothing short of a revolution. For engineers the world over, the test and its failure should come as reminder that incremental progress is sometimes good enough.