Metadata: Camera Files

Camera files are the camera-acquired data downlinked from orbit with a digital photograph. If Ku-band is not available, or if there are other technical problems, images have sometimes been compressed and downlinked in other image formats. In these cases, the camera-acquired data on date, time, lens, shutter speed, etc. is lost. This occurred primarily in the early ISS missions and has not occurred for Space Shuttle (STS) missions.

The following is a listing of the downlink format for digital photographs of Earth taken from ISS missions.

Sometimes the time set on the camera drifts and is not accurate enough to determine the nadir position. When this is the case, we delete inaccurate times and days from the database, but they are still represented in our archive of the original camera file. In these cases, the dates and times in the camera file should be discounted.