A digital camera affixed to the International Space Station just lately noticed some curious symbols amid a barren desert panorama.
“This caught our consideration,” Charles Black, the founding father of the Earth and space livestreaming firm Sen, informed Mashable.
Sen has three cameras hosted on the area station, one in every of which friends straight down at our planet and covers a scene roughly 250 by 150 kilometers (155 by 93 miles) in measurement. (You’ll be able to watch this view, live-streamed in high-resolution 4K video, online. 4K refers to a horizontal show of some 4,000 pixels, and is also referred to as Extremely Excessive Definition or Extremely HD.) The latest footage reveals what seems to be large “mysterious writing etched into the sand,” the corporate defined.
The symbols are an instance of the kind of phenomena — each pure and human-created — revealed by the digital camera because the area station, positioned some 250 miles above Earth, zooms over us at 17,000 mph.
These letter-like patterns are in reality from agriculture exercise, vividly contrasted by the barren desert plains in Tunisia, Black defined. However Sen does not all the time reveal precisely what its cameras noticed. Are these farming areas irrigated into tracts from an aquifer? Or livestock grounds? What do you suppose?
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“You by no means know what you would possibly see.”
“We would like the viewers to be engaged,” Black mentioned. “It is selling debate, dialogue, and curiosity. We’ll label the situation, however we wish the viewers to resolve, talk about, and make feedback.”
The latest 4K video footage under, exhibiting the writing-like symbols, is from April 15, 2025.
A screenshot of Sen’s 4K footage from the Worldwide House Station (from the video above this picture) exhibiting writing-like patterns in the midst of the distant Tunisian desert.
Credit score: Sen / Screenshot
Anybody with an web connection can tune into Sen’s footage. And so they’ll recurrently see new sights. The area station orbits Earth about 16 instances a day, and through every orbit the floating laboratory shifts a little to the west. “Each time you go online, you possibly can see one thing completely different,” Black mentioned. “You by no means know what you would possibly see.”
Getting such cameras aboard the station isn’t any easy feat. Sen’s system needed to move Electromagnetic Interference, or EMI, testing, to make sure their digital camera exercise would not intervene with the station’s communications and radio frequencies. The system needed to move three NASA security critiques. And Sen needed to discover a host aboard the multinational, soccer field-length station. The cameras are hosted on a European House Company module aboard an Airbus platform, which offers each energy and a share of a NASA downlink.
The area station, nonetheless, will not orbit Earth eternally. It is slated to be carefully deorbited, through a SpaceX craft, into the environment round 2030, the place it would break aside and largely vaporize (the remaining items will plunge into the Pacific Ocean). So Sen is planning for future live-streamed cameras aboard different craft, together with these farther from our planet, permitting Earthlings a real-time international view of our humble, cosmic home.
Should you tune into the present digital camera views, you will spot sprawling cities like Las Vegas, snow-blanketed mountain ranges just like the Rockies, the vivid aqua of Caribbean waters, and past.
“You see an attractive planet and a borderless world,” Black mentioned.
