Russian cosmonauts went on the longest spacewalks in their history recently trying to fix a glitch in two new earth observation cameras made by Vancouver's UrtheCast Corp. (TSX:UR).
The two high-definition cameras – worth about $10 million each – were blasted into space November 25 on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan. They were installed on the International Space Station on December 27, but failed to send signals back to the Russian Space Agency.
Two Russian cosmonauts went on an eight-hour spacewalk to try to fix the problem but were forced to bring the cameras back inside.
It's not clear whether the cameras are receiving power from the ISS. And without power, they could suffer damage from the extreme temperatures in space, so they were brought back inside.
UrtheCast CEO Scott Larson said there will be a second attempt to install and test the cameras in the coming weeks.
"We don't know when the spacewalk will be, but we think we'll announce it within the next couple of weeks," Larson told Business in Vancouver.
UrtheCast has been shooting for mid-2014 to fully commission the cameras.
"We had planned always for the summer," Larson said. "Of course it is going to depend on how long [it takes] to get this fixed. We don't think it's going to be anything material at this stage."
Founded in 2010, UrtheCast was an idea spun out of MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (TSX:MDA).
The company was one of the few Canadian companies to go public in 2013.
On June 27, it went public through a reverse takeover of Longford Energy Inc., a $30 million shell company that was originally set up as a resource business.
The UrtheCast system uses two cameras, each worth $10 million. One is a fixed, medium-resolution camera, capturing a 50-kilometre wide swath of Earth, at a resolution of five metres.
The second is a video camera mounted on a platform that allows it to swivel that can take 90-second high-definition video captures at a resolution of one metre.
Although the general public will be able to view UrtheCast images from the company's website, the company's main customers will be governments and industry.
