September 12, 2017, Tianzhou-1 (TZ-1) Cargo Spaceship had accomplished its third rendezvous and docking with Tiangong-2 Space Station. TZ-1 was launched on April 20, 2017, staying in orbit about 140 days and running well.

Developed by Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Science (IOE CAS), the tele-operation camera is a key measurement equipment for the rendezvous and docking, which is responsible for real-time photographing the docking target and providing the most intuitive image data of the automatic rendezvous and docking scene for the TZ-1 flight mission.

During the TZ-1 Cargo Spaceship flight mission, the tele-operation camera has been running well in orbit and has taken vivid images of the rendezvous and docking target under various complex conditions including shadow area, sunshine area and etc. After analyzing the download data, it shows that the anti-stray design of the optical system, automatic exposure algorithm under the docking conditions, low-delay image compression algorithm and other key techniques used by the tele-operation camera have been fully validated and praised by the user.

Images captured by the tele-operation camera.

As a key measurement equipment for the manual-control rendezvous and docking, the IOE’s tele-operation camera will be equipped on the following Tianzhou series cargo spacecraft after the completion of TZ-1 flight mission. The position and attitude of the docking target photographed by tele-operation camera can be used to perform the manual-control rendezvous and docking on orbit.