Eerie footage of spacesuit floating away
It is like a scene from the science fiction epic Gravity; a lifeless cosmonaut drifts away silently from a piece of orbiting infrastructure and into the deep unknown.
But the footage is not from the Oscar-winning flick, instead a real-life moment when the "SuitSat" was launched from the International Space Station on February 3, 2006.
The retired Russian Orlan spacesuit was loaded with electronics and batteries and pushed overboard during a spacewalk.
It transmitted students voices from around the world as well as the suit's telemetry and a special commemorative picture to be picked up by amateur radio operators back on Earth.
"Suitsat is a Russian brainstorm, some of our Russian partners in the ISS program … had an idea: Maybe we can turn old spacesuits into useful satellites," Frank Bauer of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said at the time.
The suit was designed to broadcast its messages for two weeks before power ran out.
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