First Orbit

First Orbit is a featurelength, experimental documentary film about Vostok 1, the first manned space flight around the Earth. By matching the orbit of the International Space Station to that of Vostokas closely as possible, in terms of ground track and time of day, documentary filmmaker Christopher Riley and European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli were able to film the view that Yuri Gagarin saw on his pioneering orbital space flight. This new footage was cut together with the original Vostokmission audio recordings sourced from the Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation. The film features the music of composer Philip Sheppard.

The International Space Station ISS orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes, but it does not always follow the same route that Gagarin took. To find out when filming opportunities might occur, the European Space Agency ESA teamed Riley up with German orbital mechanical engineer, Gerald Ziegler. Ziegler discovered that the ISS covered similar ground to Gagarins Vostokspaceship approximately every week. To complicate things further, the filmmakers needed to film at exactly the same time of day that Gagarin made his flight passing over Gagarins launch site, near the Aral Sea, at 0607 UT and into the nightside of Earth over the Pacific Ocean at 0637, before emerging into sunlight again over the Southern Atlantic at 0710 UT and passing across the African continent and the Middle East, returning to the ground at 0755 UT, just north of the Caspian Sea.Further calculations confirmed that opportunities to film this trajectory, with the correct sun angles, at this exact time of day, only came around once every six weeks. According to Riley, the second challenge was fitting these filming opportunities into crew time on board the space station. The astronauts have a busy schedule conducting a packed programme of experiments, Earth observations and activities like sleep, exercise and meal times. This meant that accommodating the extra filming request for First Orbit was yet another challenge for the ESA mission directors, he told BBC news in a March 2011 interview. On the final flight path back towards Gagarins landing site, the scenes shot for First Orbit are slightly to the east of the original Vostoktrajectory. Because the vantage point is so high, the vista was similar to that of Gagarins vantage point. ........

Source: Wikipedia