Transcription
SpaceX has just released the footage from flight 13 that we have all been waiting for. This has been shot by the last of the Starlinks after it was deployed, showing its view of Starship as it drifted away.
Now, this was shot on the night side of the earth. To illuminate the Starship, many of the Starlinks had lights on them. But also, since the PEZ dispenser is on the back of the spacecraft, the Starship needs to perform this roll maneuver to bring its heat shield around into view, because this is what the Starlinks were supposed to be doing. They were supposed to look at the heat shield after the spacecraft had reached orbit but before it began re-entry.
Now, it should also be fairly obvious that it looks like each quarter of this image has slightly different intensity. And I'm presuming that they have four different cameras that they are basically stitching together to do this. But what's not clear to me from this is whether they are all covering the same wavelengths or if they're all looking at different wavelengths to provide other information.
I'm presuming that SpaceX's heat shield experts have been examining this to see if there were any tiles that were damaged during the ascent. After all, it did fly a much more aggressive ascent with higher dynamic pressure that could have damaged the heat shield.