A camera affixed to the International Space Station recently spotted some curious symbols amid a barren desert landscape.
"This caught our attention," Charles Black, the founder of the Earth and space livestreaming company Sen, told Mashable.
Sen has three cameras hosted on the space station, one of which peers straight down at our planet and covers a scene approximately 250 by 150 kilometers (155 by 93 miles) in size. (You can watch this view, live-streamed in high-resolution 4K video, online. 4K refers to a horizontal display of some 4,000 pixels, and is also known as Ultra High Definition or Ultra HD.) The recent footage shows what appears to be huge "mysterious writing etched into the sand," the company explained.
The symbols are an example of the type of phenomena — both natural and human-created — revealed by the camera as the space station, located some 250 miles above Earth, zooms over us at 17,000 mph.
These letter-like patterns are in fact from agriculture activity, vividly contrasted by the barren desert plains in Tunisia, Black explained. But Sen doesn't always reveal exactly what its cameras observed. Are these farming areas irrigated into tracts from an aquifer? Or livestock grounds? What do you think?
"You never know what you might see."
"We want the audience to be engaged," Black said. "It's promoting debate, discussion, and interest. We'll label the location, but we want the viewers to decide, discuss, and make comments."
The recent 4K video footage below, showing the writing-like symbols, is from April 15, 2025.
Anyone with an internet connection can tune into Sen's footage. And they'll regularly see new sights. The space station orbits Earth about 16 times a day, and during each orbit the floating laboratory shifts a little to the west. "Whenever you log on, you can see something different," Black said. "You never know what you might see."
Getting such cameras aboard the station is no simple feat. Sen's system had to pass Electromagnetic Interference, or EMI, testing, to ensure their camera activity wouldn't interfere with the station's communications and radio frequencies. The system had to pass three NASA safety reviews. And Sen had to find a host aboard the multinational, football field-length station. The cameras are hosted on a European Space Agency module aboard an Airbus platform, which provides both power and a share of a NASA downlink.
The space station, however, won't orbit Earth forever. It's slated to be carefully deorbited, via a SpaceX craft, into the atmosphere around 2030, where it will break apart and largely vaporize (the remaining pieces will plunge into the Pacific Ocean). So Sen is planning for future live-streamed cameras aboard other craft, including those further from our planet, allowing Earthlings a real-time global view of our humble, cosmic home.
If you tune into the current camera views, you'll spot sprawling cities like Las Vegas, snow-blanketed mountain ranges like the Rockies, the vivid aqua of Caribbean waters, and beyond.
"You see a beautiful planet and a borderless world," Black said.
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