The Nikon D5 in orbit

In NASA service

On 25 August 2017, Nikon Corporation announced that NASA had placed an order for 53 Nikon D5 digital SLR cameras, intended both for astronaut ground training and for still photography inside and outside the International Space Station.¹ As with the D3S procurement eight years earlier, Nikon stated that no special hardware modifications were made — the flight units were the same D5 bodies available commercially. The first flight batch of 10 D5 bodies reached the ISS in November 2017 aboard Orbital ATK's OA-8 Cygnus resupply mission, with the balance of the 53-camera order supporting ground training, reserves, and subsequent orbital rotations.¹

Although the D5 body itself was physically standard, NASA loaded modified firmware onto its flight units — the same pattern Nikon would later document explicitly for the Z 9. In December 2023, astronaut Don Pettit described the ISS Nikon inventory of the D5 era as “12 to 15” D5 bodies at any one time, supported by a full lens range from an 8 mm fisheye to a 1200 mm prime, and identified two flight-specific firmware modifications: extended in-camera noise reduction running down to 1/500 s rather than the commercial 1-second threshold — to counter cosmic-ray sensor damage at fast shutter speeds — and a modified RAW file numbering scheme to prevent duplicate frame numbers across a mission's several hundred thousand exposures. Pettit stated that the ISS Nikon fleet is rotated back to Earth roughly every six months, with the most radiation-damaged units retired from service.²

The D5 began transitioning out of primary duty on 30 January 2024, when Nikon and NASA delivered the first Z 9 bodies to the ISS aboard Northrop Grumman's CRS-20 resupply mission. Nikon's own 2024 announcement describes the incoming Z 9 bodies as replacing the “current inventory of Nikon D6 and D5 DSLR cameras on the space station,” consistent with a mixed D5/D6 late-life fleet in the years immediately preceding the Z 9 transition.³

1. Nikon Corporation. “Nikon Corporation to supply 53 D5 digital SLR cameras to NASA.” Press release, 25 August 2017.
2. Growcoot, Matt. “Nikon Makes Special Firmware for Astronauts to Block Galactic Cosmic Rays in Photos.” PetaPixel, 6 December 2023.
3. Nikon Corporation. “Nikon Z 9 goes to space: Space station astronauts receive Nikon's flagship full-frame mirrorless camera.” Press release, 7 February 2024.