The first chilling images of Earth

When the allies defeated Nazi Germany in 1945, the US USA They captured many of the powerful V-2 rockets from the Germans which, after translation, are short for “Weapon of Vengeance Two”.

Those seized rockets didn’t stay in Europe for long. After being transported around the world and rebuilt on the desert plains of southern New Mexico, American engineers (and controversially captured Nazi scientists) launched a technologically advanced V-2 rocket 65 miles above the planet’s surface on 24 October. , 1946. In doing so, they captured the first photographs of Earth from space.

And so began an unwritten habit of looking at our cloudy planet, even if our spacecraft had other missions, sometimes bound for millions (or billions) of miles away in deep, unexplored space.

“During almost all missions we turn around and take a photo on the way home,” said Bill Barry, chief NASA historian. “There seems to be an irresistible tendency to look back at home.”

Similar to later missions to Mars, Jupiter, and beyond, the first image of Earth was not a romantic effort to capture an unprecedented view of the planet. American researchers used the V-2 rocket, shaped with scientific instruments, to improve their understanding of the great black ether, space. In this case, they wanted to understand the origin of galactic cosmic rays (deep space particles that relentlessly bombard Earth), explained Martin Collins, a space historian and curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

“Photography was kind of a side effect of this other primary purpose,” Collins said.

When the V-2 movie finally plummeted to Earth, and survived, Scientists at the New Mexico White Sands Missile Range were reportedly excited about the never-before-seen grainy sight. “… when they were first screened [the photos] on screen, the scientists went crazy, “said Fred Rulli, who retrieved the V-2 movie from the desert floor after the rocket fell into the atmosphere and crashed to the ground. Air and Space Magazine in 2006.

The first images of Earth, albeit low-resolution and ghostly, came at a time when space and defense technology was advancing rapidly. There was a space race, in which the United States sent astronauts to the moon, but they also spent two decades working hard on a nuclear-powered rocket bound for Mars (the dismantled Project Rover). There was the creation of advanced defense missiles, scattered across the country, designed to shoot down Soviet bombers during the Cold War. Even electric guitars were molded by the futuristic and stratospheric zeitgeist. The first photographs of Earth were a good start for this new era.

“It captured that sense of change,” said Collins.

Fourteen years later, Americans did not have to wait for any film to plunge into Earth’s atmosphere to catch a glimpse of the planet’s last sight.

Now, it was televised.

On April 1, 1960, the TIROS-1 meteorological satellite transmitted photos to Earth. The next day, the New York Times published these images on the cover under the title: “SATELLITE OF THE WEATHER OF ORBITS OF THE UNITED STATES; TELEVISA THE EARTH AND THE STORMS; NEW ERA IN METEOROLOGY VIEWED”.

TIROS-1, which was built with the help of the US Army Signal Research and Development Laboratory. The US electronics company RCA, NASA, and others may have been designed for the weather, but it also made a poignant statement about burgeoning satellite recognition, meaning the ability to advance satellite technology to potentially spy on activities. from others around the world.

“At that time in the 1960s, the context of the Cold War was not lost,” said Collins.

In orbit 450 miles above Earth, TIROS-1 lasted 78 days and took 19,389 images, including of a typhoon in eastern Australia. More TIROS satellites soon followed, and for years later black-and-white images of Earth’s swirling atmosphere ended up in newspapers.

As a boy in the 1970s, Jeff Weber, now a research meteorologist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, used to expect the daily image of clouds over the US. USA, Printed every day in the Colorado Springs Gazette–Telegraph. Weber, a young man obsessed with the weather, collected each photo to see how the weather changed.

“It was so obvious how weather patterns were moving across the country,” Weber said.

Decades later, Weber continues to observe the weather, albeit on computers with images taken by significantly advanced satellites of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, such as the one now spying on hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. “I look at satellite images almost all day, every day,” he said.

At the height of the space race, on August 23, 1966, Earthlings received a particularly unique image of the planet, captured from more than 200,000 miles away. Three years before Neil Armstrong cautiously stepped on the lime-like lunar soil, the Lunar Orbiter 1 robotic spacecraft took the first view of Earth taken by a spacecraft near the Moon. But like the V-2 rocket image, the mission did not intend to take photos of Earth. It was to collect detailed images of the moon’s dangerous, crater-ridden surface, where astronauts would soon try to land.

In the foreground is a mottled lunar surface filled with billions of years of impact craters. Beyond is Earth covered in clouds, half of which is covered by the shadow of the Moon.

“It was great,” NASA Barry said of the image. But a picture of Lunar Orbitor 1 did not appear on the cover of The New York Times, like TIROS-1. Nor did he make the second, third, fourth, or fifth pages. Why, this historical image was buried on page 14. This is because, in 1966, NASA astronauts had already taken striking and colored photographs of Earth, especially the 1965 image of Ed White floating above the vivid and misty blue atmosphere, connected to a spaceship by Just a Strap. Then, of course, one of Earth’s most famous images appeared, the “Blue Marble” photo taken on the way to the Moon during Apollo’s final mission in 1972. These images overshadowed the 1966 image.

“It’s mostly forgotten because of the nice color images we got later,” Barry said.

Robotic efforts into deeper and deeper space continued to look back, long after images of Earth were no longer novel.

Mariner 10, a spacecraft sent to image Venus and Mercury, looked back in 1973, capturing an iconic image of the Moon and Earth from 1.6 million miles away.

“I used to have a copy hanging in my office,” said Barry.

And on Valentine’s Day in 1990, before NASA sent commands to Voyager 1 to turn off their cameras forever (to save energy), the spacecraft took a photo of Earth from about 4 billion miles away. . It’s just a speck of blue.

“Look at that point again. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us,” wrote Carl Sagan.