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Propelling the global environmental movement
- The image was coined "Earthrise". It was the first colour photograph of Earth taken from space and quickly circulated around the world. The photo is widely credited with propelling the global environmental movement and leading to the creation of Earth Day, an annual event promoting environmental activism and awareness, in 1970.
www.bbc.com/future/article/20230511-earthrise-the-photo-that-sparked-an-environmental-movement
Nov 27, 2023 · Was Apollo 8's iconic view of the Earth rising above the moon more impactful than the Apollo 11 moon landing?
- Robert Poole
Earthrise is a photograph of Earth and part of the Moon 's surface that was taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. [1][2][3] Nature photographer Galen Rowell described it as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken". [4]
- Overview
- The birth of Earthrise
- Pale blue dot
- Earth in 2068
The famous Christmas Eve snapshot took 90 seconds to make and kicked off five decades of awareness of our planet’s beauty and fragility.
Apollo 8, the first mission to carry humans to the moon, entered lunar orbit on December 24, 1968. That evening, mission commander Frank Borman, command module pilot Jim Lovell, and lunar module pilot William Anders held a live broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of Earth and the moon as seen from their spacecraft. "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth," Lovell said.
A half-century ago, three humans sailed into lunar orbit, looped around the moon 10 times, and returned home. By the time Earth’s gravity had once again fastened them firmly to the planet, the Apollo 8 crew were rightly celebrated as the first Earthlings to visit our celestial companion.
But their true legacy revealed itself three days later, on December 30, 1968, when NASA released an image taken on Christmas Eve that shows our home planet suspended above the moon.
Now called Earthrise, the image is legendary; a postcard from the first souls to truly leave Earth behind. True, spacecraft had sent back views like this before, but this photo was the first of its kind taken by a spellbound human holding a camera. In it, Earth’s marbled beauty leaps from the darkness of space, amplified by the bleak, almost monochromatic lunar horizon in the foreground.
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Initially projected to be delayed by hardware issues, the Apollo 8 flight date got moved up to December 1968, as rumors suggested that the Soviets would imminently attempt to send a human to the moon. Having been beaten to space by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin seven years earlier, NASA was reluctant to miss its shot at claiming a different spaceflight first.
So, when commander Frank Borman, navigator Jim Lovell, and rookie Bill Anders finally strapped themselves on top of the biggest rocket ever built, they were riding a controlled bomb that had not been completely checked out, inside a spacecraft that had not been tested to everyone’s satisfaction.
But the launch went off smoothly, and the crew soon found themselves looking back on a swirled world of creamy aquamarine that got smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Anders had been put in charge of the Hasselblad cameras in the cabin, and he snapped a few images of planet Earth as they left, as well as taking pictures of the ridges and craters on the lunar surface.
“Looks like plaster of Paris, or sort of a grayish deep sand,” Lovell told mission control in Houston.
The crew looped around the moon three times and then famously greeted the citizens of Earth from lunar orbit during a Christmas Eve broadcast. On their fourth loop, though, the crew encountered something they were entirely unprepared for: a striking view of home, sliding out from behind the moon like a misshapen bowling ball.
“Oh my God! Look at that picture over there!” Anders exclaimed. “Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!”
That photo of Earth is often credited with helping to launch the environmental movement, and it has inspired 50 years’ worth of images of our home taken from space. Many of those also pack an emotional punch or delight us in different ways.
One picture from Apollo 17, the last human mission to the moon, shows astronaut Jack Schmitt on the lunar surface with Earth taking the place of the moon high in the sky. Decades later, a frame caught by a spacecraft on its way to Mars features a crescent Earth and a crescent moon, their relative sizes and separation starkly apparent.
What can we do now to make sure that we have a 2068 for our Earth?
ByLeland MelvinNASA astronaut
But few images following in Earthrise’s spirit come close to being as profoundly revelatory—except, perhaps, one made by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on Valentine’s Day in 1990. On its way out of the solar system and headed for a lonely, endless journey through interstellar space, Voyager turned around and took a long look at home. There, from the edge of the unknown, our pale blue dot hung suspended “like a mote of dust in a sunbeam,” Carl Sagan wrote in 1994.
“That’s home. That’s us,” Sagan wrote. “There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
The question now is whether anything could truly replicate the impact of the original Earthrise, which was the first to put all of humanity in that whole new context.
“Never say never, but I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done that would have that magnitude of revelation, on many levels, that the image created and still has today,” Skerry says. “You can look at it for decades, and it doesn’t get old.”
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Earth 101
Earth is the only planet known to maintain life. Find out the origins of our home planet and some of the key ingredients that help make this blue speck in space a unique global ecosystem.
But it is possible to carry the legacy of that image into the future, so that we may celebrate the 100th anniversary of its making. NASA astronaut Leland Melvin, along with a small group of fellow space travelers, is trying to do just that by sharing the lessons learned while in orbit.
Dec 20, 2018 · Lifeforms created Earth’s atmosphere by removing carbon dioxide and generating free oxygen. They created an unusual mix of gases compared to other planets – an atmosphere with a protective...
Jul 17, 2019 · One of the most influential environmental photographs ever taken almost didn’t happen. In this excerpt from Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, Marvin Heiferman tells the story of William Anders’s Earthrise.
Nov 17, 2023 · For many years, the story behind the famous Earthrise photo, was that the crew were caught off-guard by the blue orb rising from behind the Moon. But even if they were...
