The POT not only looks to the future, it is also full of nostalgia. That is why one of the most promoted images of this last week, in days these are so sensitive for humanity due to the imminent arrival of 2023, is the first time the Earth was seen from the Moon.
It happened on December 24, 1968 and as it usually is in the universe, the astronauts who crewed the apollo 8 they didn’t expect it.
William “Bill” Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman, the navigators of the second manned Apollo mission, were already turning around to return home, more than happy with their new record: they were the first humans to have achieved orbit the moon.
Although they already had enough with that, unexpectedly and out of script they also shot at the first humans to witness the magnificent sight called “Out of Earth” And also, photograph it.
While their spacecraft was rotating, both Anders and Lovell managed to take several photographs of Earth as seen from lunar orbit. However, it was one photo in particular, which came out of the camera Anders was holding, that became iconic and “went around the world”, never quite so literally.
The first photograph of the Earth
“We came all this way to explore the Moon and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth, said Anders, excited.
In 2018, the International Astronomical Union commemorated the event by naming a 25-mile-diameter crater “Anders Land’s Exit”.
Against the darkness of space, Earth is seen “rising” on the gray, cratered lunar surface in the foreground. The bottom of the globe is in shadow, but the rest is a symphony of swirling blue water with white clouds and patches of brown land. Simply beautiful.
Like those beloved photos and letters that one always needs to look at again, over the years, the POT He was reviewing those photos and perfecting angles, definition, putting together a context for the image. Thanks to new data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that provides magnificent global lunar maps, combined with the historical photographs that Anders and Lovell took, it is possible to see exactly where the moon was positioned. apollo 8 on the Moon, and even its precise orientation in space, at that moment, when astronauts first saw the Earth rising above the barren horizon of the Moon.
Earth from the Moon
The “phenomenon” occurred a few minutes after 10:30 a.m. Houston time, when Apollo 8 was approaching for the fourth time from the far side of the Moon.
Frank Borman, mission commander, was in the left seat, preparing to rotate the spacecraft to a new orientation according to the flight plans. Jim Lovell found himself in the spacecraft’s lower equipment compartment, ready to make sightings of lunar landmarks with the onboard sextant, and Bill Anders was in the right-hand seat, gazing at the Moon through his side window. and taking pictures with a Hasselblad camera, equipped with a 250mm telephoto lens.
Meanwhile, a second Hasselblad was assembled with a 80mm lens in Borman’s front window, the so-called rendezvous window, photographing the Moon on a self-timer: a new image every twenty seconds.
These photographs, combined with LRO’s high-resolution terrain maps, show that Borman was still spinning Apollo 8 when Earth appeared. It was only due to the timing of this rotation that the exit from earththat had occurred in the three previous orbits of Apollo 8, but that the astronauts They did not seenow it appeared in the side window of Bill Anders.
In 2018, the International Astronomical Union commemorated the event by naming a crater 25 miles in diameter “Anders Land Exit”. A smaller crater was given the name “Eight Homecoming”. Both craters are visible in the iconic photograph of exit from earth.
Apollo 8 had circled the Moon three times, but only on the fourth did the Earth appear through Bill Anders’ side window.
The “first” photograph of Earth
However, in all honesty, That was not the first photograph which was obtained from Earth from space.
The October 24, 1946 The United States Army took the first photograph ever taken of our planet and it was recorded 65 kilometers from Earth, by a 35mm camera that had been mounted on an old V2 rocket seized from the Nazis In the Second World War.
The rocket’s explosive warheads were missed by various instruments that made scientific measurements. Among them, one camera located between the fuel tanks, which had been programmed to take a picture every 1.5 seconds.
The rocket had been launched into space from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, USA and collapsed when it reached its full height.
Of course, when he fell he was destroyed, but since the camera was protected For a steel box, it was found by soldier Fred Rulli, who once, recalling what happened, said that “the scientists were surprised and they jumped like children“When I saw the photos.
First among first photographs
Space research in the United States actually began much earlier, the November 11, 1935when scientists from the US Army Air Corps and the National Geographic Society launched a helium-powered hot air balloon.
They started from Stratobowl, west of Rapid City, South Dakota, a natural elevation 1,200 meters high, protected by granite walls, where several attempts have already been made that were disastrous.
That time, however, the Explorer II balloon reached 22,000 meters and photographed the Earth. Those images allowed us to appreciate the curvature of the globe, not much else. The mission explorer II It was entirely financed by the National Geographic Society, an organization that wants to claim some merit in having been”forerunner in space research.
MM / DE
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