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How Astronauts Took the Most Important Photo In Space History
The Bad Astronomer writes "On December 24, 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts saw the Earth rising over the limb of the Moon. The photo they took of this moment — dubbed Earthrise — has become an icon of our need to explore, and to protect our home world. NASA has just released a video explaining how the astronauts were able to capture this unique moment, which included a dash of both coincidence and fast teamwork."
They used a camera.
Perspective is such a wonderful thing
People should get out and about more
The perspective from the moon makes it important because it fuels the need to explore. That's why the iconic moment is important.
FUCK! China landed a probe on the moon. Dammit we haven't done a damm thing in ages.
You mean except for the two rovers that are currently driving around on Mars?
FUCK! China landed a probe on the moon. Dammit we haven't done a damm thing in ages.
Good for China. Now how many probes do they have on Mars? We just landed, what, our 4th rover?
CHINA. you know those guys who make all our cheap plastic walmart crap... is now kicking our asses in space.
Let me know when China lands men on the moon, or anything on Mars. Personally, I'm also super impressed with the Cassini mission. Did you know that Titan has lakes?
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
The Chinese are getting ready to send a repair guy there, in case they need a tow or a jump-start.
That picture will be awesome!
Hmm... interesting description. It's not as though they went to the moon for a single orbit (there were ten) and then came right back. Did they manage to miss the Earth rise until their last orbit and had to act quickly? No, it was on the fourth orbit. If they missed it, they'd get another chance in two hours. From the transcript, I found the most interesting thing was that they had a list of things they were supposed to photograph, that Earth doesn't appear to have been on the list, and that there seems to been a bit of a disagreement as to whether they should even be snapping that photo. Sure the photo schedule they had was driven by the scientific information they were collection for the planetary scientists and for the planners of the future Apollo missions but you'd think they could have contacted Capcom and told them "Hey we've got a great PR opportunity here...". It's sort of funny nowadays that many, if not most, unmanned missions seem to have a view of Earth built into their photographic schedule. Keeps the general public interested, I guess.
(No... haven't seen the video yet; bandwidth starved at the my location. The above is based on the transcript.)
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That's what is important about it.
That picture of Earth had a pretty big impact on peoples' minds. It's hard to convey that to younger generations. Imagine you're living in a world where two sides of the globe are hell bent on destroying each other and both sides kinda-sorta think that they could win, or at least that they could kinda-sorta survive such a MAD scenario. They keep telling you that the other side is out to get you and to kill you, and that there is nothing more important than getting them first.
And then you see our planet, set against this pitch black void of space. That tiny, precious marble that we call our Earth, the only place where we can live. A tiny spec of heaven in the middle of the unfriendly, dangerous and outright deadly void around it.
Of course we knew what our planet looks like. We had people in orbit before. They were up there and they were able to look down onto our planet. But they always saw it as something huge. When you're in LEO, Earth is pretty big. When you're looking at it from the moon, it gets incredibly tiny. Precious. And very fragile.
I don't want to say that this picture "won" the cold war, in the sense that we steered towards mutual acceptance and away from the idea that we should blow each other up. SALT was started before it. But I think it did have some impact on the people, and on how they saw our planet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My guess is they didn't choose Genesis chapter 3 for the reading either, about how Man shouldn't eat from the forbidden tree of knowledge, lest he realize he's naked.
NASA felt that telling everybody that the crew of Apollo 8 spent the entire mission naked might be bad for the public image of the space program.
We look like such fools.. Talk up how awesome NASA was!
The other way to look at it is; "look how awesome NASA used to be - let's fund them again, and get more awesome like this, dammit!"
pretty soon we will all be witness to Earthset, and from space it won't even look less pretty than this.
Only thing is, it's man created, and the moon won't even be a possible last resort.
Wake me up when the Chinese get anybody above 400 miles. I seriously doubt that any Chinese astronauts are going to do much of anything.
Besides, launching people into space only once every three years or so isn't going to give them the ability to do much of anything. I am significantly underwhelmed by the progress of the Chinese space agency and their ability to recreate the Ranger missions.... and boldly go where dozens of amateur rocket hobbyists plan to tread in the very near future.
There certainly is no plan by the Chinese Space Agency to develop the hard infrastructure needed for major missions like you are implying. They don't even have a good equivalent of the Deep Space Network.
I just felt like I was reading the transcript of a talk by the Russians about the US after the Launch of Sputnik, or maybe Gagarin.
I am looking forward to seen whether the amateurs can make it to the moon before the Chinese. The main difference is resiliency to failure, and failures there will be.
They felt inspired due to seeing something that literally no other human ever in the entire existence of mankind had ever seen before. If you can't grasp just how profound it was for a group of people going further away from any other group of people in all of history (several times further from any other group), you really fail to grasp just what was going on that particular December of 1968.
Yes, they could have read something out of Shakespear, Tolkein, Douglas Adams, or Einstein. Instead, they choose something that was written even earlier simply to show the sheer historic significance of what it was that they were doing.
Besides, why do you give a crap about what somebody else believes? A basic principle of liberty is that people are free to believe or not believe whatever it is that they want. The first amendment applies just as much to astronauts as it does to anybody else, and that even includes the freedom from censorship about religious ideas too. The next time you decide to take a trip around from the back side of the Moon and want to make a profound public statement about your experience, you can chose something else you think is much more appropriate like Dr. Seuss.
Whats even more astounding than this iconic photo is the tiny pinpoint of light that is Earth seen in pictures from the Mars rovers, or how about the picture from one of the deep space probes looking back at the the Earth-Moon system (was it NewHorizons, I forget).. THOSE picture blow my mind even more than this one..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Yeah, you stay here and wait for the next major asteroid impact (or WWIII, or the supervolcano at Yellowstone to pop, or . . . ). If my kids get off this rock in time, they can come back later, pump your remains outta the ground and refine 'em for use in their flying cars.
The Soviet Union actually ensured our freedom. As long as it existed, our rulers had to play nice so they'd be seen as the good guy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
First you mean the Germans the Americans took were ahead of the Germans the Russians took?
Yes, and that speaks well of America. Which side do you think von Braun and company went out of their way to surrender to?
Good ideas have always been around, and relatively easy to recognize. Getting good ideas accepted by a majority vote is the big trick.
Manned spaceflight is overrated.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."