It marked a crucial turning point for both our conception of our planet's cosmic place, and also for its evident value as a PR tool. The captivating scene was widely disseminated at NASA centers, while American politicians gave out posters of the shots as diplomatic gifts. That said, NASA did mess with its working spacecraft, and fortunately, it paid off.
"You don't want to mess with a working spacecraft if you don't have to." "If you turned the spacecraft maybe it wouldn't turn back again," Dave Williams, a planetary curation scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told. This was not part of the original plan, and it was seen as a risky maneuver. Still, NASA team leads began to wonder about shifting its orientation so it could capture the Moon and Earth as one happy planetary family. The whole platform was delicate and untested, and it even suffered some early malfunctions after its launch on August 10, 1966, that had to be corrected literally on the fly. These photos were captured, developed, scanned, and transmitted entirely on board the spacecraft's intricate photography suite, which was stuffed with huge reels of 70 millimeter film. The Lunar Orbiter program was designed to scout out potential sites for the Apollo Moon landings, so the remainder of Lunar Orbiter 1's images were focused on the lunar surface. Lunar Orbiter 1's imagery, in contrast, boldly exposed a larger cosmic picture, in which Earth is simply another lonely and finite world, floating through a sprawling expanse.īut despite how revelatory these pictures were-and how quickly NASA grasped their value-they were an impulsive afterthought. While these photo sessions certainly did justice to the planet's mesmerizing features, they were close-ups, rather than wide shots. Up until this point, the only pictures of our home world taken from space were snapped in Earth orbit. "Lunar Orbiter's two pictures of the Earth taken from near the Moon, 240,000 miles away, showed photographically for the first time the Earth in one of its Moon-like phases at present a crescent-shaped 'last quarter' Earth," the New York Times pointed out in an article published a few days after the photographs were taken. One half of the planet lies in shadow, illustrating that the Earth cycles through phases from the Moon's perspective, just as the Moon does from our vantage point on the ground. The Moon's desolate foreground, cratered and sterile, offsets the Earth's rippling oceans, marbled cloud systems, and expansive continents. The orbiter will also identify potential landing sites for future lunar missions.ĭisclaimer: This story has not been edited by the Sakshi Post team and is auto-generated from syndicated feed.Lunar Orbiter 1 original photograph of the first picture of Earth from the Moon. It is assigned to measure the terrain, magnetic strengths, gamma rays and other traits of the lunar surface using six onboard instruments until the end of this year. The science ministry said people can check the real-time location of Danuri on the lunar orbit, along with its photos and collected data, on the orbiter's website.ĭanuri entered the selenocentric orbit on December 27 after 145 days of travelling from Earth and started its operation on February 4 about a month after test runs. On top of that, Danuri has sent separate photos taken with its wide-angle polarimetric camera, PolCam for short, designed to study the moon's surface composition and its volcanic deposits through measuring the degree of polarisation. They are the first photos of the moon's far side that South Korea has taken, reports Yonhap news agency. Seoul, April 12 (IANS) South Korea's unmanned space vehicle Danuri has sent photos of the moon's far side during its mission to collect selenographic data, the science ministry said on Wednesday.ĭanuri, which is rotating around the moon 100 kms above the surface, took pictures of the Tsiolkovskiy crater on March 22 and the Vallis Schrodinger and Szilard M craters each on March 24 with its high-definition cameras, according to the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).
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