How Astronauts Took the Most Important Photo In Space History 108
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."
Re:Spinit. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Fast teamwork? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
Re:It's not important (Score:5, Interesting)
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.