This Earth Day, we reflect on our home planet and look at our planet from space throughout its history.
“It’s like watching a sunset on a beach from the most exotic seat in space,” said NASA astronaut Reed Wiseman, Artemis 2’s commander. I wrote We recently talked about witnessing the Earth slip behind the Moon.
Fifty-eight years ago, the “Earthrise” photograph taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders became one of the most famous photographs in history. Not only is this photo the first high-resolution color image of Earth taken from space, it also reveals the inherent fragility of our homes.
It was a beautiful and stark reminder that our planet is a big rock floating in space, protected from the harsh environment of space by a thin atmosphere. This photo is said to have sparked the environmental movement, and it remains a powerful sight to this day.
Decades after Earthrise, NASA’s robotic Voyager 1 spacecraft captured another iconic image of our homeland, the famous “pale blue dot” photo. The Voyager program launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, into the solar system in 1977, and in the decades since then, they have passed every major planet and now travel farther into interstellar space than any other spacecraft in history.
But on February 14, 1991, Voyager captured this image of Earth from a staggering distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun.
Amidst the scattered light of sunlight captured from billions of miles away was our home planet, a “pale blue dot” as astronomer Carl Sagan famously named it.
artemis moonshot
NASA’s Artemis 2 mission, which returned astronauts to the moon for the first time since the end of the Apollo program more than 50 years ago, has obtained stunning new images of Earth taken by astronauts heading to the moon. This is a new view of our home planet from a vantage point reached by only a handful of people.
The Artemis 2 astronauts traveled to the far side of the moon before returning to Earth, giving them a unique opportunity to see the Earth sinking behind the moon.
“You only get one chance in life,” Wiseman wrote in an April 19 post. on X He shared a cellphone video of the Earth setting behind the moon. “It’s like watching a beach sunset from the most exotic seat in the universe.”
“The four of us took a little time,” Wiseman said at a press conference after Artemis 2 splashdown on April 10, referring to the section from the Orion capsule’s perspective until the Earth passes the far side of the moon. While sailing beyond the far side of the moon, the crew lost contact with Earth. During that time, for about 40 minutes, they traveled around the moon without seeing any of Earth.
“It’s amazing to see your home planet disappearing behind the moon,” Wiseman added. “You can see the atmosphere. You can see the moon’s terrain projected across the Earth… It was just an incredible sight… and then it disappeared. It became invisible.”
Before reaching the moon, the crew was able to look back at our planet through the windows of the Orion capsule. The image, dubbed “Hello, World,” was taken after the spacecraft completed its menstrual ejection burn, a maneuver that pushes it out of Earth’s orbit toward the Moon.
The image shows Earth eclipsing the sun and peeking through slivers of light reflecting off interplanetary dust, creating the glow known as zodiacal light. This image of the Earth also hides two aurora borealis at the top right and bottom left of the Earth.
The Artemis 2 crew captured images of not only Earth, but also themselves. In the image above, NASA astronaut and Artemis 2 mission specialist Christina Koch can be seen inside her cabin, her hair flowing as she looks out the window at Earth. And although we can’t read her mind, her words upon landing on her home planet reflect this profound moment.
“I know I haven’t yet learned everything this journey has taught me,” Koch said in a post-splashdown press conference. “But there’s one new thing I know: Planet Earth, you’re a crew member.”
“A crew is a group of people who are always on the move no matter what, united every minute with a common purpose, silently making sacrifices for each other, giving blessings and taking responsibility,” Koch added. “The crew has the same cares, the same needs, and the crew is inescapably beautiful and loyally connected.”
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