Space & Astronomy

70 years on: first image of Earth from space

By T.K. Randall
October 24, 2016 ·  33 comments

Taken in 1946, this is the first ever image of the Earth taken from space. Image Credit: US Army Capturing the image of the Earth against the backdrop of space might not seem like anything particularly special nowadays, but back in the 1940s such a feat was considered revolutionary.

More than ten years before the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet Union, scientists in New Mexico succeeded in capturing the first ever photographs of our own planet from space by strapping a camera to a Nazi V-2 ballistic missile and launching it 65 miles in to the sky.

Snapping images at the rate of one every 90 seconds, the rocket spent mere minutes up in space before falling back down to Earth and smashing in to the ground at more than 340mph.Thanks to a specialized steel cassette however the photographs it captured actually survived the trip, much to the excitement of the scientists who sent it up there.

Engineer Clyde Holliday, who built the camera, wrote in an article in 1950 that the images showed "how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship."

Little did he know that humans would be walking on the surface of the moon just 19 years later.

Source: Popular Mechanics | Comments (33)

Tags: Earth, Space