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It was just one of many missions undertaken to identify a possible landing place for the upcoming manned Apollo missions. On 10 August 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 became the first American spacecraft to orbit the moon – and it carried a camera. However, a photograph of the whole Earth could be taken only from much farther away – from outer space.
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In June 1965, during the second crewed flight, Ed White became the first American to walk in space from his unique vantage point he captured a few high-quality photographs of the Earth. Some remarkable photographs of the Earth seen from orbit were taken during the two-manned Gemini programme that followed Mercury. It was said that he could identify any region of the Earth from an aerial photo. After he graduated from university, Underwood had joined the US Army Corps of Engineers as part of an army project to study the Earth’s geological features from the air. The situation improved when Richard Underwood was appointed to head up a small advisory group responsible for photography. Not surprisingly, the photographs he took were worthless.
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He bought it at a local drugstore for $19.95. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, had to insist on taking his own camera on board.
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From the start, Nasa grandees were against the astronauts taking what they sneeringly called ‘tourist’ photographs of the Earth.
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In 1958, America’s newly formed space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), announced the launch of Project Mercury, a series of one-manned orbital flights. From these images, and another set of photographs taken from the flight of an Aerobee rocket launched an hour later, Halliday patched together a 2,700-mile- (4,350km-) wide panorama of the Earth – an image spanning one-tenth of the planet’s circumference. Holliday got his best set of aerial photos from a V-2 flight in 1948, taken at an altitude of 65 miles (105km).
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Clyde T Holliday, a photography specialist, was responsible for the difficult task of working out how to attach cameras that would survive the rockets’ impact. Over the following few years more than 60 V-2s, modified to carry various kinds of scientific equipment, would be launched from a site in New Mexico. On 16 April 1946 von Braun and his German colleagues – who would become US citizens – launched a V-2 on American soil. His 14-metre-tall, 12.5-tonne rocket known as the V-2 had not affected the outcome of the war, as Hitler had hoped, but it was now to play a central role in the history of space exploration. The Space Race: The Cold War rivalry that put humans on the MoonĪt the end of the Second World War, American forces captured the German engineer Wernher von Braun, the designer of the world’s first ballistic missile.Back down to Earth: the legacy of the 1969 moon landing.You can follow Tariq Malik on Twitter for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter on Facebook. The mission is conducted under a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. The spacecraft is expected to observe the Earth through at least 2016. Suomi, who has been hailed as the father figure of satellite meteorology. The Suomi NPP satellite is named after the late meteorologist Verner E. It is designed to measure ocean color, surface temperature, fires on Earth, cloud distribution and the amount of particles called aerosols in the atmosphere. The VIIRS instrument is the biggest and most important tool of the five instruments riding aboard the Suomi NPP satellite, mission scientists have said. As the satellite orbits Earth, it snaps photos over a strip of the planet about 1,865 miles (3,001 km) wide. The extreme clarity of the Blue Marble photos comes from Suomi NPP's Visible Infrared Radiometer Imaging Suite (VIIRS), which is a high-resolution sensor package designed to observe Earth in different ranges of the light spectrum. That's enough photos of Earth to fill 800 DVDs. The Suomi NPP satellite beams about 4 terabytes of data to Earth every day, mission scientists have said. NASA scientists created the two new 'Blue Marble' images from data acquired by a new instrument that's aboard the Earth-observing satellite Suomi NPP, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).
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