In October 2014, the Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 probe transmitted to Earth a beautiful photograph showing. Astronomy in Russian offers a selection of photographs of the Earth and the Moon from space, taken by various spacecraft.

Earth and the far side of the Moon from Chang'e 5-T1. Source: CNSA

Of course it's not full list similar photographs. Here we have included those that we think are the most noteworthy.

"Lunar Orbiter-1"

Earth from Moon orbit August 23, 1966. Source: NASA

The first photograph in the history of the Earth from the orbit of the Moon was photographed by the American spacecraft Lunar Orbiter 1 on August 23, 1966. The original image was lost when the craft made a hard landing on the lunar surface, and all that remained was the recording on magnetic tape. However, the film data was later digitized and the photography was improved.

Apollo 8

Earth sunrise over the lunar horizon. Source: NASA

Perhaps the most famous photograph of the Earth from lunar orbit. The photo was taken by the crew of Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968. Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft in human history. spaceship, reaching the orbit of the Moon.

Photo from Zond-7 spacecraft

This series of photographs was taken by the Zond-7 spacecraft during its flyby of the Moon on August 9, 1969. The second photo from the left is actually a montage, filling in a moment missed during filming.

"Zond-8"

The Soviet spacecraft Zond 8 orbited the Moon on October 24, 1970. During this maneuver, about a hundred photographs of the Moon were taken, including 17 photographs of the Earth “hanging” above the lunar horizon.

"Kaguya"

A single frame from a high-resolution video shot by the Japanese Kaguya apparatus. Source: JAXA/NHK

This image was taken by the Japanese artificial lunar satellite Kaguya on April 6, 2008. At that time, Kaguya was the largest lunar program since the Apollo spacecraft.

Deep Impact

Flying of the Moon against the background of the Earth. Shooting of the Deep Impact apparatus. Source: NASA/JPL/UMD Storyboard: Gordan Ugarkovic

This series of photographs was taken by the Deep Impact camera on May 29, 2008, from a distance of 50 million kilometers from Earth. Each subsequent card was done with an interval of about 30 minutes, so the entire sequence fits into 3.5 hours.

"Rosetta"

Earth and Moon from the Rosetta spacecraft.

Arena of human passions. A ray of progress and the gray twilight of everyday life. Jerusalem and Mecca of all religions. Crusades, rivers of blood. Kings, courtiers, slaves. The illusion of grandeur and power. Crimes, wars and love. Saints, sinners and destinies. Human feelings, clinking of coins. The cycle of substances in nature. Hermit and superstar. Creators, ideological fighters - here everyone lived their time in order to disappear forever. Wealth, faith and the desire for unattainable beauty. Flight of hope, sunset of powerlessness. Dream castle in the air. And an endless series of news: birth, life - a game with death, a kaleidoscope of all coincidences, forward and upward! the cycle is completed. It's time to leave. And the light of other births is already dawning ahead. Civilizations and ideas.

The price of all this nonsense is one grain of sand in the void.

...On February 14, 1990, the cameras of the Voyager 1 probe received the last order - to turn around and take a farewell photograph of the Earth, before the automatic interplanetary station disappeared forever into the depths of space.

Of course, none scientific benefit this was not the case: by that time, Voyager was already far beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, 6 billion km from the Sun. A world of eternal darkness that is never warmed Sun rays. The illumination of those places is 900 times less than the illumination in Earth's orbit, and the luminary itself looks from there as a tiny shiny dot, barely distinguishable from the others bright stars. And yet, scientists hoped to see an image of the Earth in the picture... What does the blue planet look like from a distance of 6 billion kilometers?

Curiosity took precedence over common sense, and several grams of precious hydrazine flew out through the nozzles of the vernier engines. The “eye” of the orientation system sensor flashed - Voyager turned around its axis and took the desired position in space. The television camera drives came to life and grinded, shaking off a layer of cosmic dust (the probe’s television equipment had been inactive for 10 years since parting with Saturn in 1980). Voyager turned its gaze in the indicated direction, trying to capture the vicinity of the Sun in its lens - somewhere there should be a tiny pale blue dot rushing through space. But will it be possible to see anything from such a distance?

The shooting was carried out using a narrow-angle camera (0.4°) with a focal length of 500 mm, at an angle of 32° above the ecliptic plane (the plane of rotation of the Earth around the Sun). The distance to the Earth at that moment was ≈ 6,054,558,000 kilometers.

After 5.5 hours, an image was obtained from the probe, which at first did not arouse much enthusiasm among specialists. On the technical side, the photo from the outskirts of the solar system looked like a defective film - a gray nondescript background with alternating light stripes caused by scattering sunlight in the camera optics (due to the enormous distance, the visible angle between the Earth and the Sun was less than 2°). On the right side of the photograph there was a barely visible “speck of dust”, more like an image defect. There was no doubt - the probe transmitted an image of the Earth.

However, after disappointment came a true understanding of the deep philosophical meaning of this photograph.

Looking at photographs of the Earth from low-Earth orbit, we get the impression that the Earth is a large rotating ball covered with 71% water. Clusters of clouds, giant cyclone funnels, continents and city lights. A majestic spectacle. Alas, from a distance of 6 billion kilometers everything looked different.

Everyone you have ever loved, everyone you have ever known, everyone you have ever heard of, every person who has ever existed lived their lives here. Our multitude of pleasures and sufferings, thousands of self-righteous religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every politician and "superstar", every saint and sinner of our species lived here - on a speck suspended in a ray of sunlight.

- Astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, commencement speech May 11, 1996

It's hard to imagine, but our entire huge, diverse world, with its pressing problems, “universal” catastrophes and upheavals fit on 0.12 pixels of the Voyager 1 camera.

The figure “0.12 pixels” gives many reasons for jokes and doubts about the authenticity of the photo - did NASA specialists, like British scientists (who, as you know, divided 1 bit) managed to divide the indivisible? Everything turned out to be much simpler - at such a distance the scale of the Earth was really only 0.12 pixels of the camera - it would have been impossible to see any details on the surface of the planet. But thanks to the scattering of sunlight, the area where our planet is located looked like a tiny whitish speck with an area of several pixels in the image.

The fantastic photograph went down in history under the name Pale Blue Dot (“pale blue dot”) - a stern reminder of who we really are, what all our ambitions and self-confident slogans “Man is the crown of creation” are worth. We are nothing to the Universe. And there is no way to call us. Our only home is a tiny point, already indistinguishable at distances over 40 astronomical units (1 AU ≈ 149.6 million km, which is equal to the average distance from the Earth to the Sun). For comparison, the distance to the nearest star, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, is 270,000 AU. e.

Our posturing, our imagined importance, the illusion of our privileged status in the universe - they all give in to this point of pale light. Our planet is just a lonely speck of dust in the surrounding cosmic darkness. In this grandiose emptiness there is not a hint that someone will come to our aid in order to save us from our own ignorance.

There is probably no better demonstration of stupid human arrogance than this detached picture of our tiny world. I think it emphasizes our responsibility, our duty to be kinder friend with a friend, to cherish and cherish the pale blue dot - our only home.

- K. Sagan, continuation of speech

Another cool photo from the same series - solar eclipse in the orbit of Saturn. The image was transmitted by the Cassini automatic station, which has been “cutting circles” around the giant planet for the ninth year. There is a tiny dot just visible on the left side of the outer ring. Earth!

Family portrait

Having sent a farewell picture of the Earth as a souvenir, Voyager simultaneously transmitted another interesting image - a mosaic of 60 individual images various areas Solar system. Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune “lit up” on some of them (Mercury and Mars could not be seen - the first was too close to the Sun, the second was too small). Together with the “pale blue dot,” these photographs formed the fantastic collage Family Portrait (“Family Portrait”) - for the first time, humanity was able to look at the solar system from the outside, outside the ecliptic plane!

The presented photographs of the planets were taken through various filters to obtain the best image of each object. The Sun was photographed with a darkening filter and a short shutter speed - even at such a gigantic distance, its light is strong enough to damage telescopic optics.

Having said goodbye to distant Earth, Voyager's television cameras were completely deactivated - the probe forever went into interstellar space - where eternal darkness reigns. Voyager will no longer have to photograph anything - the remaining energy resource is now spent only on communicating with the Earth and ensuring the functioning of plasma and charged particle detectors. New programs aimed at studying the interstellar medium were rewritten into the on-board computer cells that were previously responsible for the operation of the cameras.

36 years in space

...23 years after the events described above, Voyager 1 is still floating in the void, only occasionally “tossing and turning” from side to side - the orientation system engines periodically counter the rotation of the device around its axis (on average 0.2 angular min. /sec), pointing a parabolic antenna towards the Earth, which had already disappeared from view, the distance to which had increased from six (as of 1990, when the “Family Portrait” was taken) to 18.77 billion kilometers (autumn 2013).

125 astronomical units, which is equivalent to 0.002 light years. At the same time, the probe continues to move away from the Sun at a speed of 17 km/s - Voyager 1 is the fastest of all objects ever created by human hands.

Before launch, 1977

According to the calculations of the creators of Voyager, the energy of its three radioisotope thermoelectric generators will last at least until 2020 - the power of plutonium RTGs decreases annually by 0.78%, and, to date, the probe receives only 60% of the original power (260 W versus 420 W at the start). The lack of energy is compensated by an energy saving plan that provides shift work and shutting down a number of non-essential systems.

The supply of hydrazine for the engines of the attitude control system should also be enough for another 10 years (several tens of kilograms of H2N-NH2 are still splashing in the probe’s tanks, from the 120 kg of the initial supply at the start). The only difficulty is that, due to the enormous distance, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the probe to find the dim Sun in the sky - there is a danger that the sensors may lose it among other bright stars. Having lost orientation, the probe will lose the ability to communicate with Earth.

Communications... it's hard to believe, but the power of Voyager's main transmitter is only 23 watts!
Picking up probe signals from a distance of 18.77 billion km is the same as driving a car at a speed of 100 km/h for 21,000 years, without breaks or stops, then looking back and trying to see the light of a refrigerator light bulb burning in the beginning of the journey.

70-meter antenna of the Goldstone deep space communications complex

However, the problem was successfully resolved through repeated modernization of the entire ground receiving complex. As for all the seeming improbability of communication over such large distances, it is no more difficult than “hearing” the radiation of a distant galaxy using a radio telescope.

Voyager's radio signals take 17 hours to reach Earth. The power of the received signal is quadrillionths of a watt, but this is much higher than the sensitivity threshold of 34 and 70-meter “dishes” for deep space communications. Regular communication is maintained with the probe; the telemetry data transmission rate can reach 160 bits/sec.

Extended Voyager mission. At the boundary of the interstellar medium

On September 12, 2013, NASA announced once again that Voyager 1 had left the solar system and entered interstellar space. According to experts, this time there were no errors - the probe reached an area in which there is no “solar wind” (the flow of charged particles from the Sun), but the intensity of cosmic radiation has sharply increased. Moreover, this happened on August 25, 2012.

The reason for the uncertainty of scientists and the appearance of numerous false reports is the lack of operational detectors of plasma, charged particles and cosmic rays on board Voyager - the entire complex of probe instruments failed many years ago. The current conclusions of scientists about the properties environment are based only on indirect confirmation obtained by analyzing incoming Voyager radio signals - as recent measurements have shown, solar flares no longer affect the antenna devices of the probe. Now the probe's signals are distorted by a new sound that has never been recorded before - the plasma of the interstellar medium.

In general, this whole story with the “Pale Blue Dot”, “Family Portrait” and the study of the properties of the interstellar medium might not have happened - it was originally planned that communication with the Voyager 1 probe would cease in December 1980, as soon as it left the vicinity of Saturn, - the last of the planets he explored. From that moment on, the probe remained out of work - let it fly wherever it wanted, no scientific benefit was expected from its flight anymore.

The opinion of NASA specialists changed after becoming acquainted with the publication of Soviet scientists V. Baranov, K. Krasnobaev and A. Kulikovsky. Soviet astrophysicists calculated the boundary of the heliosphere, the so-called. heliopause - the region in which the solar wind completely subsides. Then the interstellar medium begins. According to theoretical calculations, at a distance of 12 billion km from the Sun, a densification should have occurred, the so-called. “shock wave” is the region in which the solar wind collides with interstellar plasma.

Interested in the problem, NASA extended the mission of both Voyager probes until the deadline - as long as communication with space reconnaissance is possible. As it turned out, it was not in vain - in 2004, Voyager 1 discovered the boundary of a shock wave at a distance of 12 billion km from the Sun - exactly as Soviet scientists predicted. The speed of the solar wind sharply decreased by 4 times. And now, the shock wave is left behind - the probe has entered interstellar space. At the same time, some oddities are noted: for example, the predicted change in direction never occurred magnetic field plasma.

In addition, the loud statement about going beyond the Solar System is not entirely correct - the probe has ceased to feel the influence of the solar wind, but has not yet escaped beyond the gravitational field of the Solar System (Hill sphere) of 1 light year in size - this event is expected to occur no earlier than 18,000 years from now.

Will Voyager reach the edge of Hill's sphere? Will the probe be able to detect objects in the Oort Cloud? can he reach the stars? Alas, we will never know about this.

According to calculations, in 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will fly at a distance of 1.6 light years from the star Gliese 445. The further path of the probe is difficult to predict. In a million years, the hull of the starship will be distorted by cosmic particles and micrometeorites, but the space reconnaissance officer, who has fallen asleep forever, will continue his lonely wandering in interstellar space. He is expected to live in outer space about 1 billion years, remaining by that time the only reminder of human civilization.

Based on materials:
http://www.astrolab.ru/
http://www.nasa.gov/
http://www.rg.ru/
http://www.wikipedia.org/

Our planet is beautiful and amazing. Perhaps, with the development of space tourism, the secret dream of many people to see the earth from space will come true. Today, you can admire the breathtaking, magnificent panoramas of the Earth in photographs.

We present a selection of ten of the most famous images globe from NASA.

"Blue marble"

A widely known and widespread image of our stunning planet until 2002. The birth of this photograph was the result of a long and painstaking work. From a compilation of footage from months of research into the movement of oceans, clouds, and drifting ice, scientists have compiled a mosaic of amazing colors.
“Blue Marble” is recognized as a universal treasure and even now is considered the most detailed and detailed image of the globe.

An image taken from a record distance (about 6 billion kilometers) using the Voyajer 1 space probe. This spacecraft managed to transmit to NASA about 60 frames from the very depths of the solar system, including the “Pale Blue Dot”, where the globe looks tiny (0.12 pixels) with a bluish speck of dust on a brown stripe.
The “Pale Blue Dot” was destined to become the very first “portrait” of the Earth against the endless backdrop of outer space.

Another world-famous photo - amazing A view of the Earth taken by the American crew of Apollo 11 during the historic mission: the 1969 Moon landing.
Then three astronauts, led by Neil Armstrong, successfully completed the task - they landed on the lunar surface and returned home safely, having managed to leave this legendary image for history.

A photo unexpected for human perception: two luminous crescents on a completely black background of the universe. On the bluish crescent of the Earth you can see the contours of eastern Asia and the western waters Pacific Ocean and white areas of the Arctic. The image was transmitted in September 1977 by the Voyager 1 interplanetary probe. In this photograph, our planet is captured at a distance of more than 11 million kilometers.

The crew of Apollo 11 took two more famous photographs, in which the Earth's Terminator (from the Latin terminare - to stop) is visible with a rounded line - the light dividing line separating the illuminated (light) part of the celestial body from the unlit (dark) part, circling the planet twice per day - at sunset and sunrise. At the North and South Poles, this phenomenon is observed quite rarely.

Thanks to this photograph, humanity was able to see what our home looks like from another planet. The globe from the surface of Mars appears as a planetary disk flickering above the horizon.

This image was the first to capture the landscape using Swedish Hasselblad equipment. reverse side Moons. This event occurred in April 1972, when dark side The crew of Apollo 16 descended onto the Earth's satellite, with John Young as expedition commander.

This photograph has a scandalous reputation: many experts believe that the picture was not taken on the Moon at all, but in a specially equipped studio that simulates the lunar surface. Many question the very fact of astronauts being on the Moon.

Recently, NASA announced that on July 19, the Cassini probe in orbit around Saturn will photograph the Earth, which at the time of shooting will be at a distance of 1.44 billion kilometers from the device. This is not the first photo shoot of this kind, but the first one that was announced in advance. NASA experts hope that the new image will take pride of place among such famous images of the Earth. Whether this is true or not, time will tell, but for now we can remember the history of photographing our planet from the depths of space.

For a long time, people have always wanted to look at our planet from above. The advent of aviation gave humanity the opportunity to rise beyond the clouds, and soon the rapid development of rocket technology made it possible to obtain photographs from truly cosmic heights. The first photographs from space (if we adhere to FAI standards, according to which space begins at an altitude of 100 km above sea level) were taken in 1946 using a captured V-2 rocket.

The first attempt to photograph the earth's surface from a satellite was made in 1959. Satellite Explorer-6 I took this wonderful photo. By the way, after Explorer 6's mission was completed, it still served the American Motherland by becoming a target for testing anti-satellite missiles.

Since then, satellite photography has developed at an incredible pace and now you can find a bunch of images of any part of the earth's surface for every taste. But the vast majority of these photos were taken from low Earth orbit. What does the Earth look like from more distant distances?

Apollo Snapshot

The only people who could see the entire Earth (roughly speaking in one frame) were 24 people from the Apollo crews. We are left with several classic photographs as a legacy from this program.

Here's a photo taken with Apollo 11, where the earth's terminator is clearly visible (and yes, we are not talking about a famous action movie, but about the line dividing the illuminated and unlit parts of the planet).

Photo of the Earth's crescent above the surface of the Moon taken by the crew Apollo 15.

Another Earthrise, this time over the so-called dark side of the Moon. Photo taken with Apollo 16.

"The Blue Marble"- another iconic photograph taken on December 7, 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17 from a distance of approximately 29 thousand km. from our planet. This was not the first image to show the Earth fully illuminated, but it became one of the most famous. The Apollo 17 astronauts are so far the last people who could observe the Earth from this angle. To mark the 40th anniversary of the photo, NASA remade this photo, stitching together a bunch of frames from different satellites into a single composite image. There is also a Russian analogue, taken from the Electro-M satellite.

When viewed from the surface of the Moon, the Earth is constantly located at the same point in the sky. Since the Apollos landed in equatorial regions, in order to make a patriotic avatar, the astronauts had to get the hang of it.

Mid-range shots

In addition to the Apollo missions, a number of spacecraft photographed the Earth from a great distance. Here are the most famous of these pictures

A very famous photo Voyager 1, taken on September 18, 1977 from a distance of 11.66 million kilometers from Earth. As far as I know, this was the first image of the Earth and the Moon in one frame.

A similar photo taken by the device Galileo from a distance of 6.2 million kilometers in 1992

Photo taken on July 3, 2003 from the station Mars Express. The distance to Earth is 8 million kilometers.

And here is the most recent, but oddly enough the worst quality image taken by the mission Juno from a distance of 9.66 million kilometers. Just think - either NASA really saved money on cameras, or because of the financial crisis, all the employees responsible for Photoshop were fired.

Images from Martian orbit

This is what Earth and Jupiter looked like from Mars orbit. The pictures were taken on May 8, 2003 by the device Mars Global Surveyor, located at that time at a distance of 139 million kilometers from Earth. It is worth noting that the camera on board the device could not take color images, and therefore these are pictures in false colors.

Scheme of the location of Mars and the planets at the time of shooting

And this is how the Earth looks from the surface of the red planet. It's hard to disagree with this inscription.

Here's another image of the Martian sky. More bright point Venus, less bright (pointed to by the arrows) is our home planet

For those interested, a very atmospheric photo of a sunset on Mars. Somewhat reminiscent of a similar shot from a movie Stranger.

The same shot from Alien

Photos from Saturn's orbit

And here is the Earth in one of the pictures taken by the apparatus mentioned at the beginning Cassini. The image itself is composite and was taken in September 2006. It was made up of 165 photographs taken in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum, which were then glued together and processed, making the colors look natural. In contrast to this mosaic, when filming on July 19, the Earth and the Saturn system will be filmed for the first time in so-called natural colors, that is, as they would be seen by human eye. In addition, for the first time, the Earth and Moon will be captured by Cassini's highest-resolution camera ever.

By the way, here’s what Jupiter looks like from Saturn’s orbit. The image, of course, was also taken by the Cassini spacecraft. On that moment gas giants separated by a distance of 11 astronomical units.

Family portrait from "inside" the solar system

This portrait of the solar system was made by the apparatus MESSENGER, orbiting Mercury in November 2010. The mosaic, compiled from 34 images, shows all the planets of the solar system, except for Uranus and Neptune, which were too far away to be recorded. In the photographs you can see the Moon, the four main satellites of Jupiter and even a piece of the Milky Way.

Actually, our home planet

Higher resolution
Layout of the apparatus and planets at the time of shooting

Family portrait "outside" the Solar system

And finally, the father of all family portraits and ultra-distant photographs is a mosaic of 60 photographs taken by the same Voyager 1 between February 14 and June 6, 1990. After the passage of Saturn in November 1980, the device was generally inactive - others celestial bodies he had nothing left to study, and there were still about 25 years of flight left before approaching the heliopause boundary.

After numerous requests, Carl Sagan managed to convince NASA management to reactivate the ship's cameras, which were turned off a decade ago, and take a photograph of all the planets in the solar system. The only things that were not photographed were Mercury (which was too close to the Sun), Mars (which, again, was hindered by the light from the Sun) and Pluto, which was simply too small.

Voyager 1 was chosen because it followed a trajectory that seemed to lift it above the plane of the ecliptic, which made it possible to photograph all the planets “from above.”

This was the view at the time of filming from the spacecraft.

A snapshot of the Sun and the regions where Earth and Venus were located

Planets close up

Carl Sagan himself said this about this photo: "Take another look at this point. It's here. This is our home. This is us. Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every person who has ever existed lived their lives on Our multitude of pleasures and sufferings, thousands of self-confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every couple in love, every mother and every father, every capable. child, inventor and traveler, every ethics teacher, every lying politician, every “superstar”, every “greatest leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here - on a speck suspended in a ray of sunshine.

The earth is a very small stage in the vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood shed by all these generals and emperors so that, in the rays of glory and triumph, they might become the short-term masters of a grain of sand. Think of the endless cruelties committed by the inhabitants of one corner of this point on the barely distinguishable inhabitants of another corner. About how often disagreements are between them, about how eager they are to kill each other, about how hot their hatred is.

Earth is the only one so far known world, capable of supporting life. We have nowhere else to go—at least not in the near future. To visit - yes. Colonize - not yet. Whether you like it or not, the Earth is our home now."

October 25, 2016 at 04:09 pm

70 years since the first photograph of the Earth from space

Photographic equipment,
Cosmonautics

The first photograph of the Earth from space was taken on film on October 24, 1946, from a V-2 ballistic missile.

On October 24, 1946, long before the Soviet Sputnik 1 officially ushered in the space age, a small search party of American scientists and soldiers gathered in the New Mexico desert. They were tasked with finding the crash site of a V-2 rocket and a cassette with 35mm film.

People were preparing to see something incredible for the first time in their history: what the Earth looks like from space.

On that day, a V-2 ballistic missile was launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, USA. Unlike Wernher von Braun's previous rocket launches, the V-2 was now launched vertically.

A movie camera loaded with 35mm film took one frame every 1.5 seconds. The rocket rose to a height of about 105 kilometers and then fell down, crashing into the ground at a speed of 150 meters per second. The camera was completely broken, but the film itself in the steel cassette remained intact.

19-year-old US Army private Fred Rulli was one of the members of the search party sent on October 24, 1946. The military members of the expedition were not particularly impressed by the find. But something incredible was happening to the scientists. When they found the steel cassette intact, they were overcome with utter delight: “They jumped like children,” recalls Rulli. Complete madness began when the film was delivered to the launch site, developed and the photographs were shown on the screen for the first time: “The scientists just went crazy,” stated a private.

Until then, the record-breaking photograph of the earth's surface taken from the very high altitude, there was a photo from the American military helium balloon Explorer II, which rose into the air at 22,066 m in 1935. High enough to record the curvature of the globe (for the first time in the history of photography, the curvature of the horizon was captured on August 31, 1933 by aeronaut Alexander Dalya).

The camera on the V-2 rocket broke the record more than five times. People saw how our bright planet looks against the backdrop of the darkness of space.

“The photographs show for the first time what our Earth looks like to aliens arriving in spacecraft,” said Clyde Holliday, rocket camera designer, in a commentary for National Geographic. This magazine published an article about unique photography in 1950, when film frames were glued together into a single whole.

The result of a montage of footage taken during the launch of the V-2 on October 24, 1946

It was an amazing event.

Engineer Wernher von Braun (with a handkerchief in his jacket pocket)

The launch on October 24, 1946 was one of many experiments research program"V-2", carried out by a group of engineers led by Wernher von Braun, who after the war were transported to work in the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. For them, the US Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) created fictitious biographies and removed references to NSDAP membership and ties to the Nazi regime from public records. The general public learned about this secret operation by accident in December 1946, when chief design engineer Walter Riedel became the subject of a published article, “German Scientist Claims American Food Is Tasteless and Chicken Like Rubber.”

From 1946 to 1950, thanks to the V-2 launches, the Americans took more than 1,000 photographs of the Earth from altitudes of up to 160 km.

The famous German engineer Wernher von Braun began working on a rocket with liquid fuel in 1930. A key influence on him was Professor Hermann Oberth, who is called one of the six founders of modern rocketry and astronautics, along with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Yuri Kondratyuk (and at the beginning of the twentieth century, Kondratyuk calculated the optimal flight path to the Moon, which NASA later used in the Apollo lunar program ), Friedrich Zander, Robert Hainault-Peltrie and Robert Goddard.

Wernher von Braun later recalled his mentor: “Hermann Oberth was the first who, having thought about the possibility of creating spaceships, picked up a slide rule and presented mathematically based ideas and designs... Personally, I see in him not only the guiding star of my life, but I also owe him my first contacts with theoretical and practical issues of rocketry and space flight.”

After the launch of the first satellites, photographing the Earth became one of the main tasks of government and then private programs. The Earth was filmed not only from satellites, but also from other spacecraft. For example, the American manned spacecraft Gemini 11, launched on September 12, 1966, took a picture from an altitude of 1368 km.

Photo from Gemini 11

Three years later, in July 1969, the Apollo 11 crew made famous photograph Earth above the Moon's horizon. The image was taken from lunar orbit at a distance of about 400,000 km from Earth.

Photo from Apollo 11

Another scale of the Earth is shown in a photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 15 on July 26, 1971.

Photo from Apollo 15

With each passing decade, our spacecraft moved further and further into space, exploring the vastness of the solar system. On November 3, 1973, NASA launched Mariner 10, the first successful launch in the Mariner series. She became the first to visit Mercury on March 29, 1974. On the way to Mercury, the device took a photograph of the Earth and the Moon from a distance of 2.57 million km, photographing them together for the first time.

Perhaps the most remarkable photograph of the Earth was taken by the Voyager 1 probe on June 6, 1990, ten years after the start of its journey.

Photo of Earth from Voyager 1 (distance 6.05 billion km)