Blue Marble image of the Earth taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on Dec. 7 1972.
Image Credit: NASA
This week marks 50 years since the first Moon landing, and we thought it might be interesting to reflect on a couple of ways that this programme influenced the Earth Observation (EO) industry.
Blue Marble
In terms of imaging the Earth, the most iconic is probably the ‘Blue Marble’ taken by astronauts onboard Apollo 17 as they headed towards their Moon landing, on the last of the Apollo Missions.
It wasn’t the first colour image of the planet, this is generally credited to the US Applications Technology Satellite 3, known as ATS-3, launched in November 1967 and later that month it took NASA’s first colour photographs of Earth. A selection of the images from this satellite can be found here.
Despite these earlier images, one taken with a 70-mm Hasselblad camera and an 80-mm Zeiss lens at 10.39 GMT on the 7th December 1972 is the most famous. It’s suggested that the image was taken upside down as the astronaut’s view was with Antarctica on top, whereas is displayed in its standard configuration with Antarctica at the bottom. The image got its name as the astronauts felt the planet looked the size of a glass marble.
It’s also reported that the Apollo 7 and Apollo 9 missions also have a key link to EO. As they took images of the Earth using wavebands outside the visible spectrum, and these images led to the development of the Landsat programme itself.
Black Marble 2016: Composite global map created from data acquired by VIIRS in 2016. Image courtesy of NASA/NASA’s Earth Observatory.
There have been other Blue Marbles, Black Marbles for images of Earth at night and the Pale Blue Dot of images of Earth from the Voyager-1 spacecraft as it travels away from the planet. Equally, of course, today with the optical imagers of the EO industry the planet is now photographed thousands of times every day from every angle. Essentially, the ATS-3 images and the original Blue Marble were the genesis of the optical EO industry.
Carrying Large & Small Payloads
The Saturn V rocket which carried the Apollo 11 towards that first landing is generally considered the most powerful rocket ever built. Part of that development was down to German engineer Dr Wernher von Braun, who joined the US Space programme at the end of the 2nd World War.
Before getting involved with the Moon Landings, Dr von Braun was part of the team who launched the first US satellite, Explorer 1, in January 1958. It only operated for four months until its batteries died, but in that time it detected the existence of radiation belts around the Earth – known as the Van Allen radiation belts. In the sixties Dr von Braun and his team developed engines that could carry large payloads into space, and whilst initially it supported the Moon programme it also laid the foundation of the launch capabilities for large EO satellites.
Dr Von Braun went onto to work for NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. to serve as Deputy Associate Administrator, before leaving and going to work for Fairchild Industries, in Maryland, where he helped develop EO satellites.
Despite this ability to carry large payloads, a lot of the space industry development has focussed on making everything smaller. As the smaller the payload, the smaller the rocket, the less fuel it will require to launch and overall the whole venture will be cheaper. This has been a significant driver for the industry over the last few years with the greater emphasis on small satellites, microsatellites, cubesats and even smaller nanosats.
Last week it was reported that together Spire Global and ESA had launched two tiny supercomputing nanosatellites aboard a Soyuz rocket. The two shoebox-sized nanosats carry parallel supercomputing scalable devices, enabling them to receive, process and transmit one terabyte of data each day in orbit.
Whilst these are just a couple of examples of how the moon landing directly impact on our industry, in truth, there are only two of many examples we could have chosen. Our entire industry would not be possible without the advances in space exploration and development in the last century and we’re happy to salute the anniversary of Neil Armstrong setting the first human foot on the moon!
