Thursday, Dec. 1, 2011
THEN
On Dec. 1, 1959 the United States launches a Thor missile with a camera onboard that takes the first color photograph of Earth from outer space. The missile is equipped with a camera in its nose cone. The images are not seen until the data capsule falls back to Earth on Feb. 16, 1960, landing on a beach on Mayaguana Island in the Bahamas, some 1,700 miles from the Cape Canaveral, Fla., launch site. Fourteen years earlier, on Oct. 24, 1946, the first black and white images of Earth from beyond the atmosphere are captured by a camera attached to a V-2 missile launched in New Mexico. That missile went straight up and then fell back to Earth minutes later. The film was protected from impact by a steel cassette. According to the Smithsonian’s AIR & SPACE magazine, eyewitness Fred Rulli, who was part of the recovery team, said when they found the cassette unharmed the scientists “were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids.” Back at the lab, “when they first projected [the photos] onto the screen, the scientists just went nuts.”
NOW
Today, the Hubble Space Telescope orbiting Earth has been able to look across space and captured images of supernovas, star nurseries, nebulae, young solar systems, black holes, and even galaxies in infant stages. Some of these incredibly distant galaxies are now 10 billion years old. Launched in 1990, the telescope collects three to four gigabytes of data each day, enough to fill six CD-ROMs. Hubble must be extremely steady to capture sharp images of distant and faint objects. Able to see ultraviolet through infrared light, Hubble captures breathtaking images a human eye could not otherwise see.
