1st photo of Earth from space<\/h3>\n
Were you alive before we saw Earth from space? If so, you were born on or before October 24, 1946. That was when a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert launched a V-2 rocket \u2013 carrying a 35-mm motion picture camera \u2013 to a height 65 miles (105 km) above Earth\u2019s surface. NASA defines the edge of space as 50 miles (80 km) above the surface. After a few minutes, the camera dropped back to Earth and was destroyed on impact. But the film survived.<\/p>\n
Reliving the momentous day<\/h3>\n
Air & Space Magazine<\/em> tells the story of this major event in space history:<\/p>\n Snapping a new frame every second and a half, the rocket-borne camera climbed straight up, then fell back to Earth minutes later, slamming into the ground at 500 feet per second. The camera itself was smashed, but the film, protected in a steel cassette, was unharmed.<\/p>\n Fred Rulli was a 19-year-old enlisted man assigned to the recovery team that drove into the desert to retrieve film from those early V-2 shots. When the scientists found the cassette in good shape, he recalls, \u201cThey were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids.\u201d Later, back at the launch site, \u201cwhen they first projected [the photos] onto the screen, the scientists just went nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n Before 1946, the highest pictures ever taken of the Earth\u2019s surface were from the Explorer II balloon, which had ascended 13.7 miles in 1935, high enough to discern the curvature of the Earth. The V-2 cameras reached more than five times that altitude, where they clearly showed the planet set against the blackness of space. When the movie frames were stitched together, Clyde Holliday, the engineer who developed the camera, wrote in National Geographic in 1950, the V-2 photos showed for the first time \u201chow our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n See a panorama of Earth from 1948 here<\/p>\n See videos and read the rest of the story from Air & Space.<\/p>\n Bottom line: On October 24, 1946, a movie camera on board a V-2 rocket captured the first photo of Earth from outer space. We\u2019ve come a long way since then!<\/p>\n Read more: Earth images from space: 10 incredible photos of our planet<\/p>\n Read more: GOES-19 first light images show stunning view of Earth<\/p>\n Enjoying EarthSky so far? Sign up for our free daily newsletter today!<\/p>\n <\/div>\n\n
Another early image from space<\/h3>\n
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