This picture of the Earth and Moon in a single frame was taken by the Galileo spacecraft from about 3.9 million miles away. Antarctica is visible through clouds (bottom). The Moon's far side is seen; the shadowy indentation in the dawn terminator is the south pole Aitken Basin, one of the largest and oldest lunar impact features.
On March 7, 1947, not long after the end of World War II and years before Sputnik ushered in the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful in these grainy black-and-white-photos -- the first pictures of Earth as seen from altitude greater than 100 miles in space. Just the year before in 1946, scientists like John T. Mengel, a NASA pioneer who later oversaw the Vanguard Program, began experimenting with captured German V-2 rockets. Mengel conducted upper atmosphere experiments by launchi
ng the rockets into near-earth orbit. He designed and fabricated the first research nose shell to replace of the V-2 warhead and began placing cameras in the nose shell. Before the Small Steps Program began in 1946 using V-2 rockets to take images from space, the highest pictures ever taken of the Earth's surface were from the Explorer II balloon, which 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 and clearly showed the planet set against the blackness of space. When the movie frames were stitched together, the panoramas taken in the late 1940s covered a million square miles or more at a single glance. Image Credit: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
Most ISS images are nadir, in which the center point of the image is directly beneath the lens of the camera, but this one is not. This highly oblique image of northwestern African captures the curvature of the Earth and shows its atmosphere. The Earth's atmosphere is composed of 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen and 1 percent other constituents, and it shields us from nearly all harmful radiation coming from the sun and other stars. It also protects us from meteors, most of which burn up before they can strike the planet. Affe
cted by changes in solar activity, the upper atmosphere contributes to weather and climate on Earth. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/UCSD/JSC
This image from Apollo 17, and others like it, captured whole hemispheres of water, land and weather. This photo was the first view of the south polar ice cap. Almost the entire coastline of Africa is visible, along with the Arabian Peninsula.
This composite image, which has become a popular poster, shows a global view of Earth at night, compiled from over 400 satellite images. NASA researchers have used these images of nighttime lights to study weather around urban areas.
One of the fascinating aspects of viewing Earth at night is how well the lights show the distribution of people. In this view of Egypt, the population is shown to be almost completely concentrated along the Nile Valley, just a small percentage of the country’s land area. The Nile River and its delta look like a brilliant, long-stemmed flower in this photograph of the southeastern Mediterranean Sea, as seen from the International Space Station. The Cairo metropolitan area forms a particularly bright base of the flower. The smaller cities and towns within the Nile Delta tend to be hard to see amidst the dense agricultural vegetation during the day. However, these settled areas and the connecting roads between them become clearly visible at night. Likewise, urbanized regions and infrastructure along the Nile River becomes apparent. Scattered blue-grey clouds cover the Mediterranean Sea and the Sinai, while much of northeastern Africa is cloud-free. The thin yellow-brown band tracing the Earth’s curvature at the top of the image is airglow, a faint band of light emission that results from the interaction of atmospheric atoms and molecules with solar radiation at an altitude of approximately 60 miles (100 kilometers). This astronaut photograph was taken by the Expedition 25 crew on Oct. 28, 2010, with a Nikon D3S digital camera using a 16 mm lens. Image Credit: NASA
The Lena River, some 2,800 miles long, is the easternmost of the three great Siberian rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean and is one of the largest rivers in the world. The Lena Delta Wildlife Reserve, a protected wilderness area, provides an important refuge and breeding ground for many species of Siberian wildlife, and is also an important fish spawning site. Image Credit: NASA
The terrain for the scientific work conducted by ICESCAPE scientists on July 4, 2010, was Arctic sea ice and melt ponds in the Chukchi Sea. The five-week field mission was dedicated to sampling the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of the ocean and sea ice. Impacts of Climate change on the Eco-Systems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment, or ICESCPE Mission, is a multi-year NASA shipborne project. The bulk of the research will take place in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in summer of 2010 and fall of 2011. Image Credit: NASA/Kathryn Hansen
Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts--Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders--held a live broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and moon as seen from their spacecraft. Said Lovell, "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth." They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Gen
esis. Visit the Apollo 8 page for audio and video of the historic mission. Image Credit: NASA
The Antarctic ozone hole reached its annual maximum on Sept. 12, 2008, stretching over 27 million square kilometers, or 10.5 million square miles. The area is calculated using data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on NASA's Aura satellite. This is considered a "moderately large" ozone hole, according to NASA atmospheric scientist, Paul Newman. And while this year«És ozone hole is the fifth largest on record, the amount of ozone depleting substances have decreased about 3.8% from peak levels in 2000. The largest ozone hole ever recorded occurred in 2006, at a s
ize of 10.6 million square miles. NASA has been monitoring the status of the ozone layer through satellite observations since the 1970s.