Apollo 17 Blue Marble 30th Anniversary

Not exactly Nutfield News, as a mater of fact Londonderry is on the other side of this image and 18,000 miles away from the photographer.  Our “new media” capability allows us to present this image in an interesting format.

Press play to start the journey.

The Apollo 17 spacecraft was launched from the Kennedy Space Center at midnight on December 7th, 1972. Just hours after lift-off, the command module aligned with the Earth and Sun, allowing the crew to photograph Earth in full light. For the first time in an Apollo mission, the Antarctic continent was visible allowing for a photo to be taken by the orbiting astronauts. The photo was taken at about 18,000 statute miles away from Earth. Virtually every picture showing the full Earth is derived from this one photograph. Television, newspapers, websites, and marketing material have all used this photograph over the years. Geostationary weather satellites, Galileo, and many other spacecraft have returned great pictures of the full Earth from space, but this image is still the number one requested photo in the NASA photo archives.

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientific Visualization Studio

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This entry was written by admin, posted on December 7, 2009 at 4:19 pm, filed under Around Nutfield and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

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  1. John Robinson
    December 8, 2009 at 3:43 pm | Reply

    For what it’s worth, when I worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, so too did Gene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17. In December of 1988, I guess it was, we were working on a video about flight simulation for Digital, and he was the host. We were at McDonnell Douglas headquarters in St. Louis. By chance, it was the anniversary of his landing, and he got to talking all about it. But the thing I remember most was, wherever he was, he knew where the moon was. He was always framing it against the sky, against the St. Louis Arch, against the skyline. It was clear how much he was affected by the moon experience – it was like part of him never left it.

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