On August 23, 1966, the team behind NASA’s Lunar Orbiter I captured the first image of Earth as seen from the Moon. You will sometimes see an updated version of this image, in fantastic resolution with all imperfections erased. It is an impressive restoration created by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) in 2008, and just one example of the amazing work done by the LOIRP. But my favorite version will always be the original, because to me the imperfections are an essential part of the image. They are artifacts of the tools used to create that image, and they tell a story of incredible ingenuity.
Below, you can see the image that was plastered across the front page of the New York Times a few days after the Lunar Orbiter teams captured it. You can probably see the vertical stripes that line the image. These exist because the picture is built from 35mm film strips laid next to each other and composited together. It was the final step of a process that started by exposing and developing 70mm aerial film onboard the spacecraft using an Eastman Kodak camera system. Here is the story of how engineers retrieved this image and others like it, and delivered them to NASA at a critical time for the agency and the country.
The pictures of the Earth weren’t part of the plan, and they almost didn’t happen. The primary goal for Lunar Orbiter was to help find landing sites for Apollo, and there were particular target areas planned for imaging on Lunar Orbiter I.
Boeing engineers were the first to raise the possibility of photographing the Earth, and NASA officials were enthusiastic about the idea. But they would have to convince Boeing Program Manager Robert J. Helberg to make it happen. Helberg was afraid of the risks that the operation might entail to the spacecraft, and the possibility that the required maneuvers would cause them to lose contact with Lunar Orbiter. He was worried about the company’s performance incentive if something went wrong.1 This was a reasonable concern, considering how complex and delicate the spacecraft was.
Below, you can see the camera that made it happen, and the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that carried the camera along with a handful of other scientific instruments.
The camera was originally created for a classified Air Force surveillance satellite called SAMOS. In my history of the camera system, I detailed how the camera came to be, and how it was eventually adopted by NASA.
In short, Kodak devised a system for taking medium resolution and high resolution images simultaneously on the same strip of film. This film was routed through the spacecraft, where it was pressed against Kodak’s “Bimat” film, which developed and fixed the image. A flying spot scanner shot an electron beam through the film, and variations in the density of the film resulting from the image changed the intensity of the beam. Those variations were captured by a photomultiplier on the other side of the film, where they were translated into electronic signals that were sent back to Earth for reconstruction.
Lunar Orbiter officials Floyd Thompson, Clifford Nelson, and Lee Scherer went to JPL to change Helberg’s mind about taking the images of Earth. “They convinced Helberg that the picture was worth the risk,” writes NASA historian Bruce Byers, “and that NASA would make compensation in the event of an unexpected mishap with the spacecraft.”2 NASA historian James Hansen also describes how “the enthusiasm of his own staff for the undertaking” played a major role in changing Helberg’s mind.3
The Lunar Orbiter team put together a plan to reorient the spacecraft for photography of Earth on orbits 16 and 27. You can see the diagrams of the position and maneuvers for these photographs below.
Once the images were taken, they were developed and stored on the spacecraft. The team transmitted the photographs to Earth a few days later, where they would go through the reconstruction process, a multipart procedure that started at the Deep Space Instrumentation Facilities scattered across the world. The three primary stations used for Lunar Orbiter were in Goldstone, Madrid, and Woomera.4
For the most part, the plan was to perform readout of the film near the end of the mission, but the Lunar Orbiter team did have the ability to perform near-real-time imagery through “manual reassembly” of the images at the ground stations in Madrid, Spain, and Woomera, Australia.
They used this ability primarily to check the quality of the photographs, especially near the beginning of the mission, but they also used this process to get the images of Earth back mid-flight. At 9:30 PM on August 25, the station near Madrid began to receive the first images of the Earth from the Moon. The image took 43 minutes to arrive.5 In the receiving station, the picture materialized on a kinescope tube, and was captured on 35mm film by a special camera pointing at the tube.
This was accomplished using the specialized ground reconstruction electronics (GRE), shown below.
The film was then looped to reconstruct the full frame as it existed on the original 70mm film onboard the spacecraft. This reconstruction process created the stripes that make Lunar Orbiter photography so distinctive.
On the bottom of each film strip, you can see the pre-exposed “edge data” that was used to aid in the reconstruction of each frame.
Below, you can see more images of the GRE used to commit the images to the 35mm film, creating the component strips of the larger frames.
The manual reconstruction process was fairly laborious, and the plan was to use automatic reconstruction machines for the bulk of the images at the end of each mision. Reconstruction aside from the near real time imagery took place at Eastman Kodak facilities in Rochester, New York, using a reassembly printer (when possible) that transferred the full frames to 9.5 inch film.
The machine projected “framelets” side by side to form composite images. The final Earthrise photo is itself a combination of three images from the high resolution lens–Frame 102, H1-H3. The result is a spectacular panoramic vista, with the Earth hanging just above the Moon’s limb.
NASA officials and histories considered the image an outstanding success.7 Before this, the Soviet Union was largely winning the space race. Their lunar exploration program had racked up numerous achievements: first flyby (Luna 1) and first impactor (Luna 2), first images of the lunar farside (Luna 3), first lander (Luna 9), and first orbiter (Luna 10). For the United States, the image of the Earth from the Moon was one of their first big “wins” in the space race. The fact that it was such an astounding visual certainly helped.
Beyond this accomplishment, the Lunar Orbiters helped comprehensively map the Moon, and achieved their primary objective of scouting for Apollo landing sites. The imagery from the first three Lunar Orbiters was so useful that scientists were able to have more control over the flight plan for the last two LO spacecraft.
Frame 102 actually directly influenced the scientists’ decision making once they were in the drivers’ seat. For the most part, the plan was to take images from a very direct top-down perspective. But the unplanned image contained oblique angles of the lunar surface, which proved useful to scientists who were trying to grapple with lunar topography. Frame 102 directly led to plans for more oblique angle photographs on later missions.8
Despite the images of the Earth taken by Apollo a few years later, that first image of the Earth from the Moon holds a special place the history of space exploration.
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- Bruce Byers, Destination Moon: A History of the Lunar Orbiter Program, April 1977, NASA, pp 241-242, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19770016195 ↩︎
- Byers, pp 241-242 ↩︎
- James R. Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution: NASA Langley Research Center from Sputnik to Apollo, NASA, January 1995, pp. 344-345 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19950021264 ↩︎
- Most of the information in this post comes directly from Lunar Orbiter contract documents. For more detail, see Lunar Orbiter I: Photographic Mission Summary, NASA/Boeing, April 1967, pp. 50-53, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112106582528; also Lunar Orbiter I: Photography, NASA/Boeing, August 1967, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19670023005 ↩︎
- “How the Earth Looks From the Moon,” The New York Times (New York, NY), August 26, 1966, https://www.nytimes.com/1966/08/26/archives/how-the-earth-looks-from-the-moon-first-picture-shows-cover-of.html ↩︎
- Lunar Orbiter slide collection, 146:13, Kodak Historical Collection, D.319, Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester ↩︎
- See Byers and Hansen. ↩︎
- Byers, p 243, and Lunar Orbiter I: Photography, p 33 ↩︎