What would Venus look like with water? Mathematician and data scientist Alexis Huet originally posted the map above online in 2014. Even now, some have suggested terraforming Venus, so that it could become a water world once again in the future. But scientists think that, a few billion years ago, Venus might have had oceans, perhaps much like those on Earth. This planet – orbiting next-inward from Earth around the sun – is one of the most inhospitable places in our solar system. So there’s no water on the surface of Venus today.
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There are also crushing surface pressures and clouds full of sulfuric acid. It’s hot enough on the surface of Venus to melt lead. Image via Alexis Huet/ Dragonite-2/ Reddit. | Map depicting Venus’ surface as if it had oceans. And what they saw helped fuel what followed.View larger. Earthlings didn’t just look forward to an ambitious space age-they trained the camera on themselves. Even though the photo seems grainy and low-res to modern eyes, it helped capture the possibility of the planet we share.
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Still, there’s something special about seeing something for the first time. It’s been done again-as when NASA took a better high-res Earthrise image in 2015 that updated the “big blue marble” view. The Lunar Orbiter 1 photo was different: It showed the planet as a round planet in deep space. NASAĮarth had been photographed before-in 1946, a satellite captured a grainy look at Earth’s surface, outdoing prior pictures of the Earth taken from a 14-mile-high balloon. They coordinated a high-risk maneuver that repositioned the satellite, then took a successful photo of earthrise from the moon on August 23, 1966. The map the craft helped produce was only recently updated with the help of the Lunar Reconnoissance Orbiter.Īs Stein reports, the Lunar Orbiter 1 mission went as planned, but near its end scientists on the ground decided they wanted to train its sights on Earth instead of the moon. Eventually, images from the photographic surveys helped NASA hone in on candidate sites, document other lunar sites of scientific interest, like the far side of the moon, and produce a map of the entire moon. The orbiters had their own film processing units inside-using two lenses, they’d take pictures, develop and process them, scan them and transmit the data back to Earth. Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratoryīetween 19, NASA sent a total of five lunar orbiters to photograph the moon.
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In response, NASA sent a series of high-tech spacecraft into orbit to take snapshots of the moon’s surface and inform the eventual Apollo 11 mission. At the time, the agency was preparing for an eventual lunar landing and needed reconnaissance photos to find the best possible spot on the surface of the moon.
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Stein writes for Inside Science News Service, it almost didn’t happen. The photo was taken by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966-and, as Ben P. That honor went to the black-and-white image you see above. Though the photo eventually became one of the most-used images in history, it wasn’t the first to show Earth from deep space. If you think the photo was the ubiquitous “blue marble”-style photograph, think again- that photo wasn’t taken until Apollo 17 traveled toward the moon in 1972. But 50 years ago today, that changed when a NASA spacecraft captured the first-ever photograph of Earth from the moon. What does Earth look like? For millennia, humans could only speculate on their planet’s appearance.