The Blue Marble: How a Photograph Revealed Earth's Fragile Beauty

The Blue Marble: How a Photograph Revealed Earth's Fragile Beauty — page 1
Chapter One A PIECE OF BLUE IN SPACE We’re not the first to discover this but we’d like to confirm that the world is round These words from Eugene Cernan commander of the Apollo 17 spacecraft reached Mission Control on Earth in less than a second The men and women monitoring the mission that day December 7 1972 smiled at Cernan’s little joke Humor was welcome because it helped to break the tension they were naturally feeling at that moment The Apollo 17 craft had launched from NASA’s John F Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s eastern coast five hours before Everyone involved was concentrating hard on doing their jobs Their goal was to place Cernan and another astronaut on the moon’s surface There they would travel farther than any of the U S astronauts who had walked on the moon They would do so using NASA’s Lunar Roving Vehicle The LRV which weighed 460 pounds 209 kilograms was similar to a golf cart but much more sophisticated It would allow the astronauts to explore the surface out to a distance of 6 miles 9 7 kilometers from the landing craft The LRV could go farther But to be on the safe side mission planners had restricted the trips to 6 miles to conserve the men’s oxygen and other elements of life support