In the three decades since then, the agency’s Earth Science program observation has expanded along with both the technological ability and the growing imperative to do so. In 1989, NASA formalized a Mission to Planet Earth, in which examining the third planet from the sun was no longer incidental to its work but central to it. A Library of Earth Images Continues to Grow The image of Earth had to be repeatedly replaced because so many people touched it. On the initiative of Carl Sagan, who first proposed photographing Earth with Voyager cameras in 1981, Voyager 1 snapped the image of a barely visible Earth that became known as the “ Pale Blue Dot.” Voyager also captured images of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and Venus, and staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory mounted the set as a mosaic on an auditorium wall.

WATCH: How the Earth Was Made on HISTORY Vault.Īmong the most famous of those images was taken in 1990. That was the last of the Apollo moon missions, but NASA’s space probes continued to take longing glances back toward their home world. Many years later, photographer Galen Rowell described Earthrise as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”Įarthrise was followed by Blue Marble, a view of the Earth taken from the Apollo 17 spacecraft in 1972.

The Apollo missions, which concluded in 1972, coincided with the birth of the modern environmental movement-the founding of Friends of the Earth in 1969 and Greenpeace in 1971, the first Earth Day in 1970, among other seminal events-and the sight of Earth from space offered inspiration and motivation. 'Earthrise,' 'Blue Marble' and 'Pale Blue Dot'

View of earth from space