An astronaut took this photo of the earth as he looked at NASA’s next human exploration target: a return to the moon. As NASA prepares for future Artemis missions to the lunar south pole, the agency and its partners are also celebrating the 20th anniversary of continuous human presence in the International Space Station (ISS).
This photo represents another achievement in the applications, as it was taken from the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle after it was disconnected from the ISS. These were the final stages of the SpaceX Demo-2 mission, the first human spaceflight from American soil since 2011. The crew watched the station return to eastern Kazakhstan after two months at the station.
This photo is just one of more than four million astronauts taken from Earth since the beginning of NASA’s spaceflight crew. Astronauts will continue to photograph our planet, whether from a low-Earth orbit, or as the Apollo astronauts once did from the Moon. These screenshots uniquely document the Earth’s ever-changing surface.
Join NASA as we celebrate the new year and look forward to what the next 20 years of space exploration and Earth observation can bring.
Editor’s note – learn more about aerospace photography in the three sections On earth video series: part 1 Aerospace photography in focus; part 2 Window on the world; and part 3 Behind the scenes.
Astronaut photo ISS063-E-68417 was obtained on August 2, 2020 with a Nikon D5 digital camera with a 14mm lens and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the crew of Expedition 63. The image was cropped and enhanced to enhance contrast, and lens artifacts were removed. The International Space Station program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take photographs of the earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make the images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA / JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by Andrea Meado, Jacobs / JETS Contract at NASA-JSC.