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SPIEGEL book »From Above«: How the world's first satellite photo was taken

2021-09-28T05:39:52.539Z


From the tools of the spies and the military, satellites have become the heart rate monitor of the earth. A SPIEGEL book shows 50 fascinating photos of our planet from space and tells the stories about them.


Enlarge image

False color image of the sea off the Mexican island of Holbox

Photo: Copernicus Sentnel Data / ESA / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The air at launch complex 17A shook that morning on August 7, 1959. From Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, a "Thor Able" rocket rises into the sky with a great roar.

After a few embarrassing setbacks early on in the program, the start must be a success.

The American "Explorer 6" satellite is on board.

Two years earlier, a beep from space startled the American space experts, no, actually the whole western world.

It came from the Soviet »Sputnik 1« satellite, which circled the world once every 96 minutes from October 4, 1957 and broadcast shortwave signals from space.

The device only sent out radio signals, but it showed the Americans how vulnerable they were to possible attacks from space - and how weak their own performance in the field of space travel had been up to this point in time.

Area About this expand text

You are reading a possibly shortened and slightly edited excerpt from the SPIEGEL book "From above - The most beautiful stories that satellite images tell about the earth and us humans", published by Jörg Römer and Christoph Seidler.

It contains more than 50 opulently designed double pages with photos from space: the best articles in the SPIEGEL.de column "The Satellite Image of the Week" with texts by SPIEGEL editors Julia Merlot, Susanne Götze and Julia Köppe as well as numerous articles exclusively for the book written texts like this one:

Area Mysterious Glimmer Unfold

Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

Once they were an exotic phenomenon, today they can be regularly admired in the sky on summer nights.

But glowing night clouds still hold many secrets.

A special satellite mission tries to fathom them.

From the vegetable soup to opening the god particle

Photo: ISS055-E-10916 / NASA Earth Observatory

Banks, watches - and a lot of diplomats: this is the classic way to imagine the Swiss metropolis of Geneva.

And there is definitely something to it.

The city's reputation also has to do with an event that happened around 420 years ago.

Area: Unfold the ship of the desert

Enlarge picturePhoto: Airbus

The Great Pyramid of Cheops in Cairo is one of the most impressive buildings known to man.

The career of a man who is revered in Egypt to this day once took off on its southern edge.

At the time, they might not have been aware that the Soviets would begin a whole new era.

Today, thousands of satellites from many nations are in orbits around our planet.

And new ones are added almost every week, and soon there will be tens of thousands.

Black and white photo from a height of 30,000 kilometers

With “Explorer 6” the Americans wanted to show what they could do.

The satellite would not only measure the earth's magnetic field, according to the plan, but also send the first images of our planet from orbit.

On August 14, 1959, one week after take-off, a small television camera was switched on on board.

It provided a picture of cloud formations over the Pacific.

Aesthetically, the black-and-white image is not very impressive from a height of around 30,000 kilometers.

The scientific value should also have been manageable.

A photo of the earth taken by a V2 rocket 13 years earlier had been much more detailed.

However, this did not reach Earth orbit, and so the image from "Explorer 6" was the first satellite photo in world history.

Then things made rapid progress: With »Tiros 1« in the spring of 1960, mankind received the first live television images from space.

Within two and a half months, the flying observatory also provided around 19,000 photos for weather forecasting.

For the first time it was possible to have complete cloud systems and storms in view.

This use of satellites may seem natural to us today.

At the time, it was a sensation: space technology had proven that it can also bring very practical benefits for the earth.

Pictures also helped the environmental movement

In addition, the photos from space amazed people, for example in May 1966 when a Soviet "Molnija-1" satellite took the first photo of the entire earth.

The first color photo came a year later from the US satellite »Dodge«.

In the USA, the activist Stewart Brand, who was at home both in the San Francisco hippie scene and in the tech community of Silicon Valley, printed a picture of the earth from space on the cover of his first "Whole Earth Catalog".

It was at the same time an influential counterculture magazine like a shopping catalog - and, as Steve Jobs later discovered, a kind of "Google in paperback form".

Photos of our homeland with its thin atmosphere, which is our protection against the hostility of space, also helped the emerging environmental movement to gain popularity.

Today we can admire daily updated images of our entire planet on the Internet. The high-resolution photos from the “Deep Space Climate Observatory”, or “DSCOVR” for short, are particularly fascinating. This US satellite, the project was launched by the then Vice President Al Gore at the end of the 1990s, is located 1.5 million kilometers away from us. It circles the sun synchronously with the earth. Particularly fascinating are the shots in which a light gray ball with dark gray spots slides through the picture from left to right: the moon.

In addition to meteorologists and geoscientists, there were already other interested parties in this technology in the early days of satellites: the military and secret services quickly recognized the benefits of flying eyes.

Unknown information about troop strength and movements of the opposing side could be obtained from space, new technical developments on the ground could be followed and even nuclear explosions could be detected.

In the Cold War, such knowledge could potentially save lives.

Films thrown to earth

And so the superpowers researched wherever they could.

The first images of the American spy satellites "Corona" - yes, they were really called that - or "Keyhole" were made on film, dropped in small containers towards the earth and caught there by plane.

This technology was used until the 1970s, and later the data was transmitted digitally.

The Soviets initially used large return capsules for their "Zenit" scouts, such as those used in the manned space program.

They too later opted for wireless transmission.

As early as 1963, an American "KH-7 Gambit" satellite obtained photos of the earth's surface, on which even objects one meter small could still be made out.

But you didn't just take pictures: satellites searched for missile launches in enemy territory, listened for radio signals, peeked with radar even at night and through thick cloud cover.

Today it is no longer the USA and Russia alone that use such reconnaissance satellites, also countries like France (“CSO”), Japan (“IGS”), China (“Yaogan Weixing”), Israel (“Ofeq”) and Germany (“Sar-Lupe” «, Is to be replaced in the near future by» SARah «) rely on information from space that is critical to safety.

How these satellites work in technical detail and what they can actually do is something the public rarely learns about.

Trump reveals capabilities of the US spy satellites

But sometimes there are moments when the world gets at least a glimpse of the capabilities of the spy satellites.

That was the case around the end of August 2019.

Not a whistleblower was responsible for this, but the then US President Donald Trump.

The Republican had tweeted a high-resolution photo of a launch facility of the "Imam Khomeini Spaceport" in the Iranian province of Semnan.

It showed the remains of a "Safir" rocket, which had apparently exploded before take-off.

Had it not been for the Commander-in-Chief, the highest military commanding officer, himself to have publicized the picture, the Americans would hardly have shared, let alone published, a picture of this quality and sharpness with their allies.

Trump's tweet showed the precision with which the US security authorities can photograph almost every point on earth.

In addition, with the help of the shadows cast on the image and information from amateur astronomers, it was possible to reconstruct that the picture was probably taken with the spy satellite »USA-224«, which was launched in January 2011.

The technical capabilities of the billion dollar device were not publicly known until then.

What is certain, however, is that the main mirror on board has a diameter of 2.4 meters - so it is just as large as that of the “Hubble” space telescope.

The only difference is that the spy satellites do not peek into the depths of space - but rather down to earth.

Satellite images for everyone

Images that a few years ago were only reserved for the military and secret service employees have long been available to all of us: Numerous commercial providers now operate earth observation satellites, with which photos with resolutions of well under one meter are possible.

There are now so many aircraft that providers such as Planet, Digital Globe or Airbus offer their customers coverage almost in real time.

For example, analysts can use the parking space occupancy in front of large shopping centers to look for signs of declining buying mood and thus a weaker economy.

Through the shadows cast by the floating lids in the most important oil stores, you can see their fill level - and thus the economic situation.

And we all use the image material in map services such as Google Maps.

These offers also use another satellite-based service, without which our modern life would hardly be conceivable: the navigation function, which almost every smartphone has these days. Precision navigation helps us when driving and cycling as well as when hiking in the mountains. It has also become indispensable in industry and agriculture. The best known is the American “Global Positioning System”, or GPS for short, but it has long since had company in space, from the European “Galileo”, the Russian “Glonass” and the Chinese “Beidou” system.

State money is needed to set up and maintain a navigation system, a lot of state money.

And another important European satellite project only exists because the EU Commission in Brussels and the European Space Agency Esa in Paris understood that, if necessary, infrastructure should be built with state money in the hope that the Use of the data then developed economic activity.

Planned scouts for greenhouse gases and earth temperature

We are talking about the Earth observation program "Copernicus" with its "Sentinel" satellites.

The fleet of these guardians from space is constantly growing.

It includes radar satellites that don't mind night and clouds, optical satellites that provide information on the condition of plants and soil moisture, scouts for the surface of the sea and the quality of the atmosphere.

In the coming years, further »Sentinels« are to follow, which will then be devoted to monitoring greenhouse gases and the earth's temperature, for example.

Satellites measure the earth's gravitational field, the size of the ozone hole over the poles, and the deforestation of the rainforests.

Global air travel is now being followed from space, as is the melting of the ice in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Unauthorized fishing can also be precisely identified with satellites.

Anyone who compares these observations in the vastness of the world's oceans with the data that AIS receivers also often deliver on satellites, the abbreviation for “Automatic Identification System”, can filter out all the boats that are deliberately concealing their identity.

It is definitely worth taking a closer look at them.

But then you have to do that on the ground, for example with boats from the fishery supervision.

Anyway, satellites can alert us to problems from space.

We have to solve them on earth.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-09-28

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