45 Years On

It is a season of space accomplishments and space anniversaries. The 45th anniversary of man landing on the moon was in June 2014, while a bare five months later - that is, today, the day this is being written, November 12 -  the European Space Agency has landed a craft on a comet.

But what is arguably the most significant event of the Space Age, the event that changed everything, is only tangentially about space. It is a photograph taken from Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968:

This image turned out to be a Christmas present to all humanity. A once-in-a-lifetime love affair was launched, between us and this planet. And that's what inspired our This Planet episode called I Still Love Her.

To this day, you could say nothing we've done in space has had a fraction of the value, economic and spiritual, as our ability to gaze at the Earth. So it was appropriate for NASA to memorialize the moment with this little video that uses the audio recordings of that mission, melded with a re-creation of what the astronauts saw.

A lot has happened since 1968 --  look at these satellite images that show our highly-refined ability to measure the impact of humans on this planet, including the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere:

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, launched in July 2014, studies carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. The mission will provide a more complete, global picture of the human and natural sources of CO2 as well as "carbon sinks," the places where CO2 is pulled out of the atmosphere and stored (such as in plants and the ocean).

Earth observation has turned out to be a very profitable enterprise, creating and then fulfilling a huge demand to quantify what's going on down below. That's why commercial enterprises like Skybox are getting snapped up by companies like Google...click on this remarkable image to learn more:

But for those of us more interested in love than commerce or science, it is her sheer beauty that matters. And just as Mona Lisa had her Leonardo, the Planet Earth has a great portraiturist to immortalize her. It's called Globaïa, and you can enjoy what they do here:

Produced by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and Globaia and funded by the UN Foundation. The data visualization summarizes several of the most significant statements in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) recent Fifth Assessment Report.

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