Just curious to know which spacecraft took the very first full Earth globe view ?
Maybe one of the ATS satellites ? ( Application Technology Satellite )

There's been a previous discussion about this - the consensus was that the USAF DODGE vehicle and a Soviet satellite were the first!

See #14191

Bob Shaw

Bob,
I can't see the topic with that number ...
I did find something about a Navy Dodge Test satellite but that one was launched in July 1967, while the ATS satellites are 1966 ...
Do You have a link ?

Here are some early 'landmark' Earth photos:

http://www.donaldedavis.com/2003NEW/NEWSTUFF/DDEARTH.html

Note the Zond 7 image, which remarkably shows a full Aral Sea -- something which maybe no one now alive will ever see again...

Some details of DODGE (launched 1 July 1967):

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/dodge.htm

And of ATS-1 (launched 7 December 1966):

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/ATS.html
http://roland.lerc.nasa.gov/~dglover/sat/alltext.html

The second link includes a statement that ATS-1 carried a B&W camera, and the image below shows the Pacific Ocean, *not* the usual full-colour Atlantic view. There is also a statement to the effect that ATS-3 (launched on 5 November 1967) carried a colour camera.

So, it looks like the first 'full Earth' image was taken by the Soviet Cosmos in a Molniya orbit, then ATS-1 took the first good B&W image from GEO, then DODGE took a poor colour image from not-quite GEO, then ATS-3 took the first good colour image from GEO on 10 November 1967!

ATS-3 may still be alive, as may DODGE.

Bob Shaw

Boeing has some interesting tidbits, too:

http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/...76/ats/ats.html

Bob Shaw

For those who didn't know:

http://www.thewaterpage.com/aral.htm

19 meters, that's ~60 feet.

Good ol' Exploring Space with a Camera has a whole bunch of early Earth from space images, starting with the ATS-3 color image of November, 1967 here:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/contents.htm

That is really sad story about us...
Windswept Shores of the Aral Sea
The Shrinking Aral Sea
Retreating Aral Sea Coastlines
Aral Sea
Fires Near the Aral Sea
Dust over the Aral Sea
Caspian Sea
“Rebirth Island Joins the Mainland

Click to view attachment

One of the 1966 issues of National Geographic had an article on the photos from DODGE. They were hideously fuzzy, but they were full-disk -- and in color. The Soviet Molnyas got some fuzzy black-and-white photos of Earth from their elongated 12-hour orbits, but I don't know if any of them were full-disk. Lunar Orbiter 1, of course, got its famous black-and-white photo of the half-earth from lunar orbit in summer 1966 -- quite good, except for the scanning lines across it -- and Surveyor 3 got some extremely fuzzy full-disk color photos of Earth from the lunar surface in April 1967 (including some taken during a lunar eclipse).

The first decent-quality whole-Earth photos, however, definitely came back from ATS-1 in December 1966, and the first decent-quality color ones from ATS-3 the following November.

May 30, 1966 by a Soviet Weather satellite ?
Which satellite was that exactly ?

Not so much a weather satellite as a telecoms chappie in the USSR's unique Molniya orbit - these had a very high apogee over the northern hemisphere, and a low southern perigee. The idea was that the USSR, being a northern entity, got more bang for the, er, Rouble, that way. Molniya satellites could also carry cameras, which again gave good views of the bits of the world that interested the people who built the things. In common with most Soviet-era satellites the generic 'Cosmos' title was used for practically anything which reached orbit, while the name 'Molniya' itself was normally reserved specifically for the comsats. You did, however, get Cosmos vehicles in Molniya orbits, some of which were broken Molniyas which they didn't care to admit had failed.

I previously posted the DODGE images here, and Bruce found the Russian one - I'll try to find the darn things and post a working link!

Bob Shaw

AES ''MOLNIYA-1'' TRANSMITS THE EARTH'S IMAGE

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntr..._1966084822.pdf

Here are the National Geographic images:

Bob Shaw

And as Larry posted:

Bob Shaw

You know, that DODGE photo is a bit better than I remembered it being. (The lousy quality was largely due to the fact that DODGE was gravity-gradient stabilized and tended to wobble somewhat while its camera was taking three exposures through different filters to combine into a color view. Its entire purpose was to test gravity-gradient stabilization techniques, and its cameras were just to check its attitude alignment, explaining their low resolution.)

I've been seriously mixed up on my dates though -- I thought I remembered the DODGE photos being taken in summer 1966 instead of 1967, which would have put them before ATS-1's very sharp black-and-white ones from its geostationary post over the Pacific. (DODGE and ATS-3 were both hung over the Atlantic.)

My somewhat vague understanding is that the ATS 3 color capability was an experiment to evaluate the usefullness of color data in geostationary weather images. Apparently not much, as I don't think ANY geostationary platform has done natural-color (RGB) band images. Adding Near, middle, and thermal IR bands for vegetation chlorophyll observation, ice/water cloud discrimination, water vapor mapping, and cloud height estmiates from temperature turned out to be much more useful.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong on the lack of any natural color from Geostationary since ATS-3.

In this online NASA book:

Dreams, Hopes, and Realities: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the First Forty Years (NASA SP-4312, 1999) by Lane E. Wallace.

In Chapter 5, they have a *color* image of this photo of Earth taken by an
Aerobee sounding rocket in 1954:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4312/p132.jpg

A black and white version of it is shown in the famous 1968 NASA book
Exploring Space with a Camera here:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/p5.htm

I've seen that picture with the claim it was the first real space picture of the Earth.

One of the first Molniya satellites had a television camera on it, the same Seliger system used inside the Vostok cockpit. Probably a 400-line video image, but the picture seen in the PDF document is probably degraded badly by Xeroxing and PDF conversion. Molniya was a television and communications relay satellite, the camera was just an experiment. Here is a typcial Seliger image, still degraded by generation loss, but not as totally as the Molniya image:

Click to view attachment

The Meteor-1 satellites had a television camera, and the later Meteor satelites had a mechanical scanning camera (like on Landsat and a lot of other Earth resource satellites).

When was the first linear camera used from space, using the motion of a satellite to sweep out an image? Landsat and Meteor uses reciprocating mirrors or spinning prisms to scan the Earth with a photomultiplier. I first example I know of is the Luna-19 camera. But surely someone photographed the Earth like this before the Moon though!

Interesting - that image was stitched together by hand from 16mm movie frames, IIRC. I was unaware that it was colour film which was used - it's the B&W version which has made it into the history books (I suppose colour press reproduction just wasn't especially economic 50 years ago). AutoStitch would just eat that sequence of images up - if anyone could find the original film...

Bob Shaw