An astronaut took this photo of Earth while looking at NASA’s next target for human exploration: a return to the moon. As NASA prepares for future Artemis missions to the Moon’s South Pole, the agency and its partners are also celebrating the 20th anniversary of continued human presence on the International Space Station (ISS).
This photo represents another achievement in those programs, as it was taken from the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle after it was disconnected from the ISS. It was the last leg of the SpaceX Demo-2 mission, the first manned space flight from US soil since 2011. The crew looked out over Eastern Kazakhstan on their return flight home after two months on the station.
This photo is just one of more than four million astronauts have taken of Earth since the beginning of NASA’s manned space flight programs. Astronauts will continue to photograph our planet, whether from low Earth orbit or, as the Apollo astronauts once did, from the moon. These snapshots in time 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 about astronaut photography in the three-part section Depicting the Earth video series: part 1 Astronaut photography in pictures; part 2 Window on the World; and part 3 Behind the Scenes.
Astronaut photo ISS063-E-68417 was acquired on August 2, 2020 with a Nikon D5 digital camera with a 14 millimeter 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 Expedition 63 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program is supporting the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts create images of the Earth that are of the greatest value to scientists and the public and make those images available for free on the Internet. Additional images created by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed on the NASA / JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by Andrea Meado, Jacobs / JETS contract with NASA-JSC.