{"id":410225,"date":"2026-04-25T13:01:29","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T13:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/410225\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T13:01:29","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T13:01:29","slug":"nasas-earthrise-image-changed-how-we-see-our-planet-can-the-artemis-moon-missions-do-the-same","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/410225\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s \u2018Earthrise\u2019 image changed how we see our planet. Can the Artemis moon missions do the same?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just 14 days ago, amid the mundanity of East Coast commutes and West Coast alarm clocks, NASA\u2019s Artemis II mission<\/a> gave humans across the nation and around the world a stunning new image of our planet.<\/p>\n

In it, a crescent of Earth\u2019s blue vitality hovers amid the blackness of space, above a high-definition brownish gray wasteland of lunar craters. It\u2019s an eerily familiar recreation of the iconic \u201cEarthrise\u201d photograph<\/a> from 1968\u2019s Apollo 8, a mission with a similar flight path to Artemis II that came amid a troubled moment for Earth that many also say feels familiar today<\/a>. The original \u201cEarthrise\u201d was just one of hundreds of thousands of photographs taken during the 11 crewed Apollo missions, but it has, over the decades, become laden with symbolism about humanity and our relationship with space and our planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s been fascinating about Artemis II is that we\u2019ve seen many of these overarching narratives about spaceflight return\u2014how space exploration helps us understand how we\u2019re connected<\/a>, how we share the planet, how beautiful but vulnerable our planet is,\u201d says Teasel Muir-Harmony, a space historian at the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s National Air and Space Museum.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/p>\n

Apollo 8\u2019s \u201cEarthrise\u201d image, captured in 1968.<\/p>\n

The Apollo Era<\/p>\n

On Apollo 8\u2019s launch day, human spaceflight was less than a decade old, and no one had seen the Earth from beyond orbit<\/a>. When the trio of astronauts zipped around the far side of the moon and saw their home planet sparkling above its barren surface\u2014even though they had known to expect the moment\u2014they were spellbound.<\/p>\n

It was a response repeated on each subsequent mission, says Catherine Newell, a historian of religion and science at the University of Miami, who has written a book about space exploration. \u201cAlmost every Apollo astronaut came back to Earth a fundamentally changed person,\u201d she says. \u201cIt really shook them to their core in a spiritual way to see Earth just kind of hovering there by itself in the void.\u201d<\/p>\n

A sense of that experience translated to the billions of humans back on Earth through the images astronauts captured of our planet, particularly \u201cEarthrise\u201d and Apollo 17\u2019s \u201cBlue Marble\u201d photograph (the first image captured by an astronaut that showed Earth\u2019s full disk suspended in space).<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The \u201cBlue Marble\u201d image, the first astronaut-captured full view of Earth\u2019s disk from space.<\/p>\n

Between these two missions and their iconic photographs was the first Earth Day, celebrated on April 22, 1970<\/a>. On that day, a loosely organized network of celebrations, protests and teach-ins tapped into decades of growing interest in land and wildlife conservation and concerns about pollution and overpopulation. At the time, environmental initiatives were popular across the political spectrum, says Keith Woodhouse, an environmental historian at Northwestern University. \u201cThere was more of a sense back then that environmentalism was a commonsense idea, because who would object to clean water, clean air, forests and pretty places?\u201d<\/p>\n

As the environmental movement developed, it adopted the images of Earth from space\u2014thanks in part to NASA\u2019s own efforts to communicate how the agency\u2019s Earth science research was related to phenomena such as the ozone hole<\/a> and climate change, says Neil Maher, an environmental historian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. \u201cBy collecting global scientific data and then combining it with these incredible images of Earth,\u201d he says, \u201cthey turned images from space into environmental symbols.\u201d By the 1990s the \u201cEarthrise\u201d and \u201cBlue Marble\u201d images were all over environmental demonstrations.<\/p>\n

The Artemis Era<\/p>\n

The Artemis II crew were the first humans to leave Earth\u2019s orbit since 1972. They followed Apollo\u2019s path but with a modern understanding of what their home planet faced.<\/p>\n

During the long trek back to Earth, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen reminded viewers that appreciating and tending Earth doesn\u2019t require the journey of a lifetime. \u201cThe perspective I launched with was that we live on a fragile planet in the void of space,\u201d he told a reporter during a news conference. \u201cWe know this from science. We\u2019re very fortunate to live on planet Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like their predecessors, the Artemis II astronauts were unable to look away from their home planet. \u201cWhat struck me wasn\u2019t necessarily just Earth,\u201d NASA astronaut Christina Koch\u2014who credits her career to the poster of \u201cEarthrise\u201d that hung on the wall of her childhood bedroom\u2014said after returning home. \u201cIt was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat, hanging undisturbed in the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Astronaut<\/p>\n

The morning after Koch and her crewmates flew around the moon, the White House released \u201cEarthset,\u201d the recreation of Apollo 8\u2019s iconic view. The new name reflected the mission\u2019s trajectory\u2014but it was also, perhaps, an accidentally apt metaphor, Maher says.<\/p>\n

Although the pollution that inspired the Apollo era to rally for the environment is largely under control<\/a>, decades of politicization have left humanity struggling to respond to the newer and more existential threat of climate change, Woodhouse says.<\/p>\n

Maher sees that represented in \u201cEarthset.\u201d \u201cIt perfectly captures this cultural moment where we\u2019re facing the most important global crisis in human history, which is climate change, and there are people out there who are ignoring this science and this catastrophe, and the Earth is imperiled because of that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He also worries that science at NASA is in dark times, noting that critics have complained about the limited scientific motivation for the Artemis program and that the agency\u2019s science division is facing a 50 percent funding cut<\/a> in the White House budget proposal for the second year in a row (although Congress is likely to keep funding more or less steady).<\/p>\n

In NASA\u2019s space science, Woodhouse sees the modern equivalent of the 19th-century experience of the \u201csublime\u201d that inspired the earliest environmentalists. \u201cIt\u2019s this combination of fear and awe often associated with mountains,\u201d he says\u2014but now that mountains have become mundane, spectacular images of space are one of the few sights that can conjure the feeling.<\/p>\n

\"At<\/p>\n

During the Artemis II lunar flyby, the astronauts experienced a nearly hour-long total eclipse, the first time humans have seen such an event from near the moon. \u201cNo matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us,\u201d NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman said during the eclipse. \u201cIt is absolutely spectacular, surreal.\u201d He might as well have called it sublime.<\/p>\n

Although it\u2019s too early to know whether the new Artemis photographs will continue the environmental legacy of their predecessors, they have already brought that experience of the sublime back to Earth for a new generation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve all seen \u2018Earthrise\u2019 and the \u2018Blue Marble\u2019 images a zillion times, so their power to really shake us out of the ruts of daily life is profoundly diminished,\u201d Woodhouse says. The new images, perhaps, still can. \u201cIt\u2019s hard not to think about the fragility of planet Earth when you see those photos.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just 14 days ago, amid the mundanity of East Coast commutes and West Coast alarm clocks, NASA\u2019s Artemis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":410226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":["post-410225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}