my passport photo

by Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros

May 2, 2002 • Current weblog

My space mistake: For Earth Day, April 22, I wanted to publish a photo of Earth right now.

Not the first television image of earth from space shot by Tiros I on April 1, 1960; not the Christmas, 1968 "Earthrise" photo by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders that graced The Whole Earth Catalog and "saved" 1968, nor the famous 1972 version by the Apollo XVII crew. It wasn't easy, but I thought I'd found one on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site when I saw the date Jan. 31, 1999 leading the page, and hastily linked to it. This date turned out to be the date NASA made this the image of the day, and several readers wrote to tell me that this was indeed the Apollo XVII crew's shot of Dec. 7, 1972. (below right)


NASA photo
Earth Day
When I was small, no photos like this existed; humans had never gotten far enough off the earth to photograph the whole planet. The Apollo 17 crew shot this photo on December 7, 1972.
Larger image

I kept looking for a current one, and found that it doesn't exist. It was supposed to exist, but it doesn't. And why it doesn't exist involves Al Gore, layoffs at Kennedy Space Center and the 2000 election.

The next generation of whole-earth photos were to have come from Triana, a satellite that would photograph a full-color, continuous view of the entire sunlit face of the rotating Earth every 15 minutes for display on the Web, but it's sitting in storage in an aluminum box in the corner of Building 7 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Here's a simulation of what the camera is to send back to the Internet from a million miles away, a distance called L1 orbit. "A spacecraft at the Earth-Sun L1 point, like Triana, will experience a gravitational attraction from the sun that is the same strength as that felt at Earth. Since the strength of the attraction determines the orbital period, Triana will orbit the sun at the same rate as the Earth, one year."

In March, 1998, then vice-president Al Gore proposed "that NASA scientists and engineers design, build and operate a satellite that will make available a live image of earth 24 hours a day on the Internet." The Washington Post reported on March 13 of that year that "Gore almost literally dreamed up the idea in his sleep about a month ago, waking at 3 a.m. one night, according to a White House official." According to the Post, Gore had the Apollo XVII shot at right on the wall of his White House office.

Triana was named after Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on the Pinta who first sighted land on Columbus's first voyage in 1492, but it was quickly dubbed Goresat or Gore-cam by wags.

The idea (and the cost) grew as scientific projects were added to Triana's mission, among them a study of global warming by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.

With some Republicans dismissing Triana as a $75 million screensaver, the House Science Committee killed the project on May 13, 1999, with a 21-18 party line vote on an amendment proposed by Rep. Dave Weldon, (R-Fla.) in retaliation for job cuts at Kennedy Space Center in his congressional district. (N.Y. Times: Politics Keep an Earth-Viewing Satellite Earthbound; Orlando Sentinel: Politics puts $100 million satellite on ice)

House Majority Leader Dick Armey said, "This idea supposedly came from a dream. Well, I once dreamed I caught a 10-foot bass. But I didn't call up the Fish and Wildlife service and ask them to spend $30 million to make sure it happened."

The bill directed NASA to suspend all development work on Triana until the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) completed a thorough evaluation of Triana's true scientific merit and value. If Triana received an unfavorable review from NAS the program would be terminated.

A National Academies of Science Task Group on the Review of Scientific Aspects led by James Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, agreed to evaluate the mission's objectives and to review Triana's contributions to the nation's science priorities for climate and environmental studies. The report, issued in March, 2000, concluded that Triana could make contributions to Earth and solar science at a relatively reasonable cost. (N.Y. Times: Science Panel Supports Gore Satellite Plan)

The animation at right is the Triana project site's substitute for the live images expected someday from the Scripps Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera.

In November, 2001, Congress earmarked $1 million of the $14.8 billion for NASA in Bush's 2002 budget for Triana's science team. Triana is ready to fly.

A NASA page on the Triana project now projects a launch in 2004. In February of this year, Space News (subscription required) reported that NASA was considering foreign options for launching the satellite: "One proposal would launch Triana as a secondary payload on an Ariane 5; such a launch would be paid by a European national space agency in exchange in a scientific role on the mission. A second possibility is to launch it on a Ukrainian Tsiklon launch vehicle, arranged by an unnamed company trying to market the Tsiklon commercially."

So for Earth Day 2004 (2005? 2006?), we all might be able to see on the Web a live photo of Earth right now.