my passport photo |
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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
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.
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