Skip to main content /SPACE
CNN.com /SPACE
CNN TV
EDITIONS


Space station crew keeping watch on Earth

The current space station crew: Mikhail Tyurin, left, Frank Culbertson, center, and Vladimir Dezhurov
The current space station crew: Mikhail Tyurin, left, Frank Culbertson, center, and Vladimir Dezhurov  


By Amanda Barnett
CNN

(CNN) -- Smile. You may be mugging for a high-flying photographer aboard international space station Alpha.

The new crew of Alpha, U.S. commander Frank Culbertson, Russian pilot Mikhail Tyurin, and flight engineer Vladimir Dezhurov, is continuing a project that started with the Mercury astronauts back in the 1960's -- the Crew Earth Observations experiment.

In other words, they're taking pictures -- lots of them.

"Astronauts have been looking at Earth ever since we put windows into spacecraft," said Kamlesh Lulla, chief scientist for Earth Observations at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

EXTRA INFORMATION
PHOTO GALLERY: Crew Observations of Earth  
 
RESOURCES
MESSAGE BOARD: Space Exploration  

Earth from Space: Astronauts' Views of the Home Planet  
 
EXTRA INFORMATION
Alpha commander Frank Culbertson gives CNN Space Correspondent Miles O'Brien a video tour of the space station Thursday morning at 9:17 a.m. EDT. E-mail your questions for the commander to Miles here  
 

John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, snapped a view of the planet during his three orbits in Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962.

Since then, thousands of pictures have been taken. The space shuttle crews have captured more than 250,000 images, according to the Johnson Space Center Imagery Services Web site.

And the space station offers a constant view of Earth. A high quality window was installed on the U.S.-built Destiny laboratory in February.

NASA has collected many of the pictures on a Web site called Earth From Space: Astronauts Views of the Home Planet.

The pictures include stunning views of the whole planet, including the famous Earthrise pictures taken by Apollo crews that orbited and landed on the moon.

Space shuttles and the space station orbit at about 220 miles, a great vantage point for documenting hurricanes, volcanoes and manmade destruction like the oil well fires set in Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War.

According to Lulla, the areas to be photographed are selected to give scientists insight into important Earth-related processes like receding lake levels.

image
Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, a member of the first space station crew, looked out the window on the U.S. Laboratory Destiny after it was installed on Alpha in February, 2001.  

For example, the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan has dropped from the fourth-largest to the eighth-largest inland body of water in the world because water has been diverted from the sea for irrigation. The sea is now two separate bodies of water, as seen in a picture taken during a space shuttle mission in August of 1997.

"Many of the astronauts who are trained to be pilots, once they see the Earth, they become very concerned about the health of our planet," said Lulla.

After reviewing thousands of pictures taken from space, Lulla himself remains optimistic.

"I'm not a doomsayer that will tell you the planet is going to collapse," he said. "The important thing to remember is that there are lots of signals the planet is sending us that we need to investigate."






RELATED STORIES:
RELATED SITES:
• Earth from Space
• NASA Human Spaceflight
• The Space Shuttle Clickable Map
• Oceanography from the Space Shuttle
• NASA Space Shuttle Virtual Tour
• Boeing: Space Shuttle Homepage

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window
External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.


 Search   

Back to the top