NASA astronaut Bill Anders, who snapped one of the most famous photographs taken in outer space, “The Earthrise,” has died in a plane crash at the age of 90.
Officials say a small aircraft he was flying crashed into the sea off Washington state.
Anders – who was a lunar module pilot on the Apollo 8 mission – took the iconic Earthrise photograph, one of the most memorable and inspirational images of Earth from space.
Taken on Christmas Eve during the 1968 mission, the first crewed space flight to leave Earth and reach the Moon, the picture shows the planet rising above the horizon from the barren lunar surface.
NASA astronaut says Earthrise contributed to the space program
Anders later described it as his most significant contribution to the space program.
The image is widely credited with motivating the global environmental movement and leading to the creation of Earth Day, an annual event to promote activism and awareness of caring for the planet.
Speaking of the moment, Anders said: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth.”
Anders also served as the backup pilot to the Apollo 11 mission, the name of the effort that led to the first Moon landing on July 24, 1969.
Following Anders’ retirement from the space program in 1969, the former astronaut largely worked in the aerospace industry for several decades. He also served as US Ambassador to Norway for a year in the 1970s.
But he is best remembered for the Apollo 8 mission and the iconic photograph he took from space.
“In 1968, during Apollo 8, Bill Anders offered to humanity among the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give. He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
In a previous interview, he described taking it after being given “a little bit of photography training”.
He said: “We were in lunar orbit, upside down and going backward so for the first several revolutions we did not see the Earth and then we twisted the spacecraft so it was going forward and suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw this color – it was shocking.
“So I just took a shot, moved it took a shot, moved it.”
Mark Kelly, a former astronaut who now serves as a US Senator for the state of Arizona, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that Anders “inspired me and generations of astronauts and explorers. My thoughts are with his family and friends”.
Related: Earthrise, the True Origins of the Photo of the Century
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