Nasa Heritage Prints Wall Art

Nasa Heritage Prints — 105 museum-grade prints on the theme. Explorer 6's 14 August 1959 photograph was the first image of Earth taken from an orbiting satellite — a milestone that demonstrated orbital imaging feasibility nearly a year before TIROS 1 inaugurated operational weather monitoring from space. The mission operated inside William Pickering's Explorer program and James Van Allen's instrument tradition at Goddard, bridging Van Allen belt discovery and the coming Earth-observation era. Gemini 3 opened the two-man program that bridged Mercury's solo hops and Apollo's lunar voyages. Grissom's return to flight after Liberty Bell 7's sinking carried symbolic weight — naming the capsule Molly Brown ('unsinkable') was deliberate gallows humour. Compton GRO was the second of NASA's four Great Observatories — after Hubble and before Chandra, Spitzer, and the multi-wavelength program that transformed 1990s astrophysics. BATSE's burst catalog established that gamma-ray bursts were cosmological, not local solar-system phenomena, setting the stage for Swift and Fermi decades later.

Updated 13 Jun 2026