After several attempts, astronaut Mark T. Vande Hei aboard the International Space Station (ISS) successfully captured an image of Mount Everest from space.
Astronaut Vande Hei captures Mount Everest while flying 400km above the Earth. (Photo: Mark T. Vande Hei)
Vande Hei shared the photo of Mount Everest on Twitter on December 1 and challenged his followers to locate the highest mountain on Earth within the image. Some users reported that they were able to spot Everest, which stands over 8,000 meters above sea level, in the photograph taken while the astronaut was nearly 400 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.
User Steve Rice mentioned that he could see Mount Everest in the image with the help of Google Maps. Many other accounts, however, were unable to identify the mountain in the Himalayas that occupies 75% of Nepal’s area, but still congratulated Vande Hei.
This is not the first time an astronaut on the ISS has photographed Mount Everest. In March 2002, astronaut Daniel Bursch, a member of Expedition 4, also shared an image of the mountain. In that photograph, the morning sunlight illuminated the eastern face of Everest’s Kangshung. Recently, Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Ryazansky captured images of Mount Everest in 3D.
In addition to Mount Everest, many other natural landscapes on Earth can also be observed from space. Stretching over 2,253 kilometers, the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia, has appeared in images taken by the European Space Agency’s Envisat environmental satellite. Launched in March 2002, Envisat orbits the Earth at a higher altitude than the ISS (about 782 kilometers). The Amazon River is also a frequently photographed landscape from space. This river, nearly 6,437 kilometers long, flows through six South American countries before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean along Brazil’s northeastern coast.
