The story of how Nasa clicked the first colour picture of Earth

We have all seen hundreds of pictures of Earth, shining like a blue marble in the darkness of endless space. But that was not always the case. Scientists and astronomers initially relied on monochrome, black and white pictures. But all that changed in 1967.

58 years ago, NASA made history by capturing the world’s first full-colour photograph of Earth’s daylit side from space, using the newly launched ATS-3 weather satellite.

This pioneering image, taken from an altitude of about 35400 kilometres by the Multicolour Spin-Scan Cloudcover Camera, unveiled the “big blue world” in vivid detail for the first time.

Launched on November 5, 1967, the Applications Technology Satellite-3 (ATS-3) carried a technologically advanced camera system designed specifically to monitor global weather pattern