William Anders, the former US astronaut who took the historic \u201cEarthrise\u201d photo from space over 55 years ago, died in a plane crash on Friday at the age of 90, his family said. Anders had been piloting a small plane which crashed off the coast of Washington state on Friday morning, his son told US media. Anders was alone in the plane. His body was later recovered by a dive team, The Seattle Times reported, quoting a Coast Guard spokesperson. A member of the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, Anders became one of the first humans to orbit the Moon, along with fellow Americans Frank Borman and James Lovell. The crew circled the Moon 10 times without landing, before successfully returning to Earth on Dec 27, 1968. On one of the lunar orbits, Anders captured a photo of the bright blue Earth against the vast darkness of space, with the Moon\u2019s cratered surface in the foreground. \u201cWe\u2019d been going backwards and upside down, didn\u2019t really see the Earth or the Sun, and when we rolled around and came around and saw the first Earthrise,\u201d he said in a 1997 Nasa oral history interview. \u201c(T)hat certainly was, by far, the most impressive thing. To see this very delicate, colorful orb which to me looked like a Christmas tree ornament coming up over this very stark, ugly lunar landscape.\u201d The \u201cEarthrise\u201d photo is frequently listed in roundups of key historical images, and was included in Life Magazine\u2019s book \u201c100 Photographs that Changed The World.\u201d An original version of the photo sold at a Copenhagen auction in 2022 for 11,800 euros. \u201cIn 1968, during Apollo 8, Bill Anders offered to humanity among the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give,\u201d Nasa chief Bill Nelson wrote on social media platform X. \u201cHe traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves. He embodied the lessons and the purpose of exploration. We will miss him,\u201d Nelson added. The San Juan County Sheriff\u2019s Office in Washington state said in a statement that local authorities received a report around noon on Friday that \u201can older model plane was flying from north to south then went into the water and sunk.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
William Anders, the former US astronaut who took the historic \u201cEarthrise\u201d photo from space over 55 years ago, died in a plane crash on Friday…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17895,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}