53 a
Burma’s west coast (top), west of Rangoon and Irrawaddy River are featured in this photograph taken by Gordon Cooper with the NASA-modified Hasselblad 500C camera and its 80mm lens, and GAF anscochrome reversal film.
Prior to the introduction of the Hasselblad, NASA lacked a defined photography program. It was not until Walter Schirra, a known camera enthusiast, sought a precision instrument to accompany him on his MA-8 mission that NASA’s photographic identity began to take shape. Schirra’s experiments on Mercury-Atlas 8 paved the way for Gordon Cooper’s use of the same NASA-modified Hasselblad camera in space. His longer flight (22 orbits) allowed him to carefully frame his photographs.
His film was the first by an astronaut to be analyzed and described frame by frame by NASA, in effect launching the agency’s photographic technology department in Houston.
“I think I could have taken better pictures, but I was too busy doing other things. And Gordo (Cooper), up there for over a day, got some absolutely gorgeous pictures with the Hasselblad he flew,” said Walter Schirra (Schirra’s JSC Oral history).
“I was the first pilot to go off stabilization systems and go where I wanted,” stated Cooper, “so I made lots of pictures” (Schick and Van Haaften, p. 28).
53 b
Photograph taken of the eastern Himalayas, Tibet, China, India and Burma from the Mercury-Atlas 9 capsule by Gordon Cooper during his 22-orbit spaceflight.
“I could particularly see a lot of houses and yards, fields and roads and streams and lakes in the Himalaya areas, in the high mountain areas. I could see a lot of snow on the ground in the upper portions of the mountains and a lot of the lakes frozen over even down in the lower sections -- a lot of the windblown, mandy, high plateau areas of the Himalayas,” related Gordon Cooper (Pilot’s Flight Report).
From the mission transcript during orbit 8:
011:49 54 Cooper: All right on number 2 (photograph), I’ve just taken (a picture, number 3) over India. And I’m Just coming in over China very shortly. This is on the general purpose film in the Hasselblad.
011:51:21 Cooper: Photo three with the general purpose film. Here come the Himalayas. Number 4 (photograph) of the Himalayas. First three at 1/250, f/ll. These are two .... That last one was 1/250 f/16.
53 c
“On Mercury, we had big debates about taking some colored pencils, true artist’s pencils, along with us to try to duplicate precisely the colors in space.”
Gordon Cooper (Schick and Van Haaften, p.31)
53 d
The Earth horizon looking east over Pakistan and Iran, with Pakistan in the foreground and Iran in the background. The coast of the Arabian Sea is to the left.
Cooper recalled a NASA memo stating that: “‘If an astronaut desires, he may carry a camera.’ That’s the importance they gave to photography... It was great to be able to bring home some of those images to people who couldn’t be up there in orbit and see those kind of things. I think NASA finally swung around to realizing the importance of photography; even the diehards finally came around, admitting it had about the greatest impact of anything going” (Schick and Van Haaften, pp. 26-30).
From the mission transcript during orbit 9:
013:23:30 Cooper: Now we’re in the next series of 12. Over · . . Africa. The first series (of photographs) were started over Africa, end across on orbit 9, on across Arabia, through India, and that last series of 3 or 4 pictures were made right over the Himalayas, and in the India, India - China area.