The View from Above: The Gemini Visual Acuity Experiments

NASA News reports on a space-age debate: could early astronauts really see cars and trains from orbit? In nineteen sixty-three, Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper claimed he spotted vehicles and smoke-belching trains from a hundred miles up, but vision experts and even some psychiatrists doubted him. So during the Gemini five and seven missions, NASA set up giant rectangles on the ground in Texas and Australia and had astronauts test their vision with a binocular-like device. The results showed that astronauts could indeed make out roads and ships with wakes, and that two weeks in space didn't harm their eyesight. That evidence helped push NASA and other agencies to develop Earth-observing satellites, leading to the Landsat program, which has monitored the planet for more than five decades.

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