A robot camera aimed at the Moon turns and photographs Earth instead

Lunar Orbiter 1 had one job: photograph smooth stretches of the Moon so NASA could pick safe places to land astronauts. On August 23, 1966, while working through its imaging assignment from lunar orbit, the spacecraft turned its camera and captured the first two photographs of Earth ever taken from the vicinity of the Moon. It was a byproduct of a mapping mission, not the point of it. The image reached engineers on the ground days later, a small planet framed by black space…