What's in the photo? A massive plume of smoke blowing from Manhattan in the wake of 9/11
When was it taken? Sept. 11, 2001
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, members of the terrorist group al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger airliners and crashed two of them into the twin towers — a pair of 110-story skyscrapers at the heart of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The impact of these collisions, which occurred roughly 17 minutes apart, eventually caused both buildings to collapse.
NASA astronaut and ISS commander Frank Culbertson — the only American not on Earth at the time of the attacks — passed over New York City shortly after being told about what was happening back home. He photographed the thick plume of smoke blowing away from Manhattan, at an altitude of roughly 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth's surface.
NASA astronaut and ISS commander Frank Culbertson captured the aftermath of 9/11 from space. This photo, taken Sept. 17, 2001, shows him holding his cameras in zero gravity. (Image credit: NASA)
Culbertson wrote several letters in the days following the attacks, sharing his unique perspective of the events. "It's horrible to see smoke pouring from wounds in your own country from such a fantastic vantage point," Culbertson wrote on Sept. 13. "The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche."
Additional imagery — captured by the Landsat 7 satellite on Sept. 12, 2001 — shows that smoke continued to pour from Ground Zero for at least 24 hours. (Image credit: USGS/Landsat 7)
In 2017, Culbertson revealed that there was another striking thing he and the rest of his crew noticed in the wake of the attacks, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. "One of the most startling effects was that within about two orbits, all of the contrails that are normally crisscrossing the United States had disappeared because they had grounded all the airplanes," he said.
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