Some rare photos of the earth seen from Saturn circulate the media – taken on 19 July 2013 by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft - showing ed Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth as a small dot in dark space. And there is another pic with the raw material of the photo taken at the same day, just showing the raw photo of the earth and the moon seen from 1,44 billion kilometers away. This is only the third time ever that Earth has been imaged from the outer solar system.
The imaging team writes: “The July 19 Earth-imaging event marked the first time Earthlings had advance notice that their portrait was being taken from interplanetary distances. It was the also the first time Cassini’s highest resolution camera captured the Earth and its moon as two distinct objects… We may not be able to see individual continents or people in this portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct summary of who we were on July 19 … Cassini’s picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space, but also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to be able to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to take a picture of Earth and study a distant world like Saturn…
Pictures of Earth from the outer solar system are rare because, from that distance, Earth is very close to the bright sun. Just as a human being can damage his or her retina by looking directly at the sun, a camera’s sensitive detectors can be damaged by looking directly at the sun. Cassini was able to take these images because the sun had moved behind the planet Saturn from the spacecraft’s point of view, blocking out most of the light.”
Enjoy the awe-inspiring perspective from out of the vastness of space.
You can see here more about where Cassini is just now.
The earth seen from below Saturn’s rings. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
The earth and moon seen from Saturn. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
