‘Tiny Earth’ captured by Nasa’s Cassini
24 July 2013 12:00 AM GMT
Nasa has released colour and black-and-white images of Earth and the Moon, as bright beacons, taken from two interplanetary spacecraft millions of miles away in space.
Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft captured the colour images of Earth and the Moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 1.5 billion kilometres away, Nasa said.
Messenger, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 98 million kilometres as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of the planet.
In the Cassini images Earth and the Moon appear as mere dots — Earth a pale blue and the Moon a stark white, visible between Saturn’s rings. It was the first time Cassini’s highest-resolution camera captured Earth and its Moon as two distinct objects, the US space agency said.
Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft captured the colour images of Earth and the Moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 1.5 billion kilometres away, Nasa said.
Messenger, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 98 million kilometres as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of the planet.
In the Cassini images Earth and the Moon appear as mere dots — Earth a pale blue and the Moon a stark white, visible between Saturn’s rings. It was the first time Cassini’s highest-resolution camera captured Earth and its Moon as two distinct objects, the US space agency said.
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