Photograph of Earth below Saturn’s rings taken by the Cassini spacecraft.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)
Most all of us have seen photographs in which Earth looks like a big, blue marble, but what about a tiny, blue one?
That’s basically what you’ll see in new, stunning images NASA released on Monday.
Taken with cameras from two interplanetary spacecrafts that are located near Saturn and Mercury, the images show what Earth looks like from hundreds of millions of miles away.
One color photograph taken from the Cassini spacecraft on July 19 shows the beige rings of Saturn hovering above a tiny, bluish dot, which is Earth. In this image, Earth is nearly 900 million miles away.
“We can’t 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 project scientist Linda Spilker said in a statement. “Cassini’s picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space and also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to study Saturn and take a look-back photo of Earth.”
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