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Earth imaged from the outer Solar System by Cassini orbiter mission
1 August 2013
Cassini mission’s project scientist, Linda Spilker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a news release, “Cassini’s picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space, and also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizen’s of this tiny planet to send robotic spacecraft so far away from home to study Saturn and take a look-back photo of Earth.” The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 753,000 miles (1.212 million kilometres) from Saturn, and approximately 898.414 million miles (1.445858 billion kilometres) from Earth.
“Messenger’s black-and-white pictures were taken from a vantage point 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) away from Earth. Mercury itself doesn’t appear in the imagery, because the glare from the planet would have washed out the specks of light representing our cosmic locale. The size of those specks in a typical Messenger image would be less than a pixel wide, but they appear artificially large here because of overexposure. "’That images of our planet have been acquired on a single day from two distant solar system outposts reminds us of this nation’s stunning technical accomplishments in planetary exploration,’ Sean Solomon, an astronomer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who serves as the Messenger mission’s principal investigator, said in Monday’s news release. ‘And because Mercury and Saturn are such different outcomes of planetary formation and evolution, these two images also highlight what is special about Earth.’” Emily Lakdawalla’s blog from The Planetary Society posted this photo montage:
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