Earth Seen from Afar
July 23, 2013
The people waving at Saturn knew they would be too far away to be seen, but that didn’t stop tens of thousands of Earthlings from posing for a rare portrait of our home planet and Saturn taken by the Cassini space probe. In the photograph–a mosaic of images released yesterday–Earth appears as a pale blue dot hanging in the darkness of space between several of Saturn’s outer rings. NASA planned the “Wave at Saturn” event to coincide with a rare opportunity for Cassini to photograph Saturn and its entire ring system in the same frame as it was backlit by the sun on July 19. Scientists hope the new photographs will reveal additional details about Saturn’s thinner rings and allow them to study how the rings have changed since 2006, the last time Cassini was able to capture all of the Saturn system at once. The new images, taken 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) from Earth, also show the moon as a bright white dot.
Earth appears as a pale blue dot in an image of Saturn and its glorious rings taken by the Cassini space probe. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)
The 2006 images and the new Cassini photos mark only the second and third times, respectively, that Earth has been photographed from the outer solar system. The first image was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990, from about 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away. NASA engineers ordered the spacecraft to take the photograph at the request of American astronomer Carl Sagan.
Additional World Book articles:
- Close Encounters with Saturn (a special report)
- Exploring the Suburban Solar System (a special report)
