Image: ESA ©2009 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
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In 1990 the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1, careening across the solar system on its way to becoming the most distant human-made object in space, took a glimpse back at the planet it had left 13 years earlier. Six billion kilometers away, Earth was barely distinguishable against the backdrop of space—a "pale blue dot," as astronomer Carl Sagan would famously dub it.
Earlier this month another interplanetary explorer caught a striking glimpse of Earth, this one captured as the spacecraft, a European probe called Rosetta, approached our planet from deep space. In a third and final flyby of Earth, Rosetta tapped the planet's gravity to adjust its own trajectory for a planned encounter with a comet in 2014. As the probe drew nearer to its home planet, just a sliver of Earth was visible, but the flyby nonetheless revealed striking detail—a swirl of clouds above Antarctica is discernible, as is highly reflective ice near the South Pole.
For decades, missions to the moon and beyond have revealed Earth in brand-new visual contexts, as a pale blue dot or a richly textured marble of many colors.
Here are 10 of the most unique views of our home planet as captured from space.
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10 Comments
Add CommentMany thanks for those spectacular pictures. It tends to put ones life on Earth in perspective relative to the vastness of the visable universe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat perspective of our little spot that has produced spectacular results from the most incredibly incomprehensible sequence of events and serendipity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany thanks for a perspective of our tiny dot and the incredible significance of it providing this stuff from something so insignificant looking!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn 1969, I was watching the Lunar Landing with more than 50,000 Boy Scouts in Couer'dlane, Idaho at the National Jamboree. Under the stars surrounded by a magnificent forest, we were amazed and stared in wonderment at the future that was becoming apparent. Amazing for us all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA wonderful place. Let's not mess it up!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeterT
Why why can't we see any stars what so ever in these photos weird sucks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAardin, this phenomenon has been repeatedly explained
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOops, signing in enters you reply even though I wasn't done.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo put it simply, the stars are too dim in relation to the object that you are looking at. The response of the film is also a factor in this as well. In order to see the stars, it would require an exposure as to make the central point of the photograph (the earth) nothing but a washed out white blur.
If the photos were adjusted so you could see the stars... you would not be able to see anything but burnout on the objects shown.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Pale Blue Dot in the ray of sunlight: The ray, according to the location from the camera's position when the image was taken, has to be like a wave from the Sun. That means as there are three rays seen, there must be more rays all the way back to the ball of fire from which the rays originated. The rays would also extend out to the equatorial area of the heliosphere, and be striking that area exactly where the bright circle has been quite recently discovered.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow could they have the energy to excite the heliosphere's equatorial area's captured positive energied proton gas from the solar wind's 80% content?
That would be as the circles of sunlight are not circles, but are electromagnetic field lines (EM-FL), of which there are 16. Each of those EM-FL is an induced energy from the upper surface of each of the equatorial dynamos in the convection zone. Those 16 dynamos had been called - internal weather big fronts at the equator, while investigators call them equatorial big cells. - Sacha Brun, of France, as reported in arxiv.org, had been looking at small upper latitude tapered cells, which are merely a portion of one north and to the left EM-FL from its dynamo to the polar circle as it lines up for its exit to the corona as a loop to return to the opposed face of the dynamo.
So, those waves of sunlight are spiraled EM-FL whose energy comes from the 16 dynamos, and which receive an induced current through the tachocline and from each of the sixteen magnetic toroids in the radiative zone where at each fusion reaction takes place.
The reason for there not being much visibility to the EM-FL is because being an induced energy from a rotating disk of a grouping of electrons, in a dynamo, and as the 4 groupings in each dynamo rotate so that their each opposed pair of EM-FL contact the induction system’s unattached conductor to the heliosphere on an on/off situation and are therefore an AC current, which does not exhibit as large a magnetic surround as does a DC conductor.
The electrics of that situation are listed in any EM instruction manual as the induction principle. That fact of the dynamo is listed under the properties of ionized plasma. The spiraled arms from each dynamo are listed as galaxy-like arms in a small novel: ISBN 978-0-9784457-1-3.
There is another energy from the toroids fusion reaction zones, which is the reason that the induced energy spiraled solar plane arms arc at the heliosphere's equatorial area, but that clarity takes more room than is available in this little comment section.
The Ancient One: Eddie R.