Slide Shows | Space

10 Views of Earth from the Moon, Mars and Beyond [Slide Show]

For more than 40 years, missions throughout the solar system have sent back stunning images of our home planet

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CRESCENT EARTH:
thumb: CRESCENT EARTH:

CRESCENT EARTH:

Rosetta, a European Space Agency mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, launched in 2004 on a 10-year voyage to its cometary rendezvous. Its route to the comet includes four planetary swing-bys—three of Earth and one of Mars—for gravitational trajectory assists....[More]

AT FIRST SIGHT:
thumb: AT FIRST SIGHT:

AT FIRST SIGHT:

NASA's Lunar Orbiter 1 took this photograph, the first of Earth as seen from the vicinity of the moon , in 1966. The five unmanned Lunar Orbiter missions mapped the vast majority of the moon's surface and scouted locations for the forthcoming Apollo missions....[More]

DWARFED BY A GIANT:
thumb: DWARFED BY A GIANT:

DWARFED BY A GIANT:

The Cassini spacecraft, currently exploring the Saturnian system, caught a glimpse of Earth in 2006 at a distance of about 1.5 billion kilometers....[More]

MAGNIFICO, GALILEO:
thumb: MAGNIFICO, GALILEO:

MAGNIFICO, GALILEO:

The Galileo spacecraft took this photograph of Earth and the moon in 1992, three years after its launch and just over a week after a near-Earth flyby....[More]

SPIRIT IN THE SKY:
thumb: SPIRIT IN THE SKY:

SPIRIT IN THE SKY:

One morning in 2004, just before sunrise on Mars, the Spirit rover caught sight of the planet where its human controllers live and work. According to NASA, this mosaic of images from Spirit's navigation camera is the first view of Earth, a white dot in the center of the panorama, from the surface of another planet....[More]

INDIA JOINS THE MOON CLUB:
thumb: INDIA JOINS THE MOON CLUB:

INDIA JOINS THE MOON CLUB:

The Indian Space Research Organization scored a major coup in 2008 with the launch and successful insertion into lunar orbit of Chandrayaan 1, the nation's first moon mission....[More]

PALE BLUE DOT:
thumb: PALE BLUE DOT:

PALE BLUE DOT:

As the Voyager 1 spacecraft roamed ever deeper into the solar system, astronomer Carl Sagan thought it would be worthwhile to have the NASA probe take a look back at Earth before the planet receded completely from view....[More]

SPYING ON THE NEIGHBORS:
thumb: SPYING ON THE NEIGHBORS:

SPYING ON THE NEIGHBORS:

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, perhaps best known for its high-resolution 2- and 3-D maps of the Red Planet's surface , looked instead to the sky to take this 2007 image of Earth and the moon....[More]

JUST PASSING THROUGH:
thumb: JUST PASSING THROUGH:

JUST PASSING THROUGH:

For sheer, high-detailed beauty, nothing beats an up-close view. NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, bound for Mercury, took this snapshot at a distance of 100,000 kilometers from Earth during a 2005 flyby of our planet....[More]

EARTHRISE:
thumb: EARTHRISE:

EARTHRISE:

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down on the moon in July 1969 , they became the first humans to view Earth from the surface of another celestial body....[More]

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  1. 1. engineer_az 01:12 PM 11/27/09

    Many thanks for those spectacular pictures. It tends to put ones life on Earth in perspective relative to the vastness of the visable universe.

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  2. 2. kilingtonskier 09:47 PM 11/27/09

    Great perspective of our little spot that has produced spectacular results from the most incredibly incomprehensible sequence of events and serendipity.

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  3. 3. kilingtonskier 09:51 PM 11/27/09

    Many thanks for a perspective of our tiny dot and the incredible significance of it providing this stuff from something so insignificant looking!

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  4. 4. smarkell 01:17 AM 11/28/09

    In 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.

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  5. 5. PeterT 05:45 PM 11/28/09

    A wonderful place. Let's not mess it up!!

    PeterT

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  6. 6. Aardin 11:35 AM 11/29/09

    Why why can't we see any stars what so ever in these photos weird sucks.

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  7. 7. LarianLeQuella 07:08 PM 11/29/09

    Aardin, this phenomenon has been repeatedly explained

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  8. 8. LarianLeQuella 07:10 PM 11/29/09

    Oops, signing in enters you reply even though I wasn't done.

    To 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.

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  9. 9. RWS-GR 07:14 PM 11/29/09

    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.

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  10. 10. eddierleram 10:48 AM 12/7/09

    The 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.
    How 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.

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