



For more than 40 years, missions throughout the solar system have sent back stunning images of our home planet
By John Matson | November 27, 2009 | 10
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]
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. Rosetta's camera snapped this image of Earth from more than 600,000 kilometers away during its fourth and final planetary flyby in November. The sliver of Earth lit by the sun shows clouds over Antarctica, visible at the bottom of the photograph. [Less] [Link to this slide]
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]
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. Forty-two years after this image was beamed back to Earth, NASA released a much higher-resolution version reprocessed from the original analog data tapes. [Less] [Link to this slide]
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]
The Cassini spacecraft, currently exploring the Saturnian system, caught a glimpse of Earth in 2006 at a distance of about 1.5 billion kilometers. The planet is visible as a bright dot above and to the left of Saturn's main rings. (In the detail above left, Earth's moon is just visible as a hazy mass to the planet's left.) Ordinarily the sun's glare would be too bright for Cassini to look back at its home world, but the spacecraft took advantage of a position in which Saturn stood between the probe and the sun to sneak a peek at Earth. [Less] [Link to this slide]
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]
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. The portrait of the Earth-moon system is a composite of visible and near-infrared images. Galileo was about 6.2 million kilometers from Earth when the image above was captured; the probe was drawing away from Earth for the final time on its way to Jupiter. [Less] [Link to this slide]
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]
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. Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, are still at work on Mars, although Spirit is currently stuck in a patch of soft soil from which it may never escape. [Less] [Link to this slide]
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]
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. The unmanned mission ended prematurely in August of this year when controllers lost contact with the spacecraft, but not before Chandrayaan 1 had accomplished many of its scientific goals and provided a few surprises. In September a group of scientists announced that the spacecraft's Moon Mineralogy Mapper had detected low levels of water across the lunar surface. In the image above, taken on July 22 of this year, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper was trained on an illuminated Earth just over the lunar horizon. [Less] [Link to this slide]
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]
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. "Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel, hardly distinguishable from the many other points of light Voyager could see, nearby planets and far-off suns," Sagan recalled in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot. "But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having." In 1990 he got his wish: Voyager 1 turned to see the lonely pixel (0.12 pixel, actually), photographing Earth from six billion kilometers away. The planet is visible as a dot in the rightmost diagonal ray of light—Sagan attributes the rays to sunlight reflected off the body of the Voyager spacecraft. [Less] [Link to this slide]
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]
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. The photograph is a filtered composite—the clouds on Earth were so bright in the original data as to drown out the dimmer moon. [Less] [Link to this slide]
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]
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. MESSENGER made its third flyby of Mercury in September of this year and should be the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the small, dense planet in 2011. [Less] [Link to this slide]
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]
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. This image, taken during the Apollo 11 mission, shows what Armstrong and Aldrin's home planet, some 400,000 kilometers away, must have looked like. [Less] [Link to this slide]
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Stern Steps Down as NASA Science Chief After Mars Budget Dustup
The Year in Science: 1999
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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.