Earth and its moon seen as doted beacons from distant Space

Earth as bigger dot and the moon as the smaller

NASA has released pictures of the Earth and its moon taken by a distant spacecraft. Images taken, on July 19 show our planet and its moon as bright beacons from millions of miles away in space.

Colored images were captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away. MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury on the other hand, is said to have taken a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of the planet.

In the Cassini images Earth and the moon can be seen as mere dots. According to NASA this was the first time Cassini's highest-resolution camera captured Earth and its moon as two distinct objects. The latest pictures really show how colossal the distance between planets can be.

NASA invited the public to celebrate the event by finding Saturn in their part of the sky, waving at the ringed planet and sharing pictures over the Internet. Thousands around the world participated.

"We can't see individual continents or people in this portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct summary of who we were on July 19," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

"Cassini's picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space, and also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to study Saturn and take a look-back photo of Earth."

It is very rare to catch pictures of the earth from the outer solar system as from that distance, Earth appears very close to our sun and not easily discerned. This is also because a camera's sensitive detectors can be damaged by looking directly at the sun, just as a human being can damage his or her retina by doing the same. Cassini was able to take this image because the sun had momentarily moved behind Saturn from the spacecraft's point of view and most of the light was blocked.

"It thrills me to know that people all over the world took a break from their normal activities to go outside and celebrate the interplanetary salute between robot and maker that these images represent," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "The whole event underscores for me our 'coming of age' as planetary explorers."

Principal investigator Sean Solomon of Columbia University revered their efforts boasting 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". "And because Mercury and Saturn are such different outcomes of planetary formation and evolution, these two images also highlight what is special about Earth. There's no place like home."