After traveling almost 900 million miles through outer space last Friday, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has beamed back ravishing closeup pictures of Saturn with Earth in the backgound as a "pale blue dot."
The robotic spacecraft traveled across the universe to capture a series of awe-inspiring images of Earth and Saturn's rings on July 19, 2013. A mosaic of all the images will be released in six weeks or so showing Earth, Saturn and its complete ring system.
A zoomed-in view from Cassini's narrow-angle camera shows our home planet and its moon as small points of light in the blackness of space, an image intended to spark wonder "in a way we only rarely get to see, from the most distant robotic outpost we have ever established around another planet," said Carolyn Porco, the mastermind behind the Cassini images and leader of the spacecraft imaging team at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, reports CBS News.
The photo shoot marked the first time that people were told in advance that Earth would be the subject of a portrait from space. To mark the occasion, NASA encouraged people to step outside to wave at Saturn when the images were snapped Friday afternoon. As a result, more than 20,000 people waved at Cassini.
"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," Linda Spilker, a Cassini scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., said in a written statement, according to the Huffington Post.
"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," added Spilker.
This is only the third time that Earth has been imaged from the outer reaches of the solar system. The first such image was the famous "pale blue dot" photograph taken 23 years ago by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft when it traveled 4 billion miles in space. The second was an image captured by Cassini in 2006.