NASA reveals new images of the "pale blue dot" (Earth) seen ... - Público.pt

Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn, turned a few days ago its highest resolution camera in our direction and picked up color images of the Earth and Moon, announced on Tuesday the U.S. space agency NASA in a statement.

The probe is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency.

The photographs, which were taken at 1500 million kilometers away from us, are the first Cassini who can show our planet and its natural satellite as two separate objects, NASA explains.

images now published (the first of several that accompany this text) had to be enlarged five times, the brightness of both the Earth and the Moon increased – and the brightness of the Moon further increased relative to the Earth to the Moon be visible. The picture shows our “pale blue dot” and his single “companion” immersed in the vast darkness of space.

For its part, the Messenger spacecraft, designed and built by the Johns Hopkins University (USA) in orbit around Mercury, captured an image to black and white to 98 million kilometers away from us.

is the third time that the Earth appears in the view of the outer solar system. The first spacecraft to “look back”, the February 14, 1990, was NASA’s Voyager 1, which at the time stood at more than six billion kilometers from Earth, beyond Pluto, the way the rest of the universe. The idea of ??turning the cameras that probe the Earth was the famous American astronomer Carl Sagan – and gave rise to the mythical image that earned our planet nicknamed “pale blue dot”, also written by Sagan.