Wow! Mars Probe Snaps Stunning Photo of Earth and Moon
- by Carmen Reese
- in Science
- — Jan 8, 2017
During a recent calibration exercise, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a remarkable view of Earth and its moon from a distance of 127 million miles (205 million kilometers).
The breathtaking view was taken on November 20, 2016 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The 2007 image of Earth and the moon taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
MRO captured Earth and Moon differently and scientists at the United States space agency later processed and stitched the images to make one composite picture that shows both - the moon and Earth. "The Moon is much darker than Earth and would barely show up at all if shown at the same brightness scale as Earth". The combined view shows the correct positions and sizes of the two celestial bodies relative to each other.
There have certainly been better pictures taken of Earth, but few rival the perspective offered by a spacecraft circling a neighbor planet.
NASA has released an image of Earth and its Moon as seen from Mars.
The US space agency said South-East Asia also appeared as a reddish area, at the top of Earth, while Antarctica was the "bright blob" at the lower-left.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is on the mission to study Mars.
The newly released image is sharp enough to reveal continent-size details on Earth; indeed, the reddish-brown feature in the middle of the planet is Australia, NASA officials said. The lushly green region appears red because this is a false color image. The other bright spots are clouds. The people working on HiRISE say this image required a fair amount of processing to make such a nice-looking picture.
The picture we see of the Earth and our moon staring back at us is eerily reminiscent of the famous "pale blue dot" image of Earth that was captured by the Voyager 1 probe in 1990 and showed us what Earth looked like from 3.7 billion miles away.
