{"id":3581,"date":"2013-07-23T16:24:21","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T16:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=3581"},"modified":"2013-07-23T16:24:21","modified_gmt":"2013-07-23T16:24:21","slug":"cassini-captures-saturn-earth-messenger-captures-earth-and-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=3581","title":{"rendered":"Cassini captures Saturn & Earth, Messenger captures Earth and Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned last week<\/a> that the Cassini probe<\/a> at Saturn and the Messenger probe<\/a> at Mercury would each be taking a picture of earth. NASA has now released the wonderful images NASA Releases Images of Earth Taken by Distant Spacecraft – NASA<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Saturn's<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
The Day the Earth Smiled<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. It is only one footprint in a mosaic of 33 footprints covering the entire Saturn ring system (including Saturn itself).\u00a0 At each footprint, images were taken in different spectral filters for a total of 323 images: some were taken for scientific purposes and some to produce a natural color mosaic.\u00a0 This is the only wide-angle footprint that has the Earth-moon system in it. Continue…<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

PASADENA, Calif. — Color and black-and-white images of Earth taken by two NASA interplanetary spacecraft on July 19 show our planet and its moon as bright beacons from millions of miles away in space.<\/p>\n

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured the color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away. MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took 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.<\/p>\n

In the Cassini images Earth and the moon appear as mere dots — Earth a pale blue and the moon a stark white, visible between Saturn’s rings. It was the first time Cassini’s highest-resolution camera captured Earth and its moon as two distinct objects.<\/p>\n

It also marked the first time people on Earth had advance notice their planet’s portrait was being taken from interplanetary distances. NASA invited the public to celebrate by finding Saturn in their part of the sky, waving at the ringed planet and sharing pictures over the Internet. More than 20,000 people around the world participated.<\/p>\n

“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 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.”<\/p>\n

Pictures of Earth from the outer solar system are rare because from that distance, Earth appears very close to our sun. 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 temporarily moved behind Saturn from the spacecraft’s point of view and most of the light was blocked.<\/p>\n

A wide-angle image of Earth will become part of a multi-image picture, or mosaic, of Saturn’s rings, which scientists are assembling. This image is not expected to be available for several weeks because of the time-consuming challenges involved in blending images taken in changing geometry and at vastly different light levels, with faint and extraordinarily bright targets side by side.<\/p>\n

“It thrills me to no end 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.”<\/p>\n

In the MESSENGER image, Earth and the moon are less than a pixel, but appear very large because they are overexposed. Long exposures are required to capture as much light as possible from potentially dim objects. Consequently, bright objects in the field of view become saturated and appear artificially large.<\/p>\n

“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,” said MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. “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.”<\/p>\n

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., designed and built MESSENGER, a spacecraft developed under NASA’s Discovery Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the program for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL and APL manage their respective missions for NASA.\u00a0 The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.<\/p>\n

To view the Earth images. visit: http:\/\/go.nasa.gov\/1383AHq<\/strong><\/a> .<\/p>\n

More information about the picture and the Wave at Saturn campaign is available at: http:\/\/saturn.jpl.nasa.gov\/waveatsaturn<\/a><\/strong> .<\/p>\n

To view the MESSENGER images, visit: http:\/\/go.nasa.gov\/16Vnt5G<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0.<\/p>\n

\"EW1016558881B_montag_371x500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The pair of bright star-like features in the upper panel are not stars at all, but the Earth and Moon! MESSENGER was at a distance of 98 million kilometers (61 million miles) from Earth when this picture was taken. The computer-generated image in the lower left shows how the Earth appeared from Mercury at the time. Much of the Americas, all of Europe and Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia were visible.<\/em><\/p>\n

MESSENGER took this image as part of a campaign to search for natural satellites of Mercury. Mercury has no moons that we know of. If any exist, they must be small (less than a few kilometers), or we would have seen them by now. The strategy for the satellite search involves taking multiple images of locations at predetermined distances from Mercury, from 2.5 to 25 times the planet radius. Pictures of these points in space are captured at intervals ranging from seconds to nearly an hour, depending on their distances from Mercury. A moving satellite will appear at different positions in images of the same region of space taken at different times.<\/em><\/p>\n

Continue…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned last week that the Cassini probe at Saturn and the Messenger probe at Mercury would each be taking a picture of earth. NASA has now released the wonderful images NASA Releases Images of Earth Taken by Distant Spacecraft – NASA The Day the Earth Smiled In this rare image taken on July 19, … Continue reading Cassini captures Saturn & Earth, Messenger captures Earth and Moon<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,13,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiple-media","category-space-science","category-the-moon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p34aWK-VL","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3518,"url":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=3518","url_meta":{"origin":3581,"position":0},"title":"Wave at Saturn for your picture","author":"TopSpacer","date":"July 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"About time to go outside and wave at Saturn. 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