Cassini's Last View of Earth
This view from NASA's
Cassini spacecraft shows planet Earth as a point of light between the icy rings
of Saturn. The spacecraft
captured the view on April 12, 2017 at 10:41 p.m. PDT (1:41 a.m. EDT). Cassini
was 870 million miles (1.4 billion kilometers) away from Earth when the image
was taken. Although far too small to be visible in the image, the part of Earth
facing toward Cassini at the time was the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Earth's moon is also
visible to the left of our planet in a cropped, zoomed-in version of the image.
The rings visible here
are the A ring (at top) with the Keeler and Encke gaps visible, and the F ring
(at bottom). During this observation Cassini was looking toward the backlit
rings, making a mosaic of multiple images, with the sun blocked by the disk of
Saturn.
Seen from Saturn,
Earth and the other inner solar system planets are all close to the sun, and
are easily captured in such images, although these opportunities have been
somewhat rare during the mission. The F ring appears especially bright in this
viewing geometry.
The Cassini mission is
a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian
Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were
designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is
based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
For more information
about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
The Cassini imaging
team homepage is at https://ciclops.org.
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7656/
