Cassini spacecraft captures Earth-Moon system through Saturn’s rings
A new image from the NASA mission shows our planet as a point of light
A new image 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 13 April 2017, at 05:41am (UTC). Cassini was 1.4 billion kilometres (870 million miles) away from Earth when the image was taken. Although far too small to be visible in the image, the part of Earth facing Cassini at the time was the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Earth’s Moon is also visible nearby in a cropped, zoomed-in version of the image.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter.
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