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dhani — July 31, 2008 / 10:29 pm
Have you seen the picture of the Earth and its Moon taken from 31 million miles (49.8 million kilometers) away? Here it is:
This historic picture was taken by NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft, as a part of the scientist’s effort to study alien worlds. It shows some specific features that are important for observations of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.
During a full Earth rotation, images obtained by Deep Impact at a 15-minute cadence have been combined to make a color video. The final result is a video recording, shows the moon enters the frame (because of its orbital motion) and transits Earth, then leaves the frame.
Other spacecraft have imaged Earth and the moon from space, but Deep Impact is the first to show a transit of Earth with enough detail to see large craters on the moon and oceans and continents on Earth.
Deep Impact made history when the mission team directed an impactor from the spacecraft into comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. NASA recently extended the mission, redirecting the spacecraft for a flyby of comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010; on a mission called Deep Impact extended mission, or EPOXI.
The full Quicktime video is available here (1 MB), and a version using a near-infrared filter is here. Notice how much darker the Moon’s surface is than Earth’s — something we rarely see compared so well.
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