NASA's Cassini spacecraft has taken a number of pictures of Saturn and neighboring planets, including the Earth.
The Cassini imaging team has taken natural-color images of Saturn, its moons and rings, along with Earth, Venus and Mars all together. The image captured by Cassini spans 404,880 miles.
NASA launched the Cassini-Huygens (named after astronomers Giovanni Cassini and Christiaan Huygens) spacecraft on October 1997. On December 25, 2004, Huygens separated from the Cassini and landed on Titan, Saturn's moon. Cassini is only the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first spacecraft to enter the planet's orbit.
The U.S. along with 16 European countries have teamed up and are responsible for designing, building, flying and collecting data from the Cassini and Huygens. However, the mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the U.S., where the Cassini was assembled.
On Friday, July 19, Cassini placed itself in Saturn's shadow and took 323 wide-angle pictures as a part of The Day The Earth Smiled Project. The captured images provide a view of the planet as it would appear to the human eye. Cassini, helped by Saturn obstructing the sun's harmful rays, also used its cameras and brought together 141 pictures to produce color panoramic images.
"In this one magnificent view, Cassini has delivered to us a universe of marvels: from spokes in Saturn's main rings to the spray erupting from the icy moon Enceladus, from the shadows of moons cast through the gorgeous blue E ring to the inner planets Venus, Mars, and our own planet Earth, far in the distance," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini's imaging team lead based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "And it did so on a day people all over the world, in unison, smiled in celebration at the sheer joy of being alive on a pale blue dot."
This is just the second instance that Cassini has taken an image of Earth from within Saturn's shadow. This is also the third time when Earth's picture has been taken from the outer solar system.
In 2008, NASA announced that it is extending funding for ground operations for the mission. NASA extended the mission again in 2010 and for now the Cassini Solstice Mission will continue until 2017.
