Science and WeatherEveryone smile! NASA’s Cassini will take a picture of Earth from Saturn today
NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been exploring the planet Saturn and its moons since 2004, will be in a prime 'photo spot' today, to catch Saturn, its rings, and the Earth in the same picture.
The goal of the picture, according to Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker, is to get a nice back-lit view of Saturn's rings, so that the team can put together a mosaic image to compare with one made back in 2006. "But one of the best parts of the mosaic we're making on July 19 is that we'll be able to take a picture of Earth — and all of you — from about 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) away," she said.
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The Earth will be little more than a pixel in the image, but if you're anywhere in or over North America, South America, western Africa or extreme western Europe, you can smile up at the sky between 5:27 p.m. and 5:42 p.m., Eastern Time, today, and be able to claim that you were in the picture!
Cassini was launched by NASA and the European Space agency back in 1997, and it arrived in orbit of Saturn in 2004. Even on the way to its destination it wasn't idle — giving us the best pictures of Jupiter we have, testing Einstein's theories, discovering three new moons orbiting the giant ringed planet, and returning new information on Saturn's rotation and a close-up look at its unusual moons, Phoebe. Since then, it dropped a probe into the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and has been sending back spectacular images of Saturn and its rings, of strange events like a massive storm eating its own tail and of the incredible Earth-swallowing hurricane at the planet's north pole.
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