Blue Marble to Pale Blue Dot: Our Earth From Space

Few days back one of my friend shared with us, a picture of Earth from Saturn. It was very beautiful image taken by the Cassini spacecraft, a tiny star of Earth through the Saturn’s dust rings. This image just made me think about the images taken by satellites and space missions from space.

There is little star behind Saturn's dusty ring, that's Earth!

Every time we look at Earth from space it look very calm and beautiful. Most of time wrapped in clouds, its major area covered by water and rest of its area can be seen with different colors of landscapes. Astronauts call her Blue Marble. They often says, it’s beautiful to see peaceful earth from space. No one can imagine that there are many things happening down there. Turbulent tornadoes, gusting wind, running rivers, stormy rain, sliding lands all seems very quiet from space. Borders are not visible from over there. Even Earth never look religious from space. It just appear as calm Blue Marble.

A Blue Marble, Earth seen by Apollo 17

Earth appear as a marble in the vicinity of Earth’s Space. How she look from the distant space? Our spacecraft studying alien worlds in our solar system has looked time to time towards the planet from where they get signals. It’s very amazing to see our world from there. Here is the image of Earth from moon’s horizon taken during Apollo 8 mission. It was the first earth rise seen by humans from moon. Like moon, she also displays phases from moon.

Earth rise over Moon horizon

Messenger spacecraft studying planet mercury seen our earth on 6 May 2010. From that distance earth and moon can be observe separately. If this pair observe for long time one can see moon revolve around Earth.

Pair of Earth and Moon seen from Mercury by Messenger

This image of Earth in Martian sky taken by Mars rover Curiosity on 31 January 2014. It appear like a star for rover camera and later it zoomed in during image processing. For any observer with normal human eye could see earth and moon separately in Martian sky.

Earth and Moon in Martian sky

We in the vast Universe

It was very old quest for humanity to find out our existence in this infinite universe. Human’s affinity towards this quest shown us the real picture of our planet in this universe. Previously it was thought that our world was built by Supreme Being called god and he place our world in the center of the universe. Because, we humans considered ourselves very special to him. He and only he can see our world. But, then humans started observing and studying universe and celestial bodies’ motion very keenly. It helped us in understanding out our planet’s position in solar system. We found our world is moving around the sun. Then, further observation led us towards the conclusion that our sun is also very ordinary star and located in outer region of galaxy. One of our spacecraft, Voyager 1 after starting its journey towards outside the solar system, it looks back towards earth and capture her image. This image first time shown us reality of our planet. Earth from that distance appeared as mere a tiny speck of dust. It showed us that in this infinite space we all are alone on this tiny dust particle. Only particle in known universe carrying life on it. We humans are not special in this universe but this life carrying dust particle in universe is very special. Now it’s time to value our home planet.

In 1990 Voyager 1 captured Earth, famous astronomer Carl Sagan called it a Pale Blue Dot

All images in this article are from NASA's image gallery