Every now and then NASA’s posts an image taken in space and leaves the world baffled and awe-struck. These pictures show how tiny we are compared to the whole universe. One such picture was clicked recently by NASA’s Cassini.
The US space agency on September 3 took to Instagram to share an image of Saturn and its rings taken by its Cassini spacecraft from 1.2 million kilometres away. The spacecraft used red, green, and blue filters to create the natural-color view of Saturn. However, Cassini not only captured the second-largest planet of our Solar System but also “some world photobombers with Venus, Mars, Earth, and Earth’s Moon visible as small dots of light”, NASA added.
NASA shared three images on Instagram. While one of them is the full image, the other two are two halves of the same image. In the first image, the agency said that Venus appears as a “bright white dot in the upper left”, while Mars is diagonally above it and appears as a faint red dot.
Our home planet and our Moon were shown in the second image as a pale blue dot and a smaller dot lying in the lower right space.
Describing the third picture, NASA wrote, “A whole view of the same image, with annotations showing the locations of Venus, Mars, the Moon, and Earth.”
About Cassini spacecraft
So far, this spacecraft has spent 20 years in space, of which 13 has been spent exploring the gas giant, and completed 294 orbits of Saturn. It has travelled a distance of 7.9 billion kilometres to date and taken 453,048 images, as per NASA’s website. It is not the first spacecraft to see Saturn up close. “Pioneer 11, a spacecraft that helped pave the way for exploring the solar system, first studied Saturn 44 years ago,” NASA said.