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The first image of Earth ever taken from another planet that actually shows our home as a planetary disk. Because Earth and the Moon are closer to the Sun than Mars.
On August 23, 1966, NASA’s Lunar Orbiter I sent home the first picture of Earth from the Moon.
Taken on the orbiter’s 16th lap around the Moon, the black-and-white image shows the crated surface of the Moon in the foreground and the cloudy atmosphere of Earth in the distance, almost 240,000 miles away.
38 years later, the Spirit Rover sent home the first photo of Earth from the surface of another planet.
And in 2013, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sent home photos of Earth from Saturn’s orbit, slightly less than 900 million miles away.
Earth appears as a bright blue object, dwarfed by the much closer silhouette of Saturn and the bright sweep of its rings in the foreground.
As we pass the moon – some quarter million miles (about 380,000 km) away – Earth looks like a bright ball in space.
