Spacecraft snaps first Earth portrait from Mars
LOS ANGELES (AP) --NASA on Thursday released what it billed as the first portrait of Earth as seen from Mars.
The colorized photograph shows Earth from 86 million miles away as a small blue dot orbited by its even smaller moon.
The keen-eyed can make out clouds over the central and eastern United States and northern South America, as well as portions of Central America and the Gulf of Mexico, in a specially processed blowup of the image.
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft took the picture while orbiting the red planet on May 8.
"This image gives us a new perspective ... one in which we can see our own planet as one among many," said Michael Malin, whose company built and operates the camera for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Jupiter can also be seen in a larger version of the picture.
NASA said the portrait was unprecedented -- but not for lack of trying.
The agency's Pathfinder spacecraft tried several times to photograph Earth after reaching Mars in 1997 but was thwarted by cloudy skies.
Images of Earth from space have been among the most compelling images produced by NASA missions.
Apollo 8 began orbiting the moon on December 24, 1968, becoming the first manned mission to do so. During a live Christmas Eve television broadcast, the three-man crew took turns reading from the book of Genesis and showing images of the Earth as it rose above the moon.
And in 1990, as NASA's unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft reached the fringes of the solar system, it turned back to take a final look at Earth at the suggestion of astronomer Carl Sagan. The image, taken from 4 billion miles away, inspired the title of Sagan's 1994 book "A Pale Blue Dot."
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives," Sagan wrote.
