Most days, NASA’s Earth Observatory offers close-up views of our planet—oceans, mountain ranges, clouds, and rivers filling the frame. But every now and then, NASA lets us take a step back and see the bigger picture—our place in the solar system and the universe. One such view recently arrived from the MESSENGER spacecraft, which studies Mercury and its surroundings.
MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) captured this photo of Earth and the Moon on May 6, 2010, while orbiting Mercury, a staggering 183 million kilometers from our planet. That’s even farther than the average distance between Earth and the Sun (about 150 million kilometers), because Mercury and Earth were at different points in their orbits at the time. The image was taken using the Wide Angle Camera (WAC), part of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS).
This view was a lucky coincidence for scientists on the MESSENGER mission, as the spacecraft was actually searching for vulcanoids—tiny rocky bodies believed to orbit between Mercury and the Sun. From its position, MESSENGER saw Earth and the Moon near the boundary between the constellations Libra and Scorpius.
MESSENGER was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury since the Mariner 10 mission in 1974–75. However, it wasn’t the first to capture a distant view of Earth.
The view from Mercury makes Earth and the Moon appear like stars in the sky, so next time you gaze up at a night sky full of stars—take a moment to reflect.
In 2003, the Mars Global Surveyor photographed Earth and the Moon in the same frame, while the Spirit rover on Mars took the first photo of our planet from the surface of another world. In 2006, the Cassini spacecraft sent back images of Earth from 1.5 billion kilometers away while orbiting Saturn. And back in 1990, the legendary Voyager 1 assembled a “family portrait” of the entire solar system, capturing Earth from an incredible 6.4 billion kilometers away.
