Fascinating NASA image shows what Earth and the moon look like from MARS

[Kashmiri Pandit]

The stunning view shows what future generations will see if plans to colonise Mars are successful

A stunning image published by NASA shows what Earth looks like from Mars - 127 million miles (205 million kilometers) away.

The incredible view also features our moon and was taken by the space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) probe.

In the image, the reddish area near the middle of the face of Earth is Australia.

Southeast Asia appears as the reddish area near the top, while Antarctica is the bright blob at bottom-left.

The other bright areas are clouds.

Captured by the probe's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, the picture is actually a composite of two separate images.

"Each was separately processed prior to combining them so that the moon is bright enough to see," explains NASA officials from its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

"The moon is much darker than Earth and would barely be visible at the same brightness scale as Earth.

"The combined view retains the correct sizes and positions of the two bodies relative to each other".

The original images were taken on 20 November 2016.

The distance between Earth and the moon is about 30 times the diameter of Earth.

"Earth and the moon appear closer than they actually are in this image because the observation was planned for a time at which the moon was almost directly behind Earth, from Mars' point of view, to see the Earth-facing side of the moon," explained NASA.

With HiRISE and five other instruments, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been investigating Mars since 2006.

In November, it revealed that the surface of Mars is hiding a gigantic ice lake containing about as much water as Lake Superior here on Earth.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/science/fascinating-nasa-image-shows-what-9589382

 

[Kashmiri Pandit]

From outside it feels as if one can step on Mars .
But you can't . Its not like a Ball .

It has kilometers of atmosphere .

 

[Talwar e Pakistan]

Our earth is so beautiful...

 

[DoTell]

"...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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

- by Carl Sagan