A Deep Blue Vision of Earth From an Asteroid Hunter

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/University of Arizona

As it slingshotted past Earth at 19,000 miles per hour on its journey to an asteroid, NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft took a moment to admire the view — from 106,000 miles away.


This composite image was taken on Friday by an onboard camera as the spacecraft flew past the planet. It shows the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean flanked by Australia in the lower left and the southwestern United States and Baja California in the upper right.


At the top of the image there are several black vertical streaks, the result of the camera’s short exposure times. According to NASA, the camera’s rapid exposures — less than three-milliseconds each — are necessary when taking a picture of something as bright as our blue planet, but are not required for taking images of the spacecraft’s dark primary target: the asteroid Bennu.

Osiris-Rex is on a mission to collect samples from Bennu and bring them back to Earth. Launched in September 2016, the probe made a quick circle around the sun. To get on the right trajectory for traveling toward the asteroid, it needed to fling past Earth last week. The flyby tilted the spacecraft upward by about six degrees, which would put it in the correct position to rendezvous with Bennu in August 2018.


The carbon-rich asteroid is like a time capsule from more than 4.5 billion years ago when the solar system formed. Scientists hope that the samples that Osiris-Rex collects and brings to Earth in 2023 will contain clues from the earliest history of our stellar neighborhood.