NEW DELHI: Get ready for an inter-planetary photo-op this coming week: a camera aboard the Cassini spacecraft, currently about 1.5 billion kilometers away in the orbit of Saturn, will turn towards Earth and snap photos for about 15 minutes. The date is 19 July and the time is about 8 pm in India.
This is not the first time that a distant spacecraft has taken photographs of the Earth. Voyager 1 took a famous photo from 6 billion kilometers, the one that was described by cosmologist Carl Sagan as 'The Pale Blue Dot'. Cassini itself has taken photos of Earth earlier.
But it is the first time that residents of Earth know when a spacecraft will be snapping it from afar. It's a prearranged photo session, which the Cassini team from Nasa has fixed up, taking advantage of the fact that Cassini will be on the far side of Saturn and so, protected from the Sun's glare. The photographs will have Saturn, with all its rings in the foreground, with the Earth visible in the background.
"It will be a day to revel in the extraordinary achievements in the exploration of our solar system that have made such an interplanetary photo session possible. And it will be a day for all of us to smile and celebrate life on the Pale Blue Dot," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader, who's idea this was.
The day is being celebrated as 'The Day the Earth Smiled'. Astronomers Without Borders, a worldwide organization of scientists for popularizing astronomy, is coordinating gatherings and parties so that people can look at Saturn in the night sky and wave at it.
Fortunately, Satrurn is clearly visible in the night sky these days and can be seen with the naked eye. If seen through a telescope, Saturn's rings are also clearly visible.
The Cassini photograph will show the Earth as a tiny blue dot occupying just a few pixels of space in the images. But it will be a natural color photograph.
Cassini was launched in 1997 as a joint Nasa, European Space Agency (ESA) and ASI (the Italian space agency) mission. It was called Cassini-Huygens because it also carried the Huygens probe which was made to penetrate the atmosphere of Saturn's giant moon called Titan and crash-land on its surface in 2005, as part of exploration plan. Cassini has been in orbit of Saturn since 2004, the first human spacecraft to do so. Cassini's work was to get over in 2008 but its life was extended till 2017 when it will be made to crash on to Saturn's surface.
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