Post by rubl on May 19, 2018 13:26:14 GMT 7
NASA's Voyager 1 took a classic portrait of Earth from several billion miles away in 1990. Now a class of tiny, boxy spacecraft, known as CubeSats, have just taken their own version of a "pale blue dot" image, capturing Earth and its moon in one shot.
www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/marco/20180515/PIA22323-16.jpg
NASA set a new distance record for CubeSats on May 8 when a pair of CubeSats called Mars Cube One (MarCO) reached 621,371 miles (1 million kilometers) from Earth. One of the CubeSats, called MarCO-B (and affectionately known as "Wall-E" to the MarCO team) used a fisheye camera to snap its first photo on May 9. That photo is part of the process used by the engineering team to confirm the spacecraft's high-gain antenna has properly unfolded.
www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7124&utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NASAJPL&utm_content=weekly20180518-10
