The Psyche spacecraft is on a six-year journey to reach a metal-rich asteroid by the same name. Well into its voyage, the probe looked back at its home planet and captured a rare view of Earth, accompanied by its Moon, as a mere speck engulfed by the dark void of space.
NASA’s Psyche mission launched on October 13, 2023, and is assigned to explore a distant target in the main asteroid belt that’s believed to be the exposed core of a protoplanet. Before it reaches its destination, the imaging team behind the mission is testing the spacecraft’s ability to capture objects that shine by light reflected from the Sun. The target objects of these tests are awfully familiar—our very own planet and moon—but they were taken from a rather unfamiliar perspective.
In July, scientists on the imaging team snapped multiple, long-exposure photos of Earth and the Moon. The pair is seen amidst a dark background littered with several stars in the constellation Aries. Earth appears as a bright dot, with the Moon sitting right above it. The image was taken from about 180 million miles (290 kilometers) away and offers a rare look at our planet as seen from deep space.
The photo brings the famous Pale Blue Dot to mind, an image of Earth captured by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. That image was taken from a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers), with Earth appearing as a mere speck amid the cosmic backdrop.
Although it wasn’t captured from the same distance, Psyche’s recent image is a similar reminder of Earth’s place and size in the solar system. The spacecraft is equipped with a pair of cameras, designed to collect pictures in wavelengths of light that are both visible and invisible to the human eye, to help determine the composition of the metal-rich asteroid.
Psyche needs to travel a total of around 2.2 billion miles to reach the main asteroid belt and enter asteroid Psyche’s orbit in late July 2029. The 173-mile-wide (280-kilometer) asteroid orbits the Sun in the outer part of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists believe the space rock might be an exposed core of a planetesimal, or an early planetary building block, which was stripped of its outer layer during the early formation of the solar system.