The Planet Paparazzi: Earth through the Lens of Interplanetary Spacecraft

摘要

Ever since Voyager 1 took a snapshot of the fading Earth and Moon shortly after launch in the fall of 1977, the resourceful strategy of using interplanetary spacecraft for Earth observations has become routine. Shrinking science budgets make pinning such observations to the tails of other missions good economic sense, and pixilated, whole-disk images of our home planet are valuable from a scientific perspective because they accurately simulate the appearance of an unresolved-and as yet hypothetical-image of an extrasolar Earth-like planet.