Yesterday, Cassini was able to take a third picture of our lonely planet, this time from a distance of 898-million miles. As Carl Sagan once eloquently said, “Consider that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” With an image so recent, you, and everyone you know, is somewhere on that dot.
Altogether, Earth is about the size of a pixel as seen from Cassini’s vantage point. In case you were wondering, the side of the planet with the Americas and part of the Atlantic is the side facing Cassini in this picture. Even though Cassini took the pictures yesterday, we’ll have to exercise some patience before we can see it. NASA estimates the newly captured Saturn mosaic won’t be complete for “several weeks.”