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Sci Tech
Looking at mother Earth from Mars
The Earth appears as a disc when viewed from Mars. The moon is seen at the top right corner.
HAVE YOU ever wondered what you would see if you were on Mars looking at Earth through a small telescope? Now you can find out, thanks to a unique view of our world recently captured by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft currently orbiting the red planet.
This first-ever image of its kind shows mother Earth as a tiny alien world in the vast darkness of space
The image of Earth actually shows our home as a planetary disc, in a `half-Earth' phase. The image has been specially processed to allow both Earth and the much darker Moon to be visible together.
The bright area at the top of the image of Earth (as seen in the accompanying picture) is cloud cover over central and eastern North America. Below that, a darker area includes Central America and the Gulf of Mexico. The bright feature near the centre-right of the crescent Earth consists of clouds over northern South America.
The image also shows the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Moon, since the Moon was on the far side of Earth as viewed from Mars.
The slightly lighter tone of the lower portion of the image of the Moon results from the large and conspicuous ray system associated with the crater Tycho. Mars Global Surveyor, one of the most successful missions to Mars ever undertaken, has been orbiting the red planet since September 1997. The mission has examined the entire Martian surface and provided a wealth of information, including some stunning high-resolution imagery, about the planet's atmosphere and interior.
Evaluation of landing sites for NASA's two Mars Exploration Rover missions and the British Beagle 2 Lander mission has relied heavily on mineral mapping, a detailed imagery and the topographic measurements by Mars Global Surveyor.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers and the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission, which carries the Beagle 2 mission, are due to launch this summer and arrive at Mars in late December 2003 and January 2004.
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