(Above) The Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars

This is an image of Earth and the Moon, acquired at a range of 142 million kilometers by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

On the day this image was taken, the Japanese Kayuga (Selene) spacecraft was en route from the Earth to the Moon, and has since returned spectacular images and movies.

On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the Moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. In fact, the RED-filter image was almost completely saturated, the blue-green image had significant saturation, and the brightest clouds were saturated in the IR image. This color image required a fair amount of processing to make a nice-looking release.

The Moon image is unsaturated but brightened relative to Earth for this composite. The lunar images are useful for calibration of the camera.

This composite image of Earth and Mars was created to visually show the relative sizes of the two planets when next to each other.

The Earth image was acquired from the Galileo orbiter at about 6:10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on Dec. 11, 1990, when the spacecraft was about 1.3 million miles from the planet during the first of two Earth flybys on its way to Jupiter. The Mars image was acquired by the Mars Global Surveyor in April of 1999.