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By James Dacey
Wave at Saturn collage. (Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
On 19 July the Cassini spacecraft turned back to face Earth from its location by Saturn and captured this humbling photo of our planet as a tiny dot behind Saturn’s rings. As part of the event, NASA encouraged people to snap pictures of themselves waving at Venus and to share these via social-media sites. Now, 1400 of these images have been used to create this collage, which includes people from more than 40 countries and 30 US states.
“While Earth is too small in the images Cassini obtained to distinguish any individual human beings, the mission has put together this collage so that we can celebrate all your waving hands, uplifted paws, smiling faces and artwork,” says Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
NASA has, however, released a larger version of the “Wave at Saturn” collage where you can zoom in to make out individual images. It is well worth doing so, as you quickly come across the whole spectrum of gestures from the gentle wave to the Vulcan salute.
Wonderful, the citizens of the the tiny Cassini-mailed “dot” of the Earth waving hands of togethernes back at the vast universe!
Venus? Really? Either Cassini has a whole lot more propellant and maneuverability than I thought, or some copy-editing got left behind when this was published.
A) Does “its location by Venus” refer to Earth or to Cassini (the subject of the sentence)?
B) Why would NASA ask people to “wave at Venus” if Cassini is taking the picture from Saturn?
Dear Michael,
Thank you for pointing that out — the text was meant to read Saturn. The text has now been updated.
wonderfull view, how this is going to helpto understand saturn field