, admire its immensity and also observe the planet we call home from a distance. Few are the lucky ones who have been able to travel to the immense cosmos to lose themselves in that infinite admiration, but fortunately there are other ways to travel through space.
Technology has been a very good tool when it comes to space exploration. Since the first trips to outer space were made, everything changed for space agencies, and the goals became more and more ambitious.
The first step was to leave the Earth, reach a point so high that we could observe its immensity and beauty from the outside. Then, it was time to explore the Moon and so on until today people are thinking about settling an entire Moon on Mars.
It is true, humanity’s curiosity about the cosmos is infinite and will not stop until it continues exploring the unimaginable. But despite having the great ambition to go as far as possible from Earth, we always look back at this wonderful blue planet.
The effect of admiring the planet from space
At some point the philosopher Frank White was so captivated by the vision of the astronauts returning from space that he took on the task of building.
From White’s point of view, they returned especially transformed after looking at the Earth from space. This phenomenon is known as and referred exactly to the metamorphosis “of consciousness from the experience of observing with your own eyes the reality of the Earth as a unit.”
And when you visualize the Earth from the immense space, everything changes and the world looks and feels gigantic, something that simply cannot be understood. Perhaps many do not have the opportunity to look at the planet we inhabit from space, but technology helps us infinitely to look at it through different space objects.
The different views of the Earth
A tour of different space objects created by some agencies will allow us to enjoy some of the various views of the Earth from other spaces. are you ready?
From the orbit of the planet
We took off about 300 km above the Earth’s surface, something like the height of the International Space Station. As long as it is daytime, everything can be seen clearly, from large clusters to territories well recognized by man.
Go to the moon
A little further from the International Space Station is the Moon. Earth’s natural satellite is ready to offer us a very peculiar view about 380,000 km away. From this view, the planet we inhabit looks like a ball of blue and white swirls, an image that comes from the Apollo 8 mission in 1968.
The dance of the Moon and the Earth together
Passing the limits beyond the Moon, we do not find any nearby cosmic objects. However, there are some robotic spacecraft that coexist about 400,000 km away from the planet. This is the case of the NEAR spacecraft, which captured the union between the Earth and the Moon in the black landscape on January 23, 1998.
The view of Earth from Mars
Continuing space travel even further, we arrive at Mars. Thanks to NASA’s Curiosity Rover, not only have incredible images and discoveries been obtained about the red planet, we have also seen the Earth from there and this is the image that the small robot sent on January 31, 2014.
At a record distance
As if seeing Earth from Mars wasn’t enough, the space probe was responsible for capturing one of the record views of the planet. At a distance of about 6 billion km the Earth is literally seen as a white dot on a very blurry horizon.