The two bodies appear as bright specks amidst a field of stars in the Aries constellation.
The Psyche spacecraft is on a six-year journey to reach a metal-rich asteroid by the same name. Well into its voyage, the probe looked back at its home planet and captured a rare view of Earth, accompanied by its Moon, as a mere speck engulfed by the dark void of space.
NASA’s Psyche mission launched on October 13, 2023, and is assigned to explore a distant target in the main asteroid belt that’s believed to be the exposed core of a protoplanet. Before it reaches its destination, the imaging team behind the mission is testing the spacecraft’s ability to capture objects that shine by light reflected from the Sun. The target objects of these tests are awfully familiar—our very own planet and moon—but they were taken from a rather unfamiliar perspective.
