NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has just captured another Pale Blue Dot image while orbiting Saturn. The difference is that, in this view, unlike the one from 19 July 19 2013 that featured Earth, the blue orb is Uranus, imaged by Cassini for the first time. So that tiny dot hanging out there in the blackness of space is actually an outer planet of our solar system, an ice giant, which is four times bigger in diameter than our home planet.
And how far was Uranus from NASA’s robotic spacecraft when this photo was taken? Uranus was approximately 28.6 astronomical units (AU) from Cassini and Saturn. The average distance between Saturn and Uranus is 9.6 AU, and between Jupiter and Saturn is 4.34 AU. An astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the sun, equal to 150,000,00km.
Read more about Cassini’s recent shot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech page.
Here is the full image of the pale blue ice-giant planet Uranus far beyond Saturn’s rings:
