NASA’s ESCAPADE Snaps Family Portrait of Earth, Moon

NASA's ESCAPADE spacecraft, bound for Mars, paused on July 3 to capture an interplanetary family portrait. From nearly four hundred thousand miles away, the twin spacecraft photographed Earth and the Moon in both visible and thermal infrared light. NASA News reports the images reveal crescents with only about eight percent of each body sunlit by the Sun. But the thermal imaging tells a richer story: Earth glows with its own atmospheric and surface heat, with temperatures ranging from ten to forty-four degrees below zero Fahrenheit, while the Moon's far side sits at a bone-chilling two hundred eighty degrees below zero. The cameras are purpose-built to study the Martian atmosphere, so imaging familiar targets allows engineers to verify they're calibrated and working correctly before the spacecraft arrive at Mars in September twenty twenty-seven. The mission will investigate how solar wind from the Sun interacts with and strips away Mars's atmosphere.

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