During last week’s flyby, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured a stunning portrait of Earth’s disk, spanning the Pacific from Australia to America’s West Coast.
The color composite image, created from readings that were captured on Sept. 22 while the asteroid probe zoomed past at an altitude of 106,000 miles, was released by NASA and the University of Arizona today.
You can make out Australia at lower left, and the southwestern U.S. at upper right.
The photo op arose because OSIRIS-REx’s mission navigators took advantage of Earth’s gravitational field to slingshot the 20-foot-wide probe toward the asteroid Bennu, which it’s due to reach in late 2018.
