Wonderful image of Earth and the moon together captured by lunar mission

You are very, very small.

Wonderful image of Earth and the moon together captured by lunar mission

China's current lunar module experiment is almost finished - but before Chang'e 5 gets back home on November 1, it sent back this beautiful little shot of our home world from the far side of our moon.

Our ball of blue looks so small, doesn’t it? Many of the most famous photos we have of earth from space were taken during the golden age of space exploration, in the 1960s and 1970s (the United State's final Apollo mission was in 1972), but we're still creating stunning images with every outward mission.

[comment] The mission also captured this close-up of the moon's side surface.[/comment]

China's Chang'e 5 T1 is a robotic mission to orbit around the moon and return safely. It's part of a testing programme for the true Chang'e 5, scheduled for launch in 2017, which will, China's space agency hopes, successfully land on the moon, harvest soil and rock samples, and return safely, all without human crew.

If the above photo makes you feel small, here's what Earth looks like from the surface of Mars, as captured by NASA's Curiosity Rover earlier this year:

Having trouble seeing the tiny dot? Exactly.

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