Astro Bob: Earth's a dot, too

On July 20 and 23, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft captured images of the Earth and moon from some 180 million miles away — about 40 million miles closer than the average distance between Mars and Earth. The two are featureless dots of light in a black void shared with stars in the constellation Aries.

The probe is en route to the metallic asteroid Psyche. Launched in October 2023, the spacecraft will arrive at its target in August 2029 and spend more than two years exploring and mapping the approximately 175-mile-long object. Psyche is thought to be the exposed iron-nickel core of a one-time protoplanet. Through closeup study we hope to learn more about the makeup and formation of Earth's own metallic core, which we can't examine directly because it's thousands of miles below our feet and ina