NASA unveils incredible images of the far side of the Moon – The Point

always more extraordinary images. Just weeks after being dazzled the world with the first high-resolution images of Pluto taken by the space probe New Horizons, NASA unveils pictures of the Moon passing in front of the Earth. Rare photographs that reveal the hidden face of the only natural satellite of the Earth, never visible from Earth with background the blue planet, exactly. On the images, which were posted accelerated in a video on the YouTube channel of NASA, the Moon moves over the Pacific Ocean near the North America.

If the images were published by the US space agency on its website on Wednesday, they were in fact taken on 16 July by the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite (DSCOVR,) located between the Earth and the Sun, 1.6 million kilometers. The satellite, launched last February, took there is little a snapshot of the Earth as a whole, the first since 1972.

Obama congratulates NASA

The face Dark of the Moon had been photographed in 1959 by the Soviet satellite Soviet Luna 3. If several missions of the US space agency have captured shots of the satellite’s face, there have been few photos that show as much detail as published Wednesday. So much so that Barack Obama paid tribute to the scientists on Twitter. “Pretty amazing, the time lapse of the far side of the Moon passing in front of the Earth from NASA. The American ingenuity at its highest level!” notably US President wrote on the social network.