MESSENGER's Earth flyby on Aug. 2, 2005, not only adjusted the spacecraft's path to Mercury but allowed the spacecraft team to test several of the onboard instruments by taking some shots of its home planet. The camera, designed to characterize minerals that may have formed in Mercury's crust, took this three band composite image on the left using multiple wavelength imaging, giving the continental areas their red color - a result of the high reflectance of vegetation in the near-infrared part of the spectrum.
After traveling more than 727,000 miles in three days, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's cameras were pointed toward Earth on Aug. 15, 2005. The Orbiter's main objective, to obtain daily global images of Martian meteorology, was postponed to help the Mars Color Imager science team obtain a measurement of the instrument's sensitivity and to check that no contamination occurred to the camera during launch.
This image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera on Sept. 15, 2006, at a distance of 1.3 million miles from Saturn and about 930 million miles from Earth. The moon Enceladus is also captured on the left, swathed in blue and trailing its plume of water ice particles through Saturn's E ring.