Article Posted on : - Jun 28, 2010

The new image of Earth as seen from the Moon through the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Photo: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University.

ARIZONA (BNS): NASA’s unmanned Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured new images of Earth from Moon, from a distance of 372,335 km.

The images were taken during a routine camera test while the probe was orbiting around the moon.

The photograph of the Earth was taken by the orbiter's narrow angle camera, which has a resolution of about nearly 2.3 miles (3.7 km) per pixel, according to a media report.

"It was a beautiful clear summer day over the North Pole, you can see ice covering most of the Arctic Ocean with a few leads of open water (dark) starting to open up," Space .com, an online space portal, quoted Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the powerful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) at Arizona State University as saying.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched by NASA in June 2009 to seek out potential landing sites on the lunar surface for future missions, as well as to hunt for the signs of water, ice on moon.

So far, the orbiter has found landing sites and evidence of water on the moon in NASA’s past Apollo mission.