2. THE EARTH, FROM 100,000 KM For sheer, high-detailed beauty, nothing beats an up-close view.
3. NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, bound for Mercury, took this snapshot at a distance of 100,000 kilometers from Earth during a 2005 flyby of our planet.
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5. INDIA JOINS THE MOON CLUB: This image, taken on July 22 of this year, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper was trained on an illuminated Earth just over the lunar horizon.
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7. The Galileo spacecraft took this photograph of Earth and the moon in 1992, three years after its launch and It was about 6.2 million kilometers from Earth when this image was captured.
9. Rosetta's (a European Space Agency mission to Comet) camera snapped this image of Earth from more than 600,000 kilometers away during its fourth and final planetary flyby in November. The sliver of Earth lit by the sun shows clouds over Antarctica, visible at the bottom of the photograph.
11. SUNBURST, AND A NEAR MISS. Flares flash from the sun and send bursts of energy and matter flying at Earth. The most massive solar flare ever recorded broke from the sun's surface on November 4, 2003 our planet took only a glancing shot and not a direct hit, according to the European space agency.
13. EARTH ALIGHT The geomagnetic storm of March 13, 1989, knocked out power to six million people, although it provided quite a lightshow in the process.
14. RAGING SUN Looplike solar prominences [bottom right] that erupt from the sun's surface—occasionally for days on end—can sever, launching a coronal mass ejection (CME), although CMEs can burst forth of their own accord, as well.
15. Still we survive..And our planet is unique. Let us do everything possible to delay the inevitable and save it for the future generation.