Earth

Earth and its Moon are shown at one ten-billionth actual size to place them within the scale of the solar system. From space, Earth's swirling white clouds reveal an often turbulent atmosphere, its browns show landmasses, and its blue shows a planet covered mostly with oceans of water; as nightfall sweeps westward across its face, the land begins to glow with lights. Earth is teeming with life, from single-celled organisms whose world is a drop of water to the blue whale whose home spans an entire ocean, and life flourishes from frigid Antarctica to the ocean depths. The Moon's surface is ancient and almost frozen in time, preserving humanity's first steps on another world when Apollo 11 astronauts landed at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969; a thousand years from now, the footprints in the lunar dust will appear the same as the day they were made. In this scaled model, Mars is about twelve steps away and Venus about six steps away, while on the real equator Earth's rotation carries a person along at one thousand miles per hour.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States