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"Inferior planet" refers to Mercury and Venus, which are closer to the Sun than Earth is. "Superior planet" refers to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (the latter two added later), which are further from the Sun than Earth is. The terms are sometimes used more generally; for example, Earth is an inferior planet relative to Mars.
Seen from a superior planet, an inferior planet on the opposite side of the Sun is in superior conjunction with the Sun. An inferior conjunction occurs when the two planets align on the same side of the Sun. At inferior conjunction, the superior planet is "in opposition" to the Sun as seen from the inferior planet (see the diagram).
Earth orbits the Sun, making Earth the third-closest planet to the Sun and part of the inner Solar System. Earth's average orbital distance is about 150 million km (93 million mi), which is the basis for the astronomical unit (AU) and is equal to roughly 8.3 light minutes or 380 times Earth's distance to the Moon .
The Chinese government has a released a series of stunning high definition images taken from space by a state-of-the-art satellite. China's Gaofen-1 satellite was launched in April 2013.
Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from an unprecedented distance of over 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day's Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.
HD 63433 c: Mega-Earth: Proposed neologism for a massive terrestrial exoplanet that is at least ten times the mass of Earth: Kepler-10c: Super-Earth: An extrasolar planet with a mass higher than Earth's, but substantially below the mass of the Solar System's smaller gas giants Uranus and Neptune, which are 14.5 and 17.1 Earth masses respectively.
Raw images from Cassini were received on Earth shortly after the event, and a couple of processed images—a high-resolution image of the Earth and the Moon, and a small portion of the final wide-angle mosaic showing the Earth—were released to the public a few days following the July 19 imaging sequence. [11] [12]
Astronaut, Susan Helms, looking out the window on the International Space Station. Windows on Earth is a museum exhibit, website, and exploration tool, developed by TERC, Inc. (an educational non-profit organization, previously called Technical Education Research Centers [1]), and the Association of Space Explorers, that enables the public to explore an interactive, virtual view of Earth from ...