See the Evolution of the Iconic Blue Marble Photo

Blue Marble, 1972; The original "Blue Marble" was taken on Dec. 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft en route to the Moon at a distance of about 29,000 kilometres (18,000 mi). It shows Africa, Antarctica, and the Arabian Peninsula.

NASA created these two images to exhibit high-resolution global composites of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. The land surface data were acquired from June through Sep. of 2001. The clouds were acquired on two separate days - July 29, 2001, for the northern hemisphere and Nov. 16, 2001 for the southern hemisphere. The images were rendered in late January 2002.

In 2002, NASA released the most detailed true-color image of the Earth’s surface ever produced up to that point. Scientists and data visualizers created the image by stitching together data collected over 4 months from NASA’s Terra satellite.

The Blue Marble: Next Generation was a series of images that show the color of the Earth’s surface for each month of 2004 at very high resolution (500 meters/pixel) at a global scale. This image is a mosaic showing South America from September 2004 (with clouds removed).

Known as the "Black Marble", this image of North and South America at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012.

An image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's Earth-observing research satellite, Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on 4 Jan. 4, 2012.

The newest "Blue Marble", Earth seen from a distance of one million miles captured by a NASA scientific camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft on July 6, 2015.