Washington: NASA has captured the first image of the sunlit side of Earth from a distance of 1.6 million kilometres, which prompted US President Barack Obama to tweet about the need to protect the "only planet we have."

The colour images of Earth from NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite are generated by combining three separate images to create a photographic-quality image.