We truly live on top of a remarkable new era of space exploration, with SpaceX rockets crashing almost every month and international probes scattered around the Milky Way capturing wonderful images of asteroids, comets, planets, moons and our own bright Sun.
With all the activity and media coverage of these spacecraft and probes, it’s easy to become unsatisfied or apathetic about the data and photos their missions offer back to Earth. So, let’s stop for a moment and look at the sky at these new dazzling photos from NASA / ESA’s Solar Orbiter as it traverses our solar system studying our home star.
The new video below, associated with a series of photos, presents an incredibly rare cosmic picture of Earth, Mars and Venus, with the dim light of Uranus that also casts our eyes from beyond.
These inspiring images were obtained on November 18, 2020 by the SoloHI camera installed on board the Solar Orbiter. Venus (left), Earth (middle) and Mars (right) are clearly visible in the foreground, with a tapestry of bright stars in the background, all captured as the spacecraft revolves around the Sun. Eagle-eyed astronomers have also noticed that Uranus divides the scene near the bottom edge.
“Solar Orbiter is the most complex scientific laboratory ever built to study the Sun and the solar wind, taking images of our star closer than any spacecraft,” ESA researchers noted. “Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) is one of the six remote sensing instruments on board the mission. During the cruise phase, they are still calibrated at certain times, but are stopped otherwise. ”
Venus, Earth and Mars change slightly in the visual field of the SoloHI instrument. Venus is the brightest object seen, located about 30 million miles away from the Solar Orbiter. When the shots were fired that day, the distance to Earth was 156 million miles and 206 million miles to Mars. Far from Uranus is a simple point located next to the official time code.
“At the time of registration, Solar Orbiter was on its way to Venus for its first gravitational assistance flight, which took place on December 27,” ESA scientists explained. “Flying with Venus and Earth will bring the spacecraft closer to the Sun and tilt its orbit to observe our star from different perspectives.”