From time to time, we see how far human ingenuity has come.
Quite literally: The image above was taken by a spacecraft traveling through the solar system while 251 million kilometers (156 million miles) from Earth – more than the distance between Earth and the Sun. with almost half again.
It was captured by NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, a mission to study the Sun on November 18, 2020, while on its way to its destination. It joins a growing tradition of photographs of Earth taken by instruments far beyond which people themselves can venture.
But it’s not just the Earth after the Solar Orbiter image; Venus and Mars also appear at 48 million and 332 million kilometers from the spacecraft, respectively. It’s a wonderful family portrait when you think of it – three rocky planets, so similar in many ways, but so different from each other – seen through a scientific instrument – the heliosphere imaginary – designed to study the heart of the solar system.
(ESA / NASA / NRL / Solar Orbiter / SolOHI)
Solar Orbiter was launched in February 2020, and its flight was planned to make several Venus flights to take advantage of the planet’s gravity for an increase in speed, a maneuver known as gravitational assistance. The image of the planets was taken as the Solar Orbiter headed for Venus for one of these flybys.
When the Solar Orbiter reaches its position around the Sun to begin operations in November 2021, it will go far beyond the planetary plane to glimpse the polar regions of the Sun. This will be extremely interesting because, thanks to our observation point on Earth, we never directly imagined the Sun’s poles.
While in transit, Solar Orbiter makes observations. This helps the Solar Orbiter team back on Earth to calibrate and test the instruments on board, but this data can also be used for the scientific analysis of the planets, the solar wind, and space weather.
It also gives us a small inspiring reminder of the fragility and resilience of our own existence. Such photographs always recall the words of Carl Sagan in his 1994 book Pale blue dot, a photograph of the Earth taken by Voyager 1 at the exit of the Solar System.
“Look at that point again. This is here. This is home. This is us. This is everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who he was ever, he lived his life, “he wrote.
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of religions, ideologies and confident economic doctrines, every hunter and seeker, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, child full of hope, inventor and explorer, every moral teacher, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a word of dust suspended in a ray of Sun “.