From time to time, we realize how far human ingenuity has come.
Literally: The previous image was taken by a spacecraft traveling through the Solar System while at a distance of 251 million kilometers (156 million miles) from Earth, rather than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. almost half.
It was captured by NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, a mission to study the Sun, on November 18, 2020, as it headed for its destination. It joins an emerging tradition of photos of the Earth made by instruments far beyond where humans themselves can venture.
But it’s not just the image of the Solar Orbiter image; Venus and Mars also appear 48 and 332 million kilometers from the spacecraft, respectively. It’s a beautiful family portrait when you think about it: three rocky planets, so similar in many ways, but so different from each other, seen through a scientific instrument, the Heliospheric Imager, designed to study the heart of the solar system .
(ESA / NASA / NRL / Solar Orbiter / SolOHI)
The Solar Orbiter was launched in February 2020 and its flight was scheduled to make several Venus flyers to take advantage of the planet’s gravity to increase speed, a maneuver known as gravity assistance. The image of the planets was taken while the Solar Orbiter was moving towards Venus by one of these flybys.
When Solar Orbiter reaches its position around the Sun to begin operations in November 2021, it will move far outside the planetary plane to spot the polar regions of the Sun. This will be tremendously exciting as, due to our point of view on Earth, we have never directly imagined the poles of the Sun.
While in transit, the Solar Orbit makes observations. This helps the Solar Orbiter team here on Earth calibrate and test the instruments on board, but this data can also be used for scientific analysis of planets, solar wind and space climate.
It also provides us with a small inspiring memory of the fragility and resilience of our own existence. These photos always recall the words of Carl Sagan, in his 1994 book Pale blue dot, from a photo of the Earth taken by Voyager 1 when it left the Solar System.
“Look at this point again. This is here. There is home. It is us. In Him, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have heard of, all human beings who have been, lived their lives.” , he wrote.
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of religions, ideologies and trusted economic doctrines, every hunter and driller, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and the father, the hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every master of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, ‘every‘ supreme leader ’, all the saints and sinners in the history of our species lived there, on a word of dust suspended a ray of sunshine “.