Every now and then, we get a little glimpse of just how far human innovation has gone.
Literally: The image above was taken by a spaceship traveling through the solar system while at a distance of 251 million kilometers (156 million miles) from Earth – more than the distance between Earth and the Sun nearly halved again.
It was demolished 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 strong tradition of photographs of the Earth taken with instruments far beyond where people can engage ourselves.
But Solar Orbiter’s image is not just the Earth; Venus and Mars will also appear, 48 million 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 heart of the Solar System.
(ESA / NASA / NRL / Solar Orbiter / SolOHI)
The Solar Orbiter was launched in February 2020, and its flight was designed to make several Venus flybys to take advantage of the planet’s pressure to increase speed, a move known as gravity support. The image of the planets was raised as the Solar Orbiter moved toward Venus for one of these flybys.
By the time Solar Orbiter arrives at a position around the Sun to begin operations in November 2021, it will wake up long outside the planet’s plane to get a view of the solar pole regions. This will be very interesting because, because of our view of the Earth, we have never seen the poles of the sun.
While on the move, the Solar Orbiter is making observations. This will help the Solar Orbiter team back here on Earth to capitalize and test the on-board instruments, but that data can be used for scientific analysis, too, of planets , of the solar wind, of space weather.
It also gives us a few inspiring reminders of the fragility and resilience of our own lives. Pictures like this always remember the words of Carl Sagan, in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot, of a photograph of the Earth taken by Voyager 1 on its way out of the Solar System.
“Look again at that dot. That’s it. That’s home. That’s us. On everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you know. you never heard, everyone who ever did, spent their lives, “he wrote.
“Full of joy and suffering, thousands of courageous religions, ideologies, and economic messengers, all hunters and hunters, all heroes and cowards, all creators and destroyers of civilization, all kings and peasants, all young couples in love, every mother and father, an optimistic child, an inventor and researcher, every morality teacher, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘superintendent,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our race lived there – on a lump of dust hanging into a sunbeam. “