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Every now and then we get a little glimpse of how far human ingenuity has come.
Literally: The image above was taken by a spacecraft traveling through the solar system while it was 251 million kilometers (156 million miles) from Earth – more than the distance between the Earth and the Sun by almost half.
It was snapped by NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, a mission to study the Sun, on November 18, 2020, as it was on its way to its destination. It joins a burgeoning tradition of instrument photos of the Earth far beyond the places humans can venture.
But it’s not just Earth like Solar Orbiter; Venus and Mars also appear, respectively 48 million and 332 million kilometers from the spacecraft. It’s a lovely family portrait when you think about it – three rocky planets, so similar in many ways, but so very 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 perform multiple overflights of Venus to take advantage of the planet’s gravity to increase speed, a maneuver known as gravity assist. The image of the planets was taken as the Solar Orbiter was heading towards Venus for one of these flyovers.
By the time Solar Orbiter arrives in position around the Sun to begin operations in November 2021, it will dive well outside the planetary plane to glimpse the Sun’s polar regions. This will be extremely exciting because, due to our advantageous position on Earth, we have never directly imagined the poles of the Sun.
While in transit, the Solar Orbiter is making observations. This helps the Solar Orbiter team here on Earth to calibrate and test the instruments on board, but this data can also be used for scientific analysis of planets, solar wind, space weather.
It also reminds us of a little inspiring reminder of the fragility and resilience of our own existence. Such photos always recall the words of Carl Sagan, in his 1994 book Pale blue dot, from a photo of Earth taken by Voyager 1 as it exited the solar system.
“Look at that point again. It’s here. It’s our home. It’s us. On that point, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve heard of, every human being who has never lived, lived his life, “he wrote.
“ All of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every moral teacher, every corrupt politician, every “ superstar ”, every “ supreme leader ”, every saint and sinner of the world he history of our species lived there – on a speck of dust suspended in a ray of sunlight. “
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