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The sight of Parker Solar Probe's WISPR instrument, September 25, 2018, shows the Earth, the luminous sphere located near the middle of the right panel. The elongated mark down of the panel is a reflection of the lens by the WISPR instrument. Credit: NASA / Naval Research Laboratory / Parker Solar Probe
On September 25, 2018, Parker Solar Probe captured a view of the Earth as she headed for the mission's first gravimetric assistance mission. The Earth is the round and bright object visible in the right side of the image.
The image was captured by the WISPR instrument (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe), which is the only integrated imaging instrument on board Parker Solar Probe. During the scientific phases, WISPR sees structures in the atmosphere of the Sun, the crown, before they fly over the spacecraft. The two WISPR image panels come from two instrument telescopes, which point in slightly different directions and have different fields of view. The inner telescope produced the left image, while the outer telescope produced the right image.
Zooming on the Earth reveals a slight bulge on the right side: it's the Moon, which peeks stealthily behind the Earth. At the time of shooting, the Parker solar probe was about 27 million kilometers from the Earth.
The hemispherical function in the center of the right image is a stray light, a common feature when viewing light sources, which is caused by reflections in the lens system. In this case, the torch is due to the very bright brilliance of the Earth. Close quarters of Venus and Mercury may occasionally create similar patterns in the future, but these are limited cases and do not affect the scientific operations of the instrument.
Some objects visible in the image, such as Pleiades in the lower left corner of the Earth in the right image, and the two bright objects, Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, located near the bottom of the # 39, left image, appear elongated due to reflections on the edge of the detector.
A close-up of WISPR's Earth of September 25, 2018, an image shows what appears to be a bulge on the right side of our planet – that's the moon. Credit: NASA / Naval Research Laboratory / Parker Solar Probe
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