The Mars Express mission launched on June 2, 2003. More than 20 years later, it sent us a gif. blurry spot Our Earth as we can guess from the orbit of the Red Planet.
In 1990, the Voyager 1 probe, leaving the boundaries of our solar system, sent us a very symbolic picture. Perhaps the most important image of humanity. We guessed our land there as…a tiny little blue dot! More than three decades later, and on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Mars Express mission, the European Space Agency (ESA), thanks to a new series of images, wanted to remind us of this powerful message: “We have to take care of our little blue dot. Because there is no Planet B.”
The sequence obtained by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) Super-Resolution Channel (SRC) between May and June shows a fuzzy spot, lost in the vastness of the universe. And another point, smaller, turns around. Our land. And our moon over more than half of its monthly orbit. “In these images, our planet is the size of an ant seen from 100 meters away. This is what we all live for.”Comments by Jorge Hernandez Bernal of the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and of the Sorbonne University and member of the Mars Express team, in European Space Agency press release.
There is no scientific value, but it is invaluable in spite of everything
As was indeed the case for the image returned by the Voyager probe, this sequence has absolutely no scientific value. It just corresponds to an opportunity researchers have seized to paint a picture of our Earth again.
The team sometimes recalls that the first image of the Earth-Moon system was taken by Mars Express on July 3, 2003, when the mission was on its way to the Red Planet. About 8 million km from our planet. The images that make up this new sequence just published, were taken at a distance of about 300 million kilometers…
