You have never seen Earth and the moon like this before.
The Mars Express spacecraft recently celebrated 20 years in space by taking a nostalgic look back at Earth and the moon from the Red Planet. The photographs captured by the European Space Agency (ESA) craft show our planet and its natural satellite as little greater than a big white dot crossed by a smaller white dot.
And while this will likely not be probably the most spectacular image from space ever seen, the Mars Express picture demonstrates the gap between Earth and the Red Planet and what an achievement it’s to place vehicles on and around our neighbor planet.
Related: The climate of Mars modified dramatically 400,000 years ago, Chinese rover finds
The photographs elicit comparisons to the famous image of Earth taken in Feb. 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, through which our planet also appeared as little greater than a speck, which has been dubbed the “Pale Blue Dot.” The image moved astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan to reflect on the fragility of Earth and humanity’s responsibility to take care of the one planet we all know to harbor life. And though three a long time have passed since Sagan elucidated that message, it has never seemed more essential.
“On the special day of Mars Express’s twentieth anniversary since launch, we desired to bring Carl Sagan’s reflections back to the current day, through which the worsening climate and ecological crisis make them more valid than ever,” a part of the team behind the image and University of the Basque Country researcher Jorge Hernández Bernal said in a press release.
“In these easy snapshots from Mars Express, Earth has the equivalent size as an ant seen from a distance of 100 meters, and we’re all in there. Regardless that we’ve seen images like these before, it continues to be humbling to pause and think: We want to take care of the pale blue dot, there is no such thing as a planet B.”
The Mars Express spacecraft set off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome launch complex in Kazakhstan on June 2, 2003. The Mars Express caught its first image from space on July 3, 2020, because it looked back at Earth and the moon when it was just 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from home.
The Mars Express spacecraft arrived in orbit around Mars in December of the identical 12 months, settling into its highly elliptical orbit on Christmas Day 2003. And as this latest image, which was captured around 186 million miles (300 million kilometers) from Earth, shows the Mars orbiter has since been the Christmas gift that keeps giving for planetary scientists ever since.
These particular images were captured using the super-resolution channel (SRC) of Mars Express’s High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The foremost role of this instrument has been to look at the 2 moons of Mars and the background stars across the Red Planet.
The photographs of Earth and the moon were captured on May 15, May 21, and June 2, 2023, and thus encompass over half of the 29.5-day orbit of the moon around our planet. The ultimate image was taken just before a special event during which the Mars Express beamed images taken by its Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) for a first-of-its-kind “live from Mars” anniversary broadcast.
“There is no such thing as a scientific value in these images, but because the conditions allowed us to point the HRSC to Earth and shortly after the VMC to Mars, we took the chance to create our own portrait of home on this incredible mission milestone for Mars Express,” member of the Mars Express team on the German Aerospace Center Daniela Tirsch said.
The Mars Express can have been away from Earth for a full twenty years, however the ESA spacecraft still has much work to do before its retirement. The mission has been granted several extensions, the newest of which was approved in March this 12 months and can see the Mars Express operating until Dec. 31, 2026, on the very least.
“ESA has a protracted history of Mars exploration, first from orbit with Mars Express and the Trace Gas Orbiter, and in the following decade on the surface with the Rosalind Franklin rover and the completion of the Mars Sample Return missions. The following daring ambition is, after all, to explore with humans,” ESA project scientist for Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, Colin Wilson, said. “Perhaps it’s going to only be one other 20 years before humans can look up from the surface of Mars to see Earth within the night sky.”