Every now and then we get a little glimpse of how far human ingenuity has gone.
Quite literally: The image above was taken by a spacecraft that traveled 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 with almost half again.
It was broken on November 18, 2020 by NASA and the Solar Orbiter of the European Space Agency, a mission to study the sun, while on its way to its destination. It joins an emerging tradition of photographs of the earth taken by instruments far beyond where people can venture on their own.
But it’s not just the earth in the image of Solar Orbiter; Venus and Mars also appear 48 million and 332 million kilometers from the spacecraft, respectively. It’s a lovely family portrait if you think about it – three rocky planets, which are so similar in many ways but so very different from each other – seen by a scientific instrument – the Heliospheric Imager – designed around the heart of the Solar System to study.
(ESA / NASA / NRL / Solar Orbiter / SolOHI)
The Solar Orbiter was launched in February 2020 and the flight is planned to make several Venus aircraft to utilize the planet’s gravity for a speed increase, a maneuver known as a gravity aid. The image of the planets was taken while the Solar Orbiter was moving in the direction of Venus for one of these flying planes.
By the time Solar Orbiter is in operation in the vicinity of the sun to launch in November 2021, it will sweep far beyond the planetary plane to see the sun’s polar regions. It will be tremendously exciting because because of our vantage point on earth, we have never directly depicted the sun’s poles.
While it is being transported, the Solar Orbiter makes observations. It helps the Solar Orbiter team here on earth to calibrate and test the instruments on board, but the data can also be used for scientific analysis of planets, the solar wind, the space weather.
It also gives us a little inspiring reminder of the fragility and resilience of our own existence. Such photographs always reflect the words of Carl Sagan in his 1994 book Pale blue dot, from a photo of the Earth taken by Voyager 1 on its way out of the solar system.
“Look at the point again. It’s here. It’s home. It’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard, every person who ever was, lived out their lives,” he wrote.
“The amalgamation of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and beggar, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and farmer, every young couple in love, every mother and father , hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a dusty substance that in a sunbeam. ‘