We are truly living on the verge of a remarkable new era of space exploration, with SpaceX rockets bouncing around the Milky Way almost every month and amazing images of asteroids, comets, planets, moons and our own bright sun record.
With all the activity and media coverage of this spacecraft and sins, it’s easy to be complacent or apathetic about the data and photos that deliver their missions to earth. So let’s stop and look at the sky at these dazzling new photos of NASA / ESA’s Solar Orbiter as it traverses our solar system studying our home star.
The new video footage below, along with a series of photos, shows an incredibly rare cosmic table of Earth, Mars and Venus, with the dim light of Uranus also winking at us from the outside.
These inspirational images were obtained on November 18, 2020 through the SoloHI camera installed aboard Solar Orbiter. Venus (left), Earth (center) and Mars (right) are clearly visible in the foreground, with a tapestry of bright stars in the background, all captured as the spacecraft orbits the sun. Eagle-eyed astronomers also noted that Uranus shares the stage near the lower edge.
“Solar Orbiter is the most sophisticated scientific laboratory ever built to study the sun and the solar wind. It takes our stars closer than ever before,” ESA researchers said. The Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) is one of the six remote sensing instruments on board the mission. During the sailing phase, it is still calibrated during specific periods, but is otherwise switched off. ”
Venus, Earth and Mars move slightly in the field of view of the SoloHI instrument. Venus is the brightest object seen and hovers about 30 million miles from the Solar Orbiter. When the shots were taken that day, the distance to Earth was 156 million miles and 206 million miles to Mars. Far from Uranus is just a dot next to the official time code.
“At the time of the survey, Solar Orbiter was on its way to Venus for its first gravity assistance, which happened on December 27,” ESA scientists explained. “Venus and Earth flying planes will bring the spacecraft closer to the sun and tilt its orbit to be able to observe our star from different perspectives.”