We truly live on the cusp of a remarkable new era of space exploration, with SpaceX rockets rumbling nearly every month and international probes scattered across the Milky Way capturing wondrous images of asteroids, comets, planets, moons and our own radiant sun.
With all the activity and media coverage of these spacecraft and probes, it’s easy to become complacent or apathetic about the data and photos their missions deliver to Earth. So let’s pause for a moment and look to the sky at these dazzling new photos of NASA / ESA’s Solar Orbiter as it traverses our solar system and studies our home star.
The new video images below, combined with a series of photos, show an incredibly rare cosmic scene of Earth, Mars and Venus, with the faint light of Uranus also winking at us from the outside.
These inspiring images were acquired on November 18, 2020 by the SoloHI camera onboard 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 at the bottom.
“Solar Orbiter is the most complex scientific laboratory ever built to study the sun and solar wind and to take closer photos of our star than ever before,” noted ESA researchers. “The Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) is one of six remote sensing instruments onboard the mission. During the cruise phase, these will still be calibrated during certain periods, but will be turned off otherwise. ”
Venus, Earth, and Mars shift slightly in the SoloHI instrument’s field of view. Venus is the brightest object seen, hovering about 30 million miles from the Solar Orbiter. When the images were taken that day, the distance from Earth was 156 million miles and 206 million miles from Mars. Far from Uranus is just a dot next to the official timecode.
“At the time of the image, Solar Orbiter was on its way to Venus for its first gravity assistant, which took place on Dec. 27,” ESA scientists explained. “Flybys from Venus and Earth will move the spacecraft closer to the sun and tilt its orbit to observe our star from different perspectives.”