Every now and then we get a glimpse of how far human ingenuity has gone.
Quite literally, the above image was taken by a spacecraft traveling through the solar system while it was located 251 million kilometers (156 million miles) from Earth – almost half the distance between Earth and the sun.
It was snapped on November 18, 2020 by NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, a mission to study the sun on its way to its destination. It ties in with a burgeoning tradition of photographs of the Earth taken with instruments far beyond where humans can venture themselves.
But it’s not just Earth in the Solar Orbiter image; Venus and Mars also appear, 48 million and 332 million kilometers from the spacecraft, respectively. When you think about it, it’s a beautiful family portrait – three rocky planets, so similar in many ways, but so very different from each other – seen through a scientific instrument – the Heliospheric Imager – designed to study the heart of the solar system .
(ESA / NASA / NRL / Solar Orbiter / SolOHI)
The Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020, and its flight was scheduled to take several Venus flybys to take advantage of the planet’s gravity for a speed boost, a maneuver known as a gravity assistant. The image of the planets was taken while the Solar Orbiter was on its way to Venus for one of these flybys.
By the time Solar Orbiter arrives in place around the sun in November 2021 to start its activities, it will fly far beyond the planetary plane to glimpse the sun’s polar regions. This will be hugely exciting because, due to our vantage point on Earth, we have never directly captured an image of the poles of the sun.
While it is underway, the Solar Orbiter is making observations. This helps the Solar Orbiter team here on Earth to calibrate and test the instruments on board, but that data can also be used for scientific analysis of planets, of the solar wind, of space weather.
It also gives us a little inspiring reminder of the fragility and resilience of our own existence. Such pictures are always reminiscent of the words of Carl Sagan in his 1994 book Light blue dot, from a photo of Earth taken by Voyager 1 on its way out of the solar system.
Look at that dot again. That’s right here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every person who ever was lived their life, ”he wrote.
All of our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father every hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every morality teacher, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a speck of dust in a ray of sunshine. “