2023-07-19 15:14:11
The Mars Express mission was launched on June 2, 2003. More than 20 years later, it sends us a moving image. A fuzzy spot. Our Earth as we can guess it from the orbit of the Red Planet.
In 1990, the Voyager 1 probe, which left for the confines of our solar system, sent us a highly symbolic image. Perhaps the most important image of humanity. We guessed our Earth there as… a very small blue dot! More than three decades later, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Mars Express mission, the European Space Agency (ESA) wanted, thanks to a new series of images, to remind us of this strong message: “We have to take care of our tiny little blue dot. Because there is no planet B.
Why this image is one of the most important of humanity
The sequence acquired by the super-resolution channel (SRC) of the Mars Express high-resolution stereo camera (HRSC) between May and June shows a blurry spot, lost in the vastness of the Universe. And another spot, smaller, which turns around. Our earth. And our Moon over more than half of its monthly orbit. “In these images, our planet is the size of an ant seen from a distance of 100 meters. And that’s what we all live on.”comments Jorge Hernández Bernal from the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and the Sorbonne and member of the Mars Express team, in a ESA communication.
No scientific value, but invaluable all the same
As was already the case for the image returned by the Voyager probe, this sequence has absolutely no scientific value. It only corresponds to an opportunity seized by researchers to paint a portrait of our Earth once once more.
The team recalls on occasion that the first image of the Earth-Moon system taken by Mars Express was taken on July 3, 2003, when the mission was on its way to the Red Planet. Some 8 million kilometers from our planet. The images that make up this new sequence that has just been published, they were taken at a distance of regarding 300 million kilometers…
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