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Spirit Takes Snapshot of Earth
ControlFreal writes "On its 66th Sol on Mars, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has obtained its first full view of crater Bonneville. In doing so, Spirit achieved its primary travel destination, as set out in its initial itinerary. Furthermore, Spirit has now travelled more than 300 meters, thereby fulfilling its minimum mission success criteria. With this, and Opportunity halfway through its primary mission, and having discovered very strong indications of a wet Martian past, NASA has truly many an astonishing interplanetary succes story! See the overview at the Mars Rover site for more details." Another reader writes "Among the 'money-shots' from the Mars rovers would have to rank the 'pale blue dot' image released today--a view looking back towards Earth. The larger image also includes the horizon and Sun, which because the Earth is seen as an inner planet closer in towards the Sun from a martian perspective, is difficult to photograph without saturation by solar glare."
Sorry about the silly offtopic 1st post but I just couldn't resist.
More seriously, I have been following the twin rover missions with great interest and I think it's absolutely amazing what they (And the JPL team of course) have achieved. I looked with great interest at the pic of our "pale blue (Even though the pic is monochrome) dot"
Even on the relatively tiny (In relation to astronomical standards) scale of a view from our nearest neighbour, it is truly humbling to realise just how insignificant our rock, in the greater scheme of things, really is.
Some of you might be interested in visiting a site that I visit on a daily basis to get and update on the latest images from Mars - photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov
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Shamelessy reposted with some edits from Metafilter... ....But what is that glint to the left side?
I thought at first it was just a digital photo artifact, but seeing as how the flash of white appears in several photos from Spirit's navcam on Sol66, my next thought was ALIEN BUILDINGS!!!
Okay, not really. My next thought was that it might be the lander's backshell or heatshield. So I looked up a map of the rover's intended route, and orbital images of the landing site with labels. Take a look at the photos, the maps, and the scales. Apparently the lander's heatshield had impacted a nearby crater; that's Bonneville.
Unfortunately if you look back at the Earth you're looking towards the sun.
While the cameras are probably good enough, the Moon isn't well lit and there's a lot of glare. It doesn't surprise me that you can't make out the Moon (although it probably is in the photo).
Somehow, I doubt it. Just a little perspective. Based on the current position of Earth and Mars:
Distance from Earth to the closest star in Orion (HD 30652): 26.176 lightyears
Distance from Earth to Mars: 0.0000278306 lightyears.
So, the distance from Earth or Mars is 0.00010632% the distance from Earth to 30652.
Basically, we're so damned far from Orion that, no matter where you were in the *solar system*, it would probably look the same.
Incidentally, if you want to check this out for yourself (ie, look at the constellations from orbit around Mars), and you have a hardware-accelerated 3D card, I would highly recommend trying out Celestia, a very impressive space simulator