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."

Comments

Congratulations!

[tizzyD]

From all of us out here that dreamed of stepping on the Martian surface at one time or another, thanks for taking me there--at least in spirit.

Good job all!

hmmm

[bbowers]

Feels a little bit humbling... I feel so small and insignificant :-\

But the cultural impact...

[meringuoid]

... I don't think this will be very important. It's a dot in the sky like any other, with just an arrow pointing to it to say that it's Earth. There's no real visceral connection there.

I doubt any image returned by space exploration in the next few thousand years will change our perspective on things as much as the Earthrise photographs from Apollo 8. Our first view of Earth from the Moon, and it showed so much. It was large and clear enough to connect with, it was plainly Earth with oceans and continents and clouds, and it was tiny - all of human history and culture, all our achievements, in that small spot. Now that's quite a culture shock.

But 'pale blue dot' images? It's just a dot. It might just as well be Venus for all the emotional impact I get from it. Maybe if we could see _two_ dots from Mars - Earth and Moon - then we'd get the same sense of smallness we got from the Apollo views, because that would establish identity at the gut level.

Re:But the cultural impact...

[oneiron]

I think that's the bigger impact... Earth as a small dot can help to show humans just exactly how insignificant our planet can be in the grand scale of the universe. Sounds like the small dot doesn't feed your ego in quite the same way as the pictures from Apollo 8 did. Well good... If you want a big emotional impact, take a look at the recent "deepest space picture ever" taken by hubble. Then count the galaxies you can see in a picture that shows an area about the size of what you would see if you looked at the sky through a drinking straw.

The Little Dot in The Sky

[ashitaka]

Many of us have looked up at the night sky all our lives, some have bought or made telescopes to see even more. We've beheld some amazing and beautiful things as we gazed at the heavens. We've seen the bright stars in our sky that turned out to be separate worlds, but they still remained just little points of light as we rested comfortably on our unimaginably huge earth.

But now we see another little dot hovering above a brightening horizon.

That's our planet.

Our home.

Seen from the surface of another world.

We are now just the little dot in the sky.

I hope I'm not the only one

[IamGarageGuy 2]

I am still astounded at the pictures that are sent back from Mars. I think the world is a little jaded at the monumentous task that was accomplished with this mission. This is historic stuff that should be in the press every day! If landing on the moon was big this should be justa as big if not bigger!!!

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/pale_blue_dot.h

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Reminds one of Carl Sagan's words:

Pale Blue Dot ... Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Re:Waste of Time and Money

[digitalhermit]

Really. Let's all admit it finally. Those pictures from mars are as boring as hell!

Interesting attitude.

I, for one, find the pictures fascinating and awe-inspiring on many levels.

At first it was just an appreciation for the mere fact that NASA was able to get the rovers onto the Martian surface. When I think of how f***ing far away Mars is, and how they were able to hit the target, I'm pretty much in awe. Yeah, the physics are well understood and software exists to determine everything about the mission (I can download such software for my home PC), but actually doing it is still pretty amazing.

Then there's the whole rover itself. It's a semi-autonomous machine, thousands of miles from home base, and it can send back some pretty detailed images of the surface, drill rocks, sample the environment. Hell, sometimes getting cams in the other room to work properly can be a task. That they could do this, troubleshoot and re-program the machine from that distance, and do it *twice* gives me a tremendous feeling of well-being.

Then there are the pictures themselves. We're peering at a f***ing other planet, man! Never before in human history have we seen the Martian surface with this much detail and this much information. I know it doesn't mean much to many people, but this is the spirit of exploration, the pure f***ing joy of discovery that pushed our forefathers to new worlds, new medicines, new art. Pushing the bounds, ripping apart the g*ddamned envelope, reaching beyond our grasp, is what makes us human and differentiates us from some cockroach or mindless automaton.

Mod me as a dork, but I am happy to be alive at this time.

And in the meantime, on CNN...

[Kinniken]

...I see endless pictures of the senseless Madrid bombings, two hundred civilians killed by madmen for religious or pseudo-political reasons.

How strange a thing is humanity, which is capable of such horrors and yet can move rovers on an other planet and look up in awe at the pale blue dot that is Earth.