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Earth Departure Movie From MESSENGER Spacecraft

Posted by Hemos on from the pretty-things-to-watch dept.

A reader writes:"The Mercury-bound MESSENGER spacecraft took 358 images during a gravity assist swingby of Earth on Aug. 2, 2005. Those images were sequenced into an MPEG movie showing the view from MESSENGER as it departed Earth."

4 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Beautiful.... by ClaraBow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    These images have a calming, peaceful effect. It is amazing how beautiful the earth looks from a far and how chaotic it seems when your in it! Get me out of here :)

    1. Re:Beautiful.... by mikerich · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Wow - that is stunning!

      I couldn't help but think of a short essay written by Carl Sagan after he saw an image of the Earth taken by Voyager. It's spine-tingling stuff:

      '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.'

      Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

  2. Interesting by slavemowgli · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Interesting. If I didn't know better, I would've said that this is a POV-Ray animation...

    --
    quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
  3. Good for the industry by CubicleView · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I love when nasa release pictures like these. As with many of the pictures the rovers have taken the scientific benifit is not very apparent (well to me anyway..) Often they're just cool pictures.

    I'm sure they could be taken as simply a successful test of the probes systems, but they also capture peoples imagination and help keep the space program going.