Slashdot Mirror
Earth and Moon From an Alien's Perspective
krygny writes "NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft (whose extended mission is called EPOXI) has created a video of the moon transiting Earth as seen from 31 million miles away. Scientists are using the video to develop techniques to study alien worlds. 'Our video shows some specific features that are important for observations of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars,' said Drake Deming of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center... 'A "sun glint'" can be seen in the movie, caused by light reflected from Earth's oceans, and similar glints to be observed from extrasolar planets could indicate alien oceans. Also, we used infrared light instead of the normal red light to make the color composite images, and that makes the land masses much more visible.'" Here are links to the two videos, one red-green-blue and the other infrared-green-blue.
What, they couldn't just take pictures of Earth from the moon, resize them, and then photoshop the moon on top? I mean I'm all for NASA, but this seems pretty useless. "Seeing the earth will help us understand aliens!" I'm not buying it.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
If this alien perspective is awesome, thought provoking (or at least makes one pause for reflection) consider what the view would've been like from "Triana".
That was the space probe proposed by Al Gore in 2000 that was an earth looking satellite to be placed at the earth-SUN (not moon!) L1 point. This would've allowed it to have a continual, full on view of the sunlit side of the earth; it would've been invaluable for climate studies, weather forecasting, solar studies (how much sunlight is ACTUALLY reaching us) etc.
Of course our anti-intellictual/anti-science president cancelled it. Anyway, I would imagine the lunar transits would be spectacular, in fact we would almost be getting two missions for the price of one (because the instruments would only need be slightly redirected to image the moon).
I don't know enough about astronomy to know how close the plane of the moon's orbit is to the plane of the earth's orbit but there should be occasional transits which, in addition to being pretty, would also give us information about atmospheric attenuation (when the earth passes in front of the moon).
Now the soap box-
As an American it is so depressing when I see how the average person has come to think of intellectual as a dirty word. America is losing its greatness because it is embracing faith over reason, guts over brains, instinct over analysis. Already biotechnology is moving overseas; today you can get your dog cloned in Korea (why isn't that a slashdot story?) tomorrow maybe your heart or liver. The cancellation of this space probe was just the start of the country's fall over the last seven years.
And no, Al Gore isn't an Alien and yes he did have a hand at a critical phase of the Internet's development. (In 1993 I got a $100K grant from the NTIA which he set up).