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Juno Looks Back, Photographs Earth-Moon System
astroengine writes "Looking back as it zooms through interplanetary space, less than a month into its 445-million mile, five-year journey to the gas giant Jupiter, NASA's spacecraft Juno captured a portrait of the Earth and moon. Juno was 6 million miles away at the time. 'This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely,' said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. 'This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves.'"
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. 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.
Fake! Where are those orbital lines you always see in diagrams?
is dust on the lens.
The Admin and the Engineer
After many zooms and enhances. Photoshop Hollywood Edition (HE) can do it!
It's roughly:
RadToDeg (ArcTan (0.384 / 6*1.609))) = 5.87 degree
If you are sitting behind similar monitor and font settings as mine, it would be like staring at
O------------o
The moon orbits at ~240,000 miles. That seems like the right angular distance for a triangle of 6,000,000 x 240,000 (25:1) You can distinguish two things that are an inch apart from 25 inches away, right? Further, the earth's diameter is ~8000 miles, and the distance from the earth to the moon in that photo is approx 30x the width of the earth.
"We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves.'"
Once again they want me to feel humble. Quite to the contrary, that little dot is a very small part of the universe and yet it's the only place we know for sure that life exists. That makes me feel pretty special.
The Mars Express spacecraft got a better (IMHO) shot a few years back: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/express/newsroom/pressreleases/20030717a_image01.html
We would be 1000 behind. Most of the tech is made to kill other people. Non violent tech was used for political posturing and gain power over some one else or to get in to some one pants.
OR
Guy with big stick beats other guy. Smart guy controls guy with big stick to beat other guy. Other guy invents big stick protection. Smart guy invents stick protection legislation. Guy with big stick enforces legislation with HUGH stick. Smart guy smiles
Please find a point in there about something. It makes me sad to read it back. proofing abandedned,
A quote of Carl Sagan, for those who don't know.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
They just go the camera turned on, so no. It'll be back for a flyby in a couple years, though, so we should get a cooler shot then.
Really? You think if I take your 12MP Kodak several million miles away it's going to take crystal clear pictures? Come on. It's 6 million miles for crying out loud. It's not like you're going to zoom in and see continents.
Rule of thumb (pun intended) of angular measurement for most people with their hands extended at full arm's length:
* pinkie finger subtends about 1 degree
* first three fingers (index to ring) held tightly together subtend about five degrees.
* fist subtends about ten degrees.
* fingers spread into span subtend about 25 degrees.
My guess is that somebody realized the spacecraft would be positioned to capture a picture of the earth and moon with nice angular separation. Had their luck been ideal, they'd have caught the Earth and Moon at close to maximum angular separation, but while the spacecraft was somewhat closer so the limbs of the planets were sharper. Then the photo would serve as an illustration of all the relative scales concerned. Of course the camera might not have a wide enough angle or enough resolution for that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You can barely see anything in the picture!
That's the point. It's a different perspective from our everyday self-centered view of the world.
Why are all the other drivers always trying to measure my car?
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
One of the better bits Eric Idle came up with.
I am officially gone from
If only we had the technology to do such research when they faked the moon landings .....
Have gnu, will travel.
That's probably because it doesn't have a particularly good camera. We've got lots of good pictures from Galileo -- the purpose of this mission is to map the gravity, magnetic and radiation fields. The mission is power-starved and in a really nightmarish radiation environment, so the only camera is intended solely for outreach purposes, and that one won't last long (7 orbits) within that radiation.
Remember this is not a flagship mission, meant to do anything and everything. It's a relatively cheap mission selected through a competitive process, and thus is highly focused on its particular science goals.
In true nerd fashion it is indeed my favorite song that Eric Idle ever wrote. It is amazing how he was able to capture our utter insignificance in 24 lines, all while rhyming and ending with a punchline.
Aw shit, I'm gushing aren't I?
Cool post bro, highfive \o