Family Photo Snapped by Solar Orbiter Shows Venus, Earth and Mars Gleaming Like Stars
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Family Photo Snapped by Solar Orbiter Shows Venus, Earth And Mars Gleaming Like Stars:
Every now and again, we get a little glimpse of just how far human ingenuity has gone.
Quite literally: The above image was taken by a spacecraft travelling through the Solar System while it was at a distance of 251 million kilometres (156 million miles) from Earth - more than the distance between Earth and the Sun by nearly half again.
It was snapped by NASA and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, a mission to study the Sun, on 18 November 2020, while en route to its destination. It joins a burgeoning tradition of photos of Earth taken by instruments far beyond where humans ourselves can venture.
But it's not just Earth in Solar Orbiter's image; Venus and Mars make an appearance, too, 48 million and 332 million kilometres from the spacecraft, respectively. It's a lovely family portrait when you think about it - three rocky planets, so similar in many ways, but so very different from each other - seen through a scientific instrument - the Heliospheric Imager - designed to study the heart of the Solar System.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.