Earth and Moon Caught In Single Photo From Mars
This?
Oh. This is nothing. Just a picture of the Earth, and the Moon… in the same photo… from Mars. I mean, you see this kind of impossible all the time, no? Right, me too. Who cares really. I mean. We only had to fire a Lander to Mars years ago. And then, all that we needed to do is to code in the ability for the craft to zero in on the earth in a foreign planet’s sky. Cause, I mean, I’m sure that’s easy. And then all we had to do was make sure the lander had a good enough optical zoom to even catch a glimpse of the Earth.
Pretty simple.
Daaammmmn. My brain breaks to consider everything involved to catch this shot. For those of you interested in the real details, and not my ramblings, the photo was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRise). HiRise is an instrument embedded on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that was circling the orbit of Mars when the picture was captured.
The interesting bit is that when the image was snapped, Earth was 88 million miles from Mars. Doing a little math, that comes to a scale of something like 88 miles per pixel. If you look closely at the photo, you can see a hint of the west coast of South America.
Also, the image I used for my featured image, is a photo of the earth and the dark side of the moon captured simultaneously. That photo was captured by DSCOVR… which is a satellite probe which has the primary mission to monitor solar winds in real time. But DSCOVR also is constantly monitoring the earth’s ozone levels. While we are blowing your mind, why don’t we really do it…
Yeah. I giggled like a little school girl the very first time I saw that gif. Come ON! That is fullon. Nothing like it. Man, science is all kinds of geek-cool.