by Tom Shafer
July 14, 2023
A couple of amazing space images were revealed to the public this week, and I couldn’t resist posting them here for your perusal. One comes from the James Webb Telescope that orbits our earth and transmits remarkable pictures of our universe, including objects that are too distant, too faint, or too old (in universe time). This one is local, as in our own solar system, and frankly, it needs no formal introduction.
This new image of Saturn not only provides a more detailed view of the planet’s ring system, but it also captures four of its moons – including Dione, Enceladus, and Tethys. And, frankly again, this representation looks more like an artist’s rendering than a photograph! If you would like to learn how this portrait was collected (and to see better close-ups), click here to access the NASA James Webb Telescope webpage.
The other image is easily the coolest GIF ever created, and comes to us compliments of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, which is now permanently planted on Mars. The craft just celebrated twenty years of space duty, and to commemorate this significant anniversary, the team in charge of the program decided to turn its camera back at Earth and the moon.
This image clearly illustrates and exemplifies the sheer distance between Mars and Earth, and exhibits just how impressive a technological achievement traveling to the Red Planet really is.
The team intentionally tried to draw a comparison to the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph taken of Earth from NASA space probe Voyager I in 1990 as it exited our solar system — a request made by famed American astronomer Carl Sagan — an image that moved him to reflect on our fragility here with three famous sentences — and just six words: “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
A statement from the Mars Express team is not as succinct, but it lays out directly this moment’s inflection point for our planetary home:
“On the special occasion of Mars Express’s 20th anniversary since launch, we wanted to bring Carl Sagan’s reflections back to the present day, in which the worsening climate and ecological crisis make them more valid than ever. In these simple snapshots from Mars Express, Earth has the equivalent size as an ant seen from a distance of 100 meters, and we are all in there. Even though we have seen images like these before, it is still humbling to pause and think: We need to look after the pale blue dot; there is no planet B.”
I truly wish that all of us could at least agree to this.
