‘
The Pancam is a camera on both of the Mars rovers. Almost all the way cool images from the martian surface have been taken by these cameras, from shots of the craters and gullies to images of the sky above Mars.
The Pancam project has been posting images from the cameras, and there are some really phenomenal ones there, including the image above, which is a time lapse sequence of Earth and Jupiter rising before dawn. Even better: they created an animated gif of the motion! Very cool. Remember– that speck of light you see in the image is us. You are in that picture. I’m in that picture. Everyone you know is in that picture, on that tiny mote of light.
I sometimes wonder– the space program was not created so that pictures like that could be taken. They are more of a happy circumstance of the program. Yet I wonder if, in the long run, images like that will be one of the biggest legacies of these early days of exploration.
Tip of the lens cap to Larry Klaes for the link to the Pancam site.’
June 20th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Awesome! I always wondered… What would our planet look like from Mars? Mars is already nice to look at, and it’s smaller than Earth! It should be really a awesome view in a scope.
June 20th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
I’m not sure which is which. I presume the brighter one is Jupiter since it’s so much larger than Earth and Mars could be closer to it (if it’s on the right side of its orbit). Also, since Earth is inferior to Mars, it will never show a whole disk.
- Jack
June 20th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
I love seeing views of Earth like that.
My favorite has to be the one Carl Sagen pushed so hard for. It is an image from Voyager looking back at Earth.
https://www.planetary.org/bluedot_poster.html
June 20th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
Earth will show a (as good as) full disk to Mars at opposition, as Venus does to Earth. If Jupiter is also at opposition, it will be much farther away from Mars than Earth is.
June 20th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
The Pancam page says, “Earth is the brighter dot moving up the center of the field; Jupiter is the slightly dimmer dot coming in to the field in the upper left, later.”
June 20th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Wow! Too cool. Every person who is now, or ever has been on earth is in that photo.
Love it!! Love your blog!
June 20th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Here’s a fun tidbit. What looks like it’s missing from this picture? Hint: it’s 3,476 kilometers in diameter, and twelve people walked on it.
I was curious why the Moon didn’t show up on the Pancam photos, so I hopped over to JPL’s Solar System Simulator and asked for a view of Earth from Mars on 29 December 2005. The result shows that the Moon is too close to the Earth to be made out as a separate body. . . neat.
June 20th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
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June 20th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Actually, wouldn’t only half of us be in that picture? (Well, probably not exactly half, since the human population isn’t distributed uniformly over the Earth’s surface, but you get the idea.)
June 20th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
Wonderful. Really puts things in perspective.
June 20th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Blake Stacey clarifies: “The Pancam page says, ‘Earth is the brighter dot moving up the center of the field; Jupiter is the slightly dimmer dot coming in to the field in the upper left, later.’”
Thank you. As usual, I “assumed” incorrectly.
James opines: “Earth will show a (as good as) full disk to Mars at opposition, as Venus does to Earth. If Jupiter is also at opposition, it will be much farther away from Mars than Earth is.”
Yes, but it will never be a full disk until it (the Earth) passes directly behind the sun. Also, Jupiter being at opposition is exactly what I meant about “the right side of its orbit.”
- Jack
June 20th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
I’ve always wondered (well, not *always*, but ever since I thought of it several years ago), if a Martian Galileo would have a much easier time with the Inquisition given the naked-eye example of the Moon orbiting the Earth. I wonder, could
you see the 4 Galilean moons of Jupiter from Mars? (Without a telescope, that is.) Since it’s closer to Jupiter, they would be brighter and more importantly, farther from Jupiter. But Jupiter would be brighter too, so there would be more glare. But on yet another hand, the seeing would be perfect!
I too would have liked to see the Moon in these pictures.
June 21st, 2006 at 2:39 am
Any guesses as to what the dim streak of light that appears in one of the frames (near the lower left corner) might be?
June 21st, 2006 at 5:39 am
I’m pretty sure it’s an optical illusion, but to me there appears to be a third object to the right of Earth moving from top to bottom very quickly (two frames, leading to my optical illusion theory) about 1/4 of the way through the motion gif. It’s either two well-placed photo imperfections or aMartian moon. If it were the latter, I’d think that the site would comment on it.
June 21st, 2006 at 8:05 am
Oh, and just to clarify, “opposition” refers to when both planets are on the SAME side of the sun, if I’m not mistaken.
June 21st, 2006 at 8:07 am
There are a bunch of things whizing around there. This a way cool!Thanks for posting this!
June 21st, 2006 at 8:16 am
Seeing that makes we wish that we’d had a probe like that on Mars in back in the 1980’s and seen if there really was a Transit of Earth across the Sun as claimed by Arthur C. Clarke in the story of the same title.
June 21st, 2006 at 8:41 am
I ran a sim on Starry Night. Mars’ moons were well out of sight of this image. Looks like it was just two coincident ‘blips’
June 21st, 2006 at 9:06 am
Astronomy is cool…
Happy summer solstice everyone! The days only get shorter from here on out. Check out this picture of the Earth rising over Mars, like the Apollo pictures of the Earth rising over the moon, it really gives you a sense……
June 21st, 2006 at 10:03 am
I too noticed the spurious flashes if light in separated frames. One appears at , it seems, 90 degree orbital intervals. Obviously not the moon as it takes 28 days to cover full orbit. It does ‘orbit’ in the right curves, but the few sample shots would be far too few to define that orbit anyway. It is only a 29 minute window of the scene, so the orbital movement of the Moon in that time is negligible.
Linking to JPL’s Simulator and adjusting the various options, shows the Moon is close to the Earth from the viewpoint of Mars, and true, it must be in the general direction of the Sun. However, the Sun at that distance would not present as much glare as it would from Earth. But there may be a problem if the Moon is on the nearer side of Earth to Mars, the disk of the Moon would hardly be visible as it would be the dark side.
One thing I could not determine though, was the time exactly that corresponded to the 04:25 hours, ‘local time’ that the exposures started. Does it refer to the Mars time, GMT or US Eastern Standard? And how does one convert it anyhow? But I did notice though that plugging in ANY time for that day in Dec. 2005, gave little difference.
Ivan
June 21st, 2006 at 10:09 am
Grrrrr. …Flashes OF light… in first para. ( I missed that typo. and a couple of minor ones).
Ivan
June 21st, 2006 at 2:07 pm
There’s a touching episode in C. S. Lewis’s _Out of the Silent Planet_, a sort of theological science fiction story. An Earthman stranded on another planet (Bad Astronomy: Martian canals) runs into an alien astronomer, who forms the opinion that the refugee’s home planet is Thulcandra, an ill-favoured place in their astronomy and their religion - and it is; he sees a small but detailed spot in a mysterious telescope, recognisable but rather sadly upside down. He is deeply saddened.
Joe: my MSIE says that https www.planetary.org/bluedot_poster.html has a wonky security certificate, so I don’t think I want to go. But it sounds lovely.
June 21st, 2006 at 3:42 pm
I’ve always thought that 1% of pictures from spacecraft should be dedicated to capturing the asthetics of that unique environment. I’m not certain but I believe Galileo (spacecraft) could have imaged Amalthea as it did a final pass during its deorbit around Jupiter and no attempt was made because of a NASA policy that all images must be scientificly analyzed and that would have taken money which wasn’t originally allocated for the dying spacecraft.
The Voyager image of the solar system was pure genius. It had no scientific merit, but it is one of my favorites.
Regarding the Buzz Parsec question on how much easier Jupiter’s satellites would be, I did a check with Redshift which allows you to do astronomy from the surfaces of other planets. When Jupiter is at opposition Ganymede’s magnitude would be 4.56 with Jupiter approximately 3.85 a.u. away. Compare this to Earth where Ganymede would be 4.83 magnitude. There is a significant difference but I think it would still be too dim to see. On the other hand Earth’s moon would be quite visible so perhaps heliocentrism would have been an easier bite to swallow. Of course even when people are shown proof there can still be resistance to new ideas.
June 22nd, 2006 at 3:07 pm
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