Pale blue dot 2.0: Tiny Earth and tinier Moon spotted by Mars orbiter

Three decades on, scientists have captured a picture, eerily similar to the one capturedby the Voyager 1 spacecraft that Carl Sagan described as seeing a "pale blue dot", referring to our home - planet Earth.The Mars Express spacecraft that recently celebrated 20 years in space took a photograph that shows the vastness of the universe and how we are a tiny part of it.

The nostalgic-looking image captured by the European Space Agency (ESA) craft shows Earth and its natural satellite as small tiny white objects. The super-resolution channel (SRC) of Mars Express’s High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) snapped the picture of Earth and its moon on 15, 21 and 27 May, and 2 June 2023. This covers more than half of the Moon’s monthly orbit around Earth.

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The latest picture comes on the 20th anniversary of the first photo of Earth-Mars sent by the orbiter. While the 2003 image was only captured 8 million kilometres away from home, the latest one has been captured from 300,000 kilometres away.

"There is no scientific value in these images, but since the conditions allowed us to point the HRSC to Earth and shortly after the VMC to Mars, we took the opportunity to create our own portrait of home on this incredible mission milestone for Mars Express," said Daniela Tirsch, member of the Mars Express HRSC team.

The scientists said the Earth captured in the image had the size equivalent of an ant seen from a distance of 100 metres.

"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," said Jorge Hernández Bernal, part of the Mars Express team who initiated the image.

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Next frontier of humanity?

The Mars Express has been away from home for a full two decades. During this time, it has received multiple extensions, with the latest keeping it operational till 31 December 2026. While ESA has already used an orbiter to explore Mars and will be sending theRosalind Franklin rover over the next decade, the goal remains to have humans on the surface of the Red Planet.

"The next bold ambition is, of course, to explore with humans," saidESA project scientist for Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, Colin Wilson."Perhaps it will only be another 20 years before humans can look up from the surface of Mars to see Earth in the night sky."

(With inputs from agencies)

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