Outbound space probe looks back at tiny Earth and Moon
NASA's space probe Juno, outward bound for Jupiter, has sent pack a pic of the Earth-Moon system from 6 million miles away. The Earth and Moon, seen from the Juno spacecraft 6 million miles out. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech I can see the pub from here According to NASA, Juno was further away than the Moon within a day of being …
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Not much
Mars at its closest is 56 million km away, and clearly visible to the naked eye. At 10 million km, Earth and the Moon would be individually resolvable with the naked eye separated by about 2 arc minutes (full moon ~30 arc minutes, limit of human vision ~1 arc minute).
amazing
It's amazing that people went from the little speck of dust on the left to the little dot on the right 35 years ago.
IMHO space age went backward, we haven't come farther anymore..
I wish I'd bookmarked the site.
But there was a discussion on space travel, and the gist of it was that if the Earth was the size of a basketball, the moon would be the size of a tennis ball 9 meters away. That was how far we traveled in the late 60s/early 70s.
Then if you take a ruler and measured 1cm from the surface of the basketball Earth, That's the ISS and how far we've been since then.
Sad, isn't it?
Not really
Manned space travel is extremely expensive and extremely wasteful, and without the economic driver of the Cold War and the arms race there really doesn't seem much need for it. We can do all the science robotically, leading to less costs, less risk to life and generally greater yields. If you include robotic missions, humanity has travelled further and accomplished far more in the time since the Moon landings than at anytime before then. The great missions were obviously in the 70s -- to Mars, Venus, Mercury, and then the Pioneer and Voyager probes, but we've not stopped. Those were little more than placeholders, scouting missions. The rovers on Mars are probably the best known of the missions since, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn remain fascinating targets. Frankly I'm as interested in and excited by these missions as I would be a small number of ex-Air Force pilots being flown pointlessly to Mars at enormous cost (and risk to their mental and physical health) so that footage can be beamed back to Earth only for people to accuse it of being fake in the first place.
Excellent picture
What struck me immediately is the distance. We think of the moon as close to our planet, but as the picture shows, the distance between the Earth and the moon is roughly 30 times the diameter of the Earth. Wow
Creepy
It struck me as well, and as far as I can calculate, the picture doesn't even tell the full story. The orbit of the Moon places it either closer or farther away from the probe than Earth, so the full distance doesn't show.
The picture creeps me out actually. I know the distances and the scale of things in the universe, but they are so vast they become just numbers. That picture however is the closest thing to a total perspective vortex I have ever come (look it up). It is close enough that for brief moments my brain gets a little perspective, or dare I say "sense of proportion". And let me tell you, it doesn't like it at all.
Btw, I can see the Paris Hilton angle, but, well...
Now then, somebody mentioned a pub.
+1 for you sir
The first thing I thought when i saw the photo was of the total perspective vortex.
just goes to prove
rl has shit graphics. dont get me started on the gameplay
Real Life...
The gameplay... geez ...the freaking User's Manual is not in the box. The PvP flag is open all the time.
I won't even begin to complain about the GM apparent absence, abundance of PKs (that would be player-killers for the uninitiated), and general foul-play. Or heavy cheating and general, widespread abuse of the rules.
... trying to recompile the kernel will start a Flame War in a heartbeat. Specially without GM consent, no matter if you actually heard him telling you to do it, and you can't prove it to the other players.
... and the game takes freaking 9 months to download, and it takes 2 people already in the game to get you invited.
I 'll stop right now...
longer life than rtg possible?
I wonder how long they will be able to operate it. If radiation and micro meteors don't take it down.
Voyager is alive and kicking...
...already left the solar system and is still beeping back to Earth. Last I heard about it, anyway.
Radiation shouldn't be a concern (isn't it powered by plutonium?) and no micro meteors got hold of it yet.
This Juno thing heading to Jupiter should have no problems.
Voyager holds right now the most range covered by a human-made working device, I guess. And I also guess you can count the distance to it light-hours or light-days, or a small percentage of a light-year. Pluto for instance is 4 light-hours away.
earth mostly harmless
they are building a hyperspace bypass, and we are in the way, check the plans!
Camera shake?
Doesn't look very good to me. Either camera shake or I must have moved at the wrong moment. Could be anything, really!
Mr
These distances are enornous, eh?
I once looked at the moon across a plateau, with it hung low in the sky. I could grasp the distance and actually feel it was close by.
I've driven the 200,000 miles to the moon, and back. OK, it took 20 years on and off, but it's not that far. At the time, I could even see the possibility of a space highway going to the moon.
But, where Juno is, and looking back, that's a different matter altogether. Does not compute!
please please please
Reg, Ask them to release all of the photos from first-test-after-launch. I think it would be really awesome to watch the earth/moon shrink in real-life photos like this.
Genuine question
Did NASA really say it was further away than the moon within a day, or farther away?
Snap happy.
"The pic was snapped using the probe's camera as part of engineering checks"
They oughtta try and restrain themselves or else they will run out of film before they get there.
Pffft! Photoshopped!
I could've produced that with one click of the mouse button using a 10-pixel brush in airbrush mode... these NASA bods have waay too much time on their hands since they dropped the shuttle program ;)
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