Written by Heba Al-Sayed Tuesday, July 18, 2023 04:00 AM
The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter, which has been studying Mars from above for two decades, has captured a poignant view of our planet and our moon from millions of miles away.
“In this simple snapshot from Mars Express, the Earth is about the size of an ant seen from 100 meters away, and we’re all there,” Jorge Hernandez Bernal, a planetary scientist working on the orbiter’s mission, said in a statement.
In the footage you see the Moon orbiting Earth from 186 million miles (300 million kilometers) away, it’s similar to the view you’d see if you were standing on Mars with binoculars and looking down on Earth.
For decades, the probe has provided researchers with rewards of Martian insight, finding evidence that Mars, earlier in its history, was a watery, blue world with the potential to host life (although it is not known if any primitive Martian life existed). .
The European Space Agency said: “The main discoveries include the presence of minerals that form only in the presence of water, the discovery of deposits of water ice underground, and evidence that volcanoes on Mars may have persisted until recently.”
