Earth from Mars

[Rudy]

I love one of the latest photos that captured sunset on Mars. My question is has the rover on Mars ever looked up in the evening sky and taken a photo of Earth from Mars? I know it will probably look like any other star in the night sky. Would love to see it if it's out there.

[neufer]

I love one of the latest photos that captured sunset on Mars. My question is has the rover on Mars ever looked up in the evening sky and taken a photo of Earth from Mars? I know it will probably look like any other star in the night sky. Would love to see it if it's out there.

http://www.planetary.org/image/mer_you_are_here.jpg

<<Spirit: Earth as Seen from Mars' Surface, March 7, 2004
This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd martian day, or sol, of its mission. The image is a mosaic of images taken by the rover's navigation camera showing a broad view of the sky, and an image taken by the rover's panoramic camera of Earth. The contrast in the panoramic camera image was increased two times to make Earth easier to see. The inset shows a combination of four panoramic camera images zoomed in on Earth. The arrow points to Earth. Earth was too faint to be detected in images taken with the panoramic camera's color filters. Credit: NASA / JPL / Cornell / Texas A&M >>

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Better still:

<<This is a HiRISE image of Earth and the Moon, acquired at 5:20 a.m. MST on 3 October 2007, at a range of 142 million kilometers, which gives the HiRISE image a scale of 142 km/pixel and an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a Moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disks of the Earth and Moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth/Moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.

On the day this image was taken, the Japanese Kayuga (Selene) spacecraft was en route from the Earth to the Moon, and has since returned spectacular images and movies.

On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the Moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. In fact, the RED-filter image was almost completely saturated, the blue-green image had significant saturation, and the brightest clouds were saturated in the IR image. This color image required a fair amount of processing to make a nice-looking release.

The Moon image is unsaturated but brightened relative to Earth for this composite. The lunar images are useful for calibration of the camera.>>

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Others at http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics ... craft.html

[Rudy]

Thanks for the photo and info. Rudy