You are here (as seen from Mars)

I saw a link to an incredible image the other day. The image was taken by the Spirit rover on Mars (which I've written about here) in March 2004 (but the image wasn't uploaded to Flickr until April 26th 2010).


What makes this image awesome is the fact that it is an image of Earth taken from the surface of Mars. Amazing!

A reminder of how alone we really are and how vast space is. And how incredible it is that we've managed to land rovers on another planet.

Click the image to go to the official NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Flickr stream.

Quote from the image description:

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. (March 8, 2004)

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.