Looking back
Thursday, October 4th, 2007Yesterday morning we turned the MRO spacecraft around to see our point of origin – the Earth. We took a special calibration image of the Earth and Moon. HiRISE isn’t the first to take a picture of the Earth from Mars, but we’re hoping ours will be even more detailed. We expect the Earth to be about 90 pixels across its diameter, and the Moon about 24 pixels. So it won’t be a big beautiful clear image like you’re used to looking at from our weekly releases, but we should be able to resolve features like continents!
This diagram simulates of what the inner solar system would look like if it were being viewed from above right now. MRO is looking from Mars (orange) towards Earth (purple). You can see from this geometry that we’ll only see the sunlit part of the Earth and Moon as a crescent. They’ll look somewhat less than half full.
