BepiColombo probes photographs Earth on its way to Mercury.

In space, no-one can hear you sneeze.

While we've been pre-occupied with medical matters other science continues. The BepiColombo probe swung by us in a gravity assist manoeuvre on its way to Mercury, capturing some cool views on the way:

sci.esa.int...

By way of comparison, here's the probe's view of Earth on the 9th compared with the GOES-17 satellite view:

and on the 10th with Russia's Elektra satellite:

a reply to: OneBigMonkeyToo

awesome - i was going to do a thread - cos i got google allert that it was sucessfully "on course "- but forgot

a reply to: OneBigMonkeyToo

Have the two first been taken the same time?

Cause it seems to have the exact same clouds...

a reply to: OneBigMonkeyToo

Fake.
Earth is flat we all know that.


Awesome cgi pics though.

originally posted by: IgnorantGod
a reply to: OneBigMonkeyToo

Have the two first been taken the same time?

Cause it seems to have the exact same clouds...

More or less. The GOES-17 image was taken at 21:20 UTC, the final image in the probe sequence at 21:04. That was kind of the point of me posting the comparison. There is actually a GOES image taken at 20:50, so I could have been even more precise in my selection.

The view fro Japan's Himawari satellite at the same time captures the western half of the weather systems visibly:

and If you zoom in on one of the earlier frames you can see the weather systems over the Americas and the Atlantic:

And just for luck, Meteosat 8's view of the pass over Africa and India on the 10th.

The probe was also photographed on its way past by a telescope in Chile:

www.esa.int...

a reply to: OneBigMonkeyToo

Thank you for further photos and additional infos, pretty interessing.

I took the Earth element of each frame in the first movie, lined them up and size-adjusted them. Could be better, but it's pretty cool

So I guess all these different nations & corporations are all great mates now, seeing as they're clearly involved in this multinational CGI fraud of the century? Seriously, there used to be a complete dearth of Earth-view satellites/ images, and now we have a wealth of them, acting in concert, providing a time-stamped video log of the Earth from many angles..

It seems a bit too convenient to me..

If I didn't say it, someone else would have! This is ATS!!!

Love threads like this. Thanks OP!

I feel like the inner planets are neglected by science enthusiasts, except for the occasional simplistic mentions of Venus in the AGW debate.

Venus fascinates me due to its extreme conditions. The few images we have from the surface look like what you'd imagine hell to look like. To my knowledge it's been quite a while since anyone tried to land anything on Venus and send back some pics with today's technology. That would be cool to see.

a reply to: FlyInTheOintment

Used to be a case of no room at the Inn on the public Silicon based life form NASA servers but these days memory is getting much cheaper.