Another family portrait of the Solar System, this one from near the fire

The MESSENGER spacecraft has captured the first portrait of our Solar System from
the inside looking out. Comprised of 34 images, the mosaic provides a complement
to the Solar System portrait – that one from the outside looking in – taken by
Voyager 1 in 1990.

”Obtaining this portrait was a terrific feat by the MESSENGER team,” says MESSENGER
Principal Investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
“This snapshot of our neighborhood also reminds us that Earth is a member of a
planetary family that was formed by common processes four and a half billion years
ago. Our spacecraft is soon to orbit the innermost member of the family, one that
holds many new answers to how Earth-like planets are assembled and evolve.”

MESSENGER’s Wide Angle Camera (WAC) captured the images on November 3 and 16, 2010.
In the mosaic, all of the planets are visible except for Uranus and Neptune, which –
at distances of 3.0 and 4.4 billion kilometers – were too faint to detect. Earth’s
Moon and Jupiter’s Galilean satellites (Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Io) can be
seen in the NAC image insets. The Solar System’s perch on a spiral arm of the Milky
Way galaxy also afforded a beautiful view of a portion of the galaxy in the bottom
center.

“The curved shape of the mosaic is due to the inclination of MESSENGER’s orbit from
the ecliptic, the plane in which Earth and most planets orbit, which means that the
cameras must point up to see some planets and down to see others,” explains MESSENGER
imaging team member Brett Denevi of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. “ The images are stretched to make it easier to
detect the planets, though this stretch also highlights light scattered off of the
planet limbs, and in some cases creates artifacts such as the non-spherical shape
of some planets.”

Assembling this portrait was no easy feat, says Solomon. “It’s not easy to find a
moment when many of the planets are within a single field of view from that perspective,
and we have strong Sun-pointing constraints on our ability to image in some directions.”
***
more: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/media/SolarSytemPortrait.html


Messenger will begin orbital insertion firing on 18 Mar. See the countdown clock at
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/index.html


Keep in mind, this machine was launched in 2004 -- still going strong.