Earth and Moon seen by Mars Express
A sequence of four images taken by ESA’s Mars Express from Mars orbit capturing Earth and the Moon. The images were taken in celebration of the 20-year launch anniversary of Mars Express, which took place on 2 June 2023.
The images were taken at 14:08, 03:10 and 19:49 UTC on 15, 21, 27 May 2023 respectively, and at 15:00 UTC on 2 June 2023. This covers a bit more than half of the Moon’s monthly motion around the Earth. The distance between Earth and Mars varied from 279 186 624 km to 301 016 265 km during this time. The image resolution is about 2570 km per pixel.
Some image processing has been applied to reduce distortion of the pixels and help correct for overexposure due to the strong contrast between Earth and the Moon. However, it was not possible to correct for all imaging distortions, hence the slightly deformed shape of Earth and the Moon.
The images were taken with the super resolution channel (SRC) of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC).
