“On the special occasion of Mars Express’s 20th anniversary since launch, we wanted to bring Carl Sagan’s reflections back to the present day, in which the worsening climate and ecological crisis make them more valid than ever,” says Jorge Hernández Bernal of the University of the Basque Country and Sorbonne University, and part of the Mars Express team who initiated this image.

“In these simple snapshots from Mars Express, Earth has the equivalent size as an ant seen from a distance of 100 metres, and we are all in there. Even though we have seen images like these before, it is still humbling to pause and think: we need to look after the pale blue dot, there is no planet B.”

The sequence of images was acquired by the super resolution channel (SRC) of Mars Express’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), which is primarily used for observing Mars’s two moons and the stars. They show the Earth and its moon on 15, 21 and 27 May, and 2 June 2023. This covers more than half of the Moon’s monthly orbit around Earth.

The final image in the sequence marked the anniversary of the launch of Mars Express on 2 June 2003. It was taken shortly before a special anniversary event during which images of Mars taken by the spacecraft’s Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) were beamed ‘live’ back to Earth in a first-of-its-kind broadcast.

“There is no scientific value in these images, but since the conditions allowed us to point the HRSC to Earth and shortly after the VMC to Mars, we took the opportunity to create our own portrait of home on this incredible mission milestone for Mars Express,” says Daniela Tirsch, member of the Mars Express HRSC team at the German Aerospace Center, DLR.