Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Earth as pictured from Mars in a rare snap taken 180MILLION miles away

To the uninitiated, they might look like faint white dots and blobs on a gray background.

But what you’re looking at is actually an incredibly rare photo of the Earth and moon taken on Mars — 187 million miles away.

A European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars orbiter captured the epic images as it orbited the Red Planet, capturing the cosmic objects moving through the Martian sky.

The white dot is the Earth and the fainter spot is the Moon. The scene was captured by the Mars Express craft that has been observing the distant world for 20 years to detect underground water that could lead to finding signs of life.

Jorge Hernández Bernal, who is part of the Mars Express team, said: “On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Mars Express since launch, we wanted to bring Carl Sagan’s reflections back to the present, in which the deteriorating climate and the ecological crisis more valid than ever.

“In these simple snaps from Mars Express, the Earth is the size of an ant as seen from 100 meters away, and we’re all in it.

“Even though we’ve seen images like this before, it’s still humbling to stop and think, We need to take care of the light blue dot, there’s no planet B.”

The astonishing video is a sequence of photos taken by the super-resolution channel (SRC) of Mars Express’s High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), used primarily to observe Mars’ two moons and stars.

They show the Earth and its moon on May 15, 21, and 27, and June 2, 2023.

And the final shot shows more than half of the Moon’s monthly orbit around the Earth.

The June shot was taken on the 20th anniversary of the launch of Mars Express to the Red Planet – the orbiter arrived later in December.

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

The craft is a cube of about 1.5 by 1.8 meters with two 18 meter long radar antennas.

It photographs the entire surface of Mars in high resolution, produces a detailed color map of the minerals on the surface, maps the atmosphere and probes below the surface using radar.

On the 20th anniversary of Mars Express, ESA shared ‘live images’ of the Red Planet with the public for the first time.

Mars has previously only been seen through images from orbiters and landers exploring Mars, usually days after the images were taken.

Around noon Eastern, 12pm ET (5pm UK time), new images were beamed down approximately every 50 seconds.

The Visual Monitoring Camera on Mars Express has previously detected the evolution of a rare elongated cloud formation hovering above one of Mars’ most famous volcanoes – the 20 km high Arsia Mons.

Since science operations began in 2004, the durable orbiter has given scientists a whole new look at Earth’s intriguing neighbor.

It now helps answer fundamental questions about the geology, atmosphere, surface environment, history of water and potential for life on Mars.

The spacecraft’s high-resolution camera has returned thousands of dramatic 3D views of the Martian surface.

One instrument has discovered hydrated minerals that only form in liquid water, confirming that Mars was once much wetter than it is today.

The first radar sounder ever to orbit another planet has detected subsurface layers of water ice.

Another instrument detected enough ice in the polar caps to create a global ocean 10 meters deep, revealing vast permafrost plains around the South Pole.

Mars Express found the highest clouds above any planetary surface at 100 kilometers.

The mission found evidence of the possible presence of methane, which has been attributed to active volcanism and biochemical processes on Earth.

Its highly elliptical orbit has enabled the spacecraft to look beyond Mars to examine its two small moons, particularly the inner satellite Phobos, which has been studied in unprecedented detail.

It has served as a communications relay between Earth and several NASA spacecraft, including the Phoenix lander and several surface rovers.

“The Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera, also known as the Mars Webcam, was not planned to break such a record,” ESA shared in a statement.

Its primary task, 20 years ago, was to monitor the separation of the Beagle 2 lander from the ‘MEX’ spacecraft. Once it did that and reported back, it turned off.

“Like the surveillance cameras on board ESA’s Juice spacecraft, which send back images of instruments and solar panels being deployed, it was not intended to be a scientific instrument.

“It didn’t have to create exactly accurate images. And yet we are here.’