Rosetta’s Trajectory

This photo found on NASA’s Solar Exploration page diagrams the trajectory for the European Space Agency’s mission Rosetta’s exploration of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Launched in 2004, Rosetta has since flown-by Earth three times, Mars, and two asteroids, and is scheduled to arrive at the comet later this year.  It’s so how cool scientist are ale to calculate precisely where the planets, asteroids, and comet will be at a given point in time in the future and how long it will take Rosetta to reach it on it’s given path.

Neil Armstrong

Admittedly, I had pinned this image on my Pinterest a while back. I think it is so fascinating and really puts the whole scale of our world and the universe into perspective.

Neil Armstrong had the insane privilege to view the Earth in a way the no other human, animal, insect has been able to. For most people, the only way we see the Earth in its entirety is through photographs taken by satellites, which makes it very difficult to truly comprehend the vast size of the Earth from our perspective. However, when we venture outside our home planet and view it from a whole new perspective, you realize that there is so much more to the universe beyond our “tiny pea.” All we have ever known, all the history that has occurred, people and other life forms that have lived, knowledge we have obtained happened on our tiny planet. All that we know appears only as a small marble in the sky from our closest neighbor…. I’d imagine that from Armstrong’s experience, everything he had previously experienced in his life so far got put into a whole new perspective. Everything that we know, all of our problems and successes, and our life in general seem so impossibly small and irrelevant when compared to size of the universe. In a way it’s a little sad, but it is also completely mind-blowing to think about how even though we have uncovered so much about the history of the universe, there is so much more out there left to be discovered.