If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the Alfonso Cuarón helmed thriller about being trapped up in space all alone with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, Gravity, but have been wondering what it’d be like for real, then this time-lapse video of NASA should do the trick.
The Messenger spacecraft, which provides scientists with oodles of detailed information about Mercury, captured a great deal of imagery as it was flung away from Earth on August 2, 2005. The spacecraft’s camera, the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), snapped hundreds of images during a gravity-assisted swing-by of Earth. The images were pieced together, forming a short video of what it looked like being flung from Earth.
The video is composed of 358 frames shot over a full 24 hours, and showcases a full rotation of Earth. When the camera began snapping photos it was 40,761 miles above South America, and when it the final image was captured, the camera was 270,847 miles from Earth, which is farther than the Moon’s orbit.
As NASA notes, the Earth is so bright, that the background stars aren’t visible in the images.
Though different from Sandra Bullock’s dramatic wild ride through space, seeing the Earth quickly shrink in size as it moves into the distance, surrounded by nothing but black, is certainly nerve-racking. Messenger doesn’t even have George Clooney’s dulcet tones to calm it down. In fact, when Messenger completes its mission, it will crash into the surface of Mercury — something even George Clooney couldn’t save.
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