In Feb of 1990 NASA was preparing to power down the camera on the Voyager I spacecraft that was 3.7 million miles from Earth at the time. Karl Sagan convinced the JPL team to turn the craft toward Earth for what he called a Family Portrait which became known as the Pale Blue Dot photo. It was the farthest we had ever seen ourselves from space and it’s still a humbling experience to see how insignificant we are on a cosmic scale even though the picture is still really in our back yard.*
Today NASA and the JPL released the latest pretty pictures from the Cassini spacecraft that are much higher resolution versions of Sagan’s idea. These are the Cassini swan song photos of the Earth and it’s moon as seen looking back though mighty Saturn’s rings.
To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994
Ironically like Voyager these amazingly bracketed shots are Cassini’s farewell postcard before she plunges into Saturn. They are sent from 746 million miles and just in time for today’s Walk For Science.
Cassini has been exploring Saturn's system for 13 years, gathering data about the rings' structure and composition as well as investigating the moons in Saturn's neighborhood and the planet itself. Tonight (April 21-22) the spacecraft will swing past Saturn's largest moon, Titan, for a final time to prepare for its Grand Finale maneuver — 22 dives in between Saturn and its rings, and a final plunge into the depths of the gas giant itself. Space.com (Click on the pictures to expand them. Checkout the Earth and her moon. NASA knows how to keep people interested in science.)
*The camera was turned off to save power and it had reached the limits of its digital resolution. The picture quality would compare to an early cell phone camera. Here is a link to the original Pale Blue Dot picture. I’m having trouble linking to pictures from Photobucket tonight.
Voyager 1 is currently about 11.6 billion miles from home and his passed into Interstellar Space. It is our first robotic child fledging into the universe. It continues to send useful scientific data and it’s radioactive power source is expected to last until 2025. Afterwards it will perhaps continue to drift silently through space for millions if not billions of years.
OR it just might be picked up by some aliens looking for a nice slightly used planet place to immigrate too. Maybe they’ll find remnants of a wall and wonder what the hell that was all about.
See you at the walk.