Today is the 30th anniversary of the iconic image of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on Feb 14, 1990. 30 years ago, as Voyager 1 headed out of the Solar system after a twelve and a half year journey, its cameras were pointed back toward the sun to take a series of pictures of the sun and the planets, making the first ever "portrait" of our solar system as seen from the outside.
JPL just released this new version of the image known, which has been processed by modern software to improve the quality of the image. In the original image, Earth is a mere 0.12 pixel in size in an image that contained 640,000 pixels.
Voyager 1 also captured this series of images from its unique vantage point, approximately 4 billion miles away and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. The images, now known as the Portrait of the Solar System, were taken at 4:48 GMT on Feb. 14, 1990.
34 minutes later, Voyager 1 powered down its cameras forever to conserve power. The spacecraft is still traveling and operating in inter-stellar space, but can longer take images.
Voyager 1 remains the first and only spacecraft that has attempted to photograph our solar system.
Here is Carl Sagan unveiling the Pale Blue Dot image at a press conference on the Voyager missions in 1990.
The phrase "Pale Blue Dot" comes from Carl Sagan’s 1994 book of the same name. Here is his reading of this most memorable passage from the book -
Here are some excerpts, of which every word needs to be savored and reflected upon; no one else but Sagan can bring this perspective, with such few words, of our place in the cosmos, how tiny and fragile we are in the vastness of space, how precious life and Earth are and how we need to get beyond our hubris and our delusions to save Earth and ourselves from becoming forgotten specks in the space-time continuum.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Copyright © 1994 by Carl Sagan, Copyright © 2006 by Democritus Properties, LLC. All rights reserved including the rights of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Here are a few more artistic renderings of the Pale Blue Dot narrative -
We end with this uplifting poem by Maya Angelou A Brave and Startling Truth which she wrote in commemoration of the UN's 50th Anniversary, in 1995. It was partly inspired by the "pale blue dot” and it flew with NASA’s Orion spacecraft in 2014.
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us.
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
-
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
…
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
(Check out the full text at the YouTube site.)
Let us take few moments off from the daily grind of politics and the trump assault on humanity, to gaze at the Pale Blue Dot from a far distance, to reflect upon the reality of life, to think about where humanity will be a hundred, a thousand or a million years from now, assuming we will survive the next 50. What do you think?
Further Reading
- ’Pale Blue Dot’ Revisited — www.nasa.gov/...
- 10 Things You Might Not Know About Voyager's Famous 'Pale Blue Dot' Photo — solarsystem.nasa.gov/...
- The Power of the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Three Decades Later — www.theatlantic.com/...