The photographer was Voyager 1, the first man-made object to enter interstellar space.
September 5, 1977 was a memorable day in the history of space exploration, shortly after the launch of its twin, Voyager 2, on August 20 Voyager 1 started on its endless journey. Anyway, even though it had some disadvantages, Voyager 1 overtook its brother in time, as it reached Jupiter by a faster route. Voyager 1’s last series of images were taken of Earth and the planets of the Solar System from a dizzying distance, after which, to save energy, ground control deactivated its camera systems forever. In August 2012, this device entered interstellar space, making it the farthest man-made object from our planet.
Voyager 1 now (January 2022) It was 23.3 billion kilometers from Earthat this otherwise you can follow it on the website the path of both Voyager probes and the functionality of their instruments. As you can see, most of Voyager’s instruments are still functional – that is, it can receive commands from Earth and act on them – however, due to the great distance, the communication time with the probe is two days.
The image shown above is therefore one of the most famous images of space exploration. As the well-known scientist Carl Sagan put it: this “Pale Blue Dot” is the Earth itself. The picture was taken on February 14, 1990 at a distance of 6 billion km from the Sun. Voyager 1 was then speeding out of the Solar System – beyond Neptune and about 6 billion kilometers from the Sun – when mission control told it to look back “home” once more. The probe took a series of 60 images that were used to create the first so-called “family portrait” of our solar system. The “family portrait” was anyway the first and to this day the only time when a spacecraft tried to photograph our home solar system. Only three spacecraft were able to make such an observation from such a distance: Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and New Horizons.
Because of Voyager 1’s distance, Earth is just a pixel-sized point of light in the image. In addition to Earth, Voyager 1 also took pictures of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus. However, not everyone took part in the photo: Mars was obscured by scattered sunlight reflecting off the camera, Mercury was too close to the Sun, and the dwarf planet Pluto was too small, too far, and too dark to be detected by Voyager’s systems. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—which built and operates the Voyager probes—installed the entire mosaic of the image on the wall of the Theodore von Kármán Auditorium, covering more than 20 meters. It is said that the image of the Earth on this mosaic has to be changed very often because so many people are used to understanding it. NASA also made the image available online in 2019.
(Image: the Voyager 1 probe, source: Flickr/Global Panorama)
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