The 75 frames that Voyager returned incorporated the Sun and six of the major planets – Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Mercury and Mars (and Pluto) missed out for variety of reasons. The Red Planet, for example, couldn’t be distinguished in the streams of sunlight bouncing around inside the camera optics.
One of the reasons the photo has become so famous is because of the popularity of Sagan’s writings. In his his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, he said: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. ” And he went on to describe Earth as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.
It summed up perfectly the profound “perspective” gained from the exploration of space.
Carolyn Porco, recalling the picture for the BBC in , said that it gave a “crystalline, uncorrupted view of our cosmic place that erodes all delusion and confronts us with a powerful recognition of ourselves – a recognition that never fails to move us”.
Garry Hunt, the only Briton on the Voyager imaging team, says the picture is more relevant today than it’s ever been. He started his career in the Earth sciences, including climate studies, and continues to display the image in lectures. ) “Every time I give a climate talk and I talk about what you’re doing now to make a change – I show this picture because it shows the Earth is an isolated speck. This tiny blue dot is the only place we can possible live , and we’re making a jolly good mess of it, ” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today program this week (Carolyn Porco ) reimagined the Pale Blue Dot with the Cassini probe in , turning that spacecraft’s camera system back towards earth and capturing the blue pixel under the rings of Saturn.
Getting a view of home is now seen as something of a must-do for all far-flung missions.
The New Horizons spacecraft which made a close flyby ofPluto in and is now a little over 7 billion km from Earth is expected at some point to try to repeat Voyager’s photographic feat.
Looking back at the center of the Solar System – and directly at the Sun – poses some risk to the sensitive detectors in the probe’s long-range camera, however. So, no imaging effort will occur until New Horizon’s main mission objectives are achieved.
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