Pale Blue Dot
In September 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1,
a 722-kilogram (1,592 lb) robotic spacecraft on a mission to study the
outer Solar System and eventually interstellar space.[3][4]
After the encounter with the Jovian system in 1979 and
the Saturnian system in 1980, the primary mission
was declared complete in November of the same year. Voyager 1 was the
first space probe to provide detailed images of the two largest planets and
their major moons.
The spacecraft, still travelling at 64,000 km/h
(40,000 mph), is the most distant man-made object from Earth and the first
one to leave the Solar System.[5]
Its mission has been extended and continues to this day, with the aim of
investigating the boundaries of the Solar system, including the Kuiper
belt, the heliosphere and interstellar space. Operating for
41 years and 18 days as of today (23 September 2018), it receives
routine commands and transmits data back to the Deep Space Network.
Voyager 1 was expected to work only through the
Saturn encounter. When the spacecraft passed the planet in 1980, Sagan proposed
the idea of the space probe taking one last picture of Earth.[8] He
acknowledged that such a picture would not have had much scientific value, as
the Earth would appear too small for Voyager's
cameras to make out any detail, but it would be meaningful as a perspective on our place in the universe.
Although many in NASA's Voyager
program were supportive of the idea, there were concerns that taking a
picture of Earth so close to the Sun risked damaging the spacecraft's imaging
system irreparably. It was not until 1989 that Sagan's idea was put into
practice, but then instrument calibrations delayed the operation further, and
the personnel who devised and transmitted the radio commands to Voyager 1
were also being laid off or transferred to other projects. Finally, NASA Administrator Richard
Truly interceded to ensure that the photograph was taken.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Twenty-five years ago, Voyager 1 looked back toward Earth
and saw a 'pale blue dot,' " an image that continues to inspire wonderment
about the spot we call home.
— Voyager project scientist
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and,
if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it,
everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their
lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident
religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every
hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and
peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and
father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner
of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said
that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience.
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
