Happy “Pale Blue Dot” Day
On Earth Day, it’s a good time to revisit the iconic photograph from 30 years ago and the man who made it famous
NASA’s Voyager 1 launched over 42 years ago with a mission to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, which it completed in relatively short order. But the Voyager didn’t stop there — equipped with Beethoven records and greetings in 55 languages, the spacecraft hurtled deeper into space, leaving our planetary neighborhood behind.
By February 1990, the Voyager was 3.7 billion miles from our Sun. As it passed through the fringes of our solar system, the spacecraft’s operators turned it around for one final look at the planet where its journey began. Of the 60 photos the Voyager took that day—which combined to form the first “family portrait” of our solar system—one stands out. It’s a grainy image, difficult to make out, with three streaks of light in an otherwise dark frame.
The seemingly underwhelming image would come to be known as the “Pale Blue Dot” because of the tiny speck suspended within the far right streak of light. That’s Earth. In the immortal words of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, “That’s here…
