Credit: NASA.

[15], The design of the command sequence to be relayed to the spacecraft and the calculations for each photograph's exposure time were developed by space scientists Candy Hansen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Carolyn Porco of the University of Arizona. You remember that there were two Voyager spaceships, and to take that special photo, Voyager 1 was chosen, simply because it had a better viewing point. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before starting their journey toward interstellar space. That's home.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. "use strict";(function(){var insertion=document.getElementById("citation-access-date");var date=new Date().toLocaleDateString(undefined,{month:"long",day:"numeric",year:"numeric"});insertion.parentElement.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(date),insertion)})(); FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. The family we are discussing is the solar system with the Sun and the planets. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. In 2015, NASA acknowledged the 25th anniversary of the photograph. Transmission to Earth was also delayed by the Magellan and Galileo missions being given priority over the use of the Deep Space Network.

Voyager 1 was expected to work only through the Saturn encounter. That's us. But there is one family that it is particularly hard to photograph together, mainly because the distances between the brothers and sisters of this family can be above 5 billion KM and they will never get any closer. [20][21] (The ocean also contributes to Earth's blueness, but to a lesser degree than scattering. On Valentine's Day, 1990, 3.7 billion miles away from the sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft takes a photograph of Earth. [citation needed][18], Pale Blue Dot, which was taken with the narrow-angle camera, was also published as part of a composite picture created from a wide-angle camera photograph showing the Sun and the region of space containing the Earth and Venus.

[2] The phrase "Pale Blue Dot" was coined by Sagan himself in his reflections on the photograph's significance, documented in his 1994 book of the same name.[1].

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day's Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System. Dressed in a maroon shirt adorned ...read more, On February 14, 1779, Captain James Cook, the great English explorer and navigator, is killed by natives of Hawaii during his third visit to the Pacific island group.

Voyager 1's journey continues.

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. Detailed analysis suggested that the camera also detected the Moon, although it is too faint to be visible without special processing.