Carl sagan blue dot quote6/10/2023 (Now, Hansen is the force behind JunoCam, which is riding aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft and returning ethereal, gorgeous pictures of Jupiter.)Īt the time, Hansen was part of the Voyager imaging team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Really, this was the last-ever opportunity,” says the Planetary Science Institute’s Candy Hansen, who helped plan the photo sequence. From its perch nearly four billion miles away, the spacecraft had one last chance to snap a photo of its home planet. But Voyager was hurtling toward the edge of the solar system, and its cameras were imminently shutting down. Carl Sagan had first proposed the observation nearly a decade earlier, only to have the idea rejected over and over again for several reasons, including concerns that the images wouldn’t provide any scientific value. On Valentine’s Day in 1990, Voyager methodically assembled a family portrait of the solar system’s many worlds. There, pressed onto a star-studded sky, were a dazzling array of planets-ringed Saturn, giant Jupiter, bright white Venus, and a stunningly pale, blue, watery Earth. Nearly a billion miles farther out than Neptune, it suddenly swiveled around and stared backward. Thirty years ago today, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft had already traveled well beyond the realm of the planets and was shooting toward interstellar space.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |