Space Selfie:
The first Solar system space selfie was taken by the craft Voyager on Valentine’s day, February 14, 1990. From 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers), Voyager 1 turned its camera back towards Earth and snapped 60 frames. Voila! The first space selfie. Gives new meaning to the phrase,”We are the eyes of the Earth.”
Voyager took a series of pictures of the Solar system and Earth (see PIA00452). On the 30th anniversary of the solar system selfie and the Pale Blue Dot image, NASA enhanced the original images. They were released this week.
The ‘Pale Blue Dot’ image captures the imagination immediately. It evokes strong emotions from all who view it. In each of my climate and sustainability talks, we see Planet Earth visible as a bright speck within a sunbeam. Pale Blue Dot space selfie looks back at our solar system and our planetary neighborhood.
How did this come to be?
In 1990, project managers planned to shut off the Voyager 1 spacecraft’s imaging cameras to conserve power. Because the probes, Voyager 1 and sibling Voyager 2, would not again need to use their cameras. Before the shutdown, mission control commanded Voyager 1 to take a series of 60 images. These images were designed to produce what they termed the “Family portrait of the Solar System” (see PIA00451).
At the bottom you can see in the lightest section of the image the Sun rays emanating. Rays scattered within the camera optics and stretched across space highlighting Earth within a beam. From Voyager’s angle, Earth appeared close to the Sun. It’s glare would’ve damaged the camera at another position. Because inner planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars were close to the Sun, a solar system selfie could not be taken earlier in the mission.
Executed on Valentine’s Day 1990, the Voyager 1 Narrow-Angle Camera returned images of six planets, plus the Sun in monochrome. Created by combining images using green, blue and violet spectral filters a space selfie emerged. Taken at 4:48 GMT on Feb. 14, 1990, just 34 minutes later Voyager 1 powered off its cameras forever.
Pale Blue Dot
The Earth selfie name came from the title of a 1994 book by Voyager’s imaging scientist, Dr. Carl Sagan. It was his idea to use Voyager’s cameras to take the selfie of our home. He later wrote a book he titled, “Pale Blue Dot”
In it he wrote, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.”
Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
More links:
You can hear Dr. Sagan narrate the powerful Pale Blue Dot passage here.
Learn more about Carl Sagan and the decision to take the solar system selfie, check out this article on BBC
It was not the first look back at the Planet Earth from space. The most important discovery humans made going to the Moon, was Earth. You can read about the first image of the Earth from the Moon in another Earth day post.
