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Solar system portrait.

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters — violet, blue and green — and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.

Solar System Portrait - 60 Frame Mosaic.

Solar System Portrait - 60 Frame Mosaic.

Solar System Portrait - Earth as 'Pale Blue Dot'.

Solar System Portrait - Earth as 'Pale Blue Dot'.

'Pale Blue Dot' Images Turn 25

voyager 1 earth photo wallpaper

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft showed its love for the solar system, including Earth, with these images on Feb. 14, 1990.

Valentine's Day is special for NASA's Voyager mission. It was on Feb. 14, 1990, that the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back at our solar system and snapped the first-ever pictures of the planets from its perch at that time beyond Neptune.

This "family portrait" captures Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and Venus from Voyager 1's unique vantage point. A few key members did not make it in: Mars had little sunlight, Mercury was too close to the sun, and dwarf planet Pluto turned out too dim.

Taking these images was not part of the original plan, but the late Carl Sagan, a member of the Voyager imaging team at the time, had the idea of pointing the spacecraft back toward its home for a last look. The title of his 1994 book, "Pale Blue Dot," refers to the image of Earth in this series.

"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," said Ed Stone, project scientist for the Voyager mission, based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

The image of Earth contains scattered light that resembles a beam of sunlight, which is an artifact of the camera itself that makes the tiny Earth appear even more dramatic. Voyager 1 was 40 astronomical units from the sun at this moment. One astronomical unit is 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.

These family portrait images are the last that Voyager 1, which launched in 1977, returned to Earth. Mission specialists subsequently turned the camera off so that the computer controlling it could be repurposed. The spacecraft is still operating, but no longer has the capability to take images.

"After taking these images in 1990, we began our interstellar mission. We had no idea how long the spacecraft would last," Stone said.

Today, Voyager 1, at a distance of 130 astronomical units, is the farthest human-made object from Earth, and it still regularly communicates with our planet. In August 2012, the spacecraft entered interstellar space - the space between the stars -- and has been delivering data about this uncharted territory ever since. Its twin, Voyager 2, also launched in 1977, is also journeying toward interstellar space.

Voyager 1 is more than three times farther from Earth than it was on Valentine's Day 25 years ago. Today, Earth would appear about 10 times dimmer from Voyager's vantage point.

Sagan wrote in his "Pale Blue Dot" book: "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. ... There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."

A video clip of Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's co-author and widow, discussing the pale blue dot image, is available at:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/details.php?id=1363

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, built and operates the twin Voyager spacecraft. The Voyagers Interstellar Mission is a part of NASA's Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about Voyager, visit:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

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Crescent Earth and Moon from Voyager 1

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Voyager: 15 incredible images of our solar system captured by the twin probes (gallery)

The twin probes have captured some remarkable images of our cosmic neighborhood.

NASA's twin probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have captured some truly remarkable images of our solar system and are currently roaming through interstellar space. 

Despite its name Voyager 2 launched before Voyager 1 , when it lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 41 aboard a Titan IIIE-Centaur on Aug. 20, 1977. Voyager 1 followed suit about two weeks later on Sept. 5. 

While Voyager 1 primarily focused on Jupiter and Saturn , Voyager 2 visited both gas giants and then ventured on to Uranus and Neptune . But the duo didn't stop there. Voyager 1 officially entered interstellar space on Aug. 25, 2012, while Voyager 2 entered on Nov. 5, 2018. The pair continue to journey through the cosmos and have enough power and fuel to keep scientific instruments running until at least 2025, according to NASA . 

Here we celebrate the achievements of both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 with some incredible images captured by the pair. 

This image was taken when NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft zoomed toward Jupiter in January and February 1979, capturing hundreds of images during its approach, including this close-up of swirling clouds around Jupiter's Great Red Spot . 

This image of the Earth and moon are in a single frame. Voyager was the first spacecraft to achieve this and captured the iconic image on Sept. 18, 1977, by Voyager 1 when it was 7.25 million miles from Earth. The moon is at the top of the picture and beyond the Earth as viewed by Voyager. 

Color composite by Voyager 2 showing Jupiter's faint ring system. Images captured in July 1979. 

A Voyager 1 image of Jupiter's moon Io showing the active plume of the volcano Loki. The heart-shaped feature southeast of Loki consists of fallout deposits from the active plume Pele. The images that make up this mosaic were taken from an average distance of approximately 340,000 miles (490,000 kilometers) from the moon. 

Layers of haze covering Saturn's moon Titan are seen in this image taken by Voyager 1 on Nov. 12, 1980, at a range of 13,700 miles (22,000 km). This false-color image shows the details of the haze that covers Titan. The upper level of the thick aerosol above the moon's limb appears orange. 

This view of Uranus was recorded by Voyager 2 on Jan. 25, 1986, as the spacecraft left the planet behind and set forth on the cruise to Neptune. Even at this extreme angle, Uranus retains the pale blue-green color seen by ground-based astronomers and recorded by Voyager during the historic encounter. 

This Voyager 2 high-resolution color image provides obvious evidence of vertical relief in Neptune's bright cloud streaks. These clouds were observed at a latitude of 29 degrees north near Neptune's east terminator, the "line" on a planet where daylight meets darkness. 

Global color mosaic of Triton , taken in 1989 by Voyager 2 during its flyby of the Neptune system. The color was synthesized by combining high-resolution images taken through orange, violet and ultraviolet filters; these images were displayed as red, green and blue images and combined to create this color version. 

Saturn and three of its moons, Tethys, Dione and Rhea, seen by a Voyager spacecraft on Aug. 4, 1982, from a distance of 13 million miles (21 million km). 

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed the "Pale Blue Dot," is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles (6 billion km) from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic, which is the plane that contains most of the planets of the solar system. 

Voyager 1 took photos of Jupiter and two of its satellites (Io, left, and Europa ).

Enhanced color view of Saturn's ring system captured by Voyager 2 on Aug. 17, 1981, at a distance of 5.5 million miles (8.9 million km). The color variations between the rings possibly indicate variations in chemical composition from one part of Saturn's ring system to another.  

Close-up of the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa captured by Voyager 2 at a distance of 152,000 miles (246,000 km). 

Voyager 2 captured this image of Neptune's rings on Aug. 26, 1989, from a distance of 175,000 miles (280,000 km).  

A false-color image of Callisto captured on July 7, 1979, by Voyager 2 at a distance of about 677,000 miles (1.09 million km). Callisto is the second largest moon of Jupiter and is the most heavily cratered of the Galilean satellites. 

Daisy Dobrijevic

Daisy Dobrijevic joined Space.com in February 2022 having previously worked for our sister publication All About Space magazine as a staff writer. Before joining us, Daisy completed an editorial internship with the BBC Sky at Night Magazine and worked at the National Space Centre in Leicester, U.K., where she enjoyed communicating space science to the public. In 2021, Daisy completed a PhD in plant physiology and also holds a Master's in Environmental Science, she is currently based in Nottingham, U.K. Daisy is passionate about all things space, with a penchant for solar activity and space weather. She has a strong interest in astrotourism and loves nothing more than a good northern lights chase! 

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earth

On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft saw Earth from a distance of nearly four billion miles, capturing a view of our planet later described by scientist Carl Sagan as a “Pale Blue Dot.”

The first person to see the 'Pale Blue Dot' image still has it stashed in her closet

"Somewhere in that little bright speck, I was sitting at my desk."

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. Nearly a billion miles farther out than Neptune, it suddenly swiveled around and stared backward. 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.

On Valentine’s Day in 1990, Voyager methodically assembled a family portrait of the solar system’s many worlds. 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. But Voyager was hurtling toward the edge of the solar system, and its cameras were imminently shutting down. From its perch nearly four billion miles away, the spacecraft had one last chance to snap a photo of its home planet.

“Really, this was the last-ever opportunity,” says the Planetary Science Institute’s Candy Hansen , who helped plan the photo sequence. (Now, Hansen is the force behind JunoCam , which is riding aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft and returning ethereal, gorgeous pictures of Jupiter.)

At the time, Hansen was part of the Voyager imaging team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory . Her job, as the experiment representative, included planning the spacecraft’s observations and then checking the resulting images to make sure everything worked as planned—which meant that of the billions of people on Earth, she was the first human to see the image now referred to as the Pale Blue Dot .

“It was really quite overwhelming to think about,” Hansen recalls. “That our little spacecraft from so far away—that this was a picture of home, and somewhere in that little bright speck, I was sitting at my desk.”

Thirty-four minutes after capturing Earth, Voyager’s cameras turned off forever. In the now-iconic image, a small, unobtrusive pinprick of light hovers amid a ray of scattered sunlight, appearing cosmically inconsequential. The photo’s legacy is that it has inspired the opposite response: a deep recognition of Earth’s importance, its fragility, its uniqueness.

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“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 … on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” Sagan later wrote in his book , Pale Blue Dot . “In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

Hansen spoke with National Geographic about what the Pale Blue Dot meant to her then, what it means to her now, and where she’s stashed the original photograph. ( This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )

How did you end up being the first human to see the Pale Blue Dot?

I went to work for the Voyager imaging team in 1977, and I started out as the assistant to the assistant experiment representative. The imaging team, who were a bunch of scientists scattered around the country, relied on the experiment rep at JPL to implement everything on their behalf.

My main job was planning for all of our observations and camera commands for the flybys themselves. I had been helping Carl with this observation since its beginning. It was his vision. But as the person on the scene at JPL, it was my job to fill out the form that says, “Here’s the request, here’s what we want to do,” go to the meetings, just do the legwork.

We’d gotten turned down a bunch of times, but then finally in 1989, realizing that really, this was the last-ever opportunity, we got permission to go forward with this observation. So I had been involved in planning the observation as well as ultimately looking at the pictures.

How did you all design the observation?

One of the sequence designers and I sat down and looked at what we could do. Carl’s idea was to mosaic the whole sky and have the whole star background of all of the planets—but we just didn’t have enough space on the tape recorder. So we came up with a picture of every planet, in color, and some stars. We did this kind of hobby-horse-looking thing that connected all the planets with wide-angle images, and then we did the images of the sun.

And then, finally, the pictures started to hit the ground.

So you were checking the images and making sure the observations had worked.

Yes. And because it was first in, first out on the tape recorder, and we had started out at Neptune, we were working our way in. I was looking first at the Neptune images, and it was like, Oh yeah, OK, there’s Neptune, and then Uranus—oh yeah, there’s Uranus, and then Saturn, and then Jupiter—and those are relatively large planets, so they were relatively large little spots.

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I could recognize almost immediately the blemishes and the specks of dust that are in every image, so I could pretty quickly pull up an image and identify “Blemish, blemish, dust, ah, there’s Neptune,” and I was just very systematically working my way in.

And when I got to the picture that should have had the Earth in it, I didn’t see it at first.

I checked the other two filters, and I was like, How could we have missed the Earth? We got all these other planets, and our whole idea was to capture the Earth! That was a moment of terror, panic, that something had—after all these years when we finally had this opportunity—that something had gotten screwed up.

So I’m sitting there thinking, What are we going to do? What are we going to say? And then I noticed, Oh wait, over in this ray of scattered light, there’s a bright spot that I don’t recognize as dust or a blemish. So I thought, OK, let me get the other two filters. Sure enough, it was in all three images, and I knew positively it wasn’t an artifact or anything else because I knew how to recognize those.

It was the Earth.

I just sat there. It was, honestly, it was really quite overwhelming to think about. That our little spacecraft was so far away, that this was a picture of home, and somewhere in that little bright speck, I was sitting at my desk. And it was so dramatic with it being in that ray of scattered light.

Logically, I knew this was just scattered light in the optics. I knew that. But my heart was like, Oh it looks so special. The sun is shining on us! So then after I composed myself, I started making calls to let people know that we had gotten it, it looked good, all three colors, and then everything else happened after that.

Did you know that you were looking at an image that would have such an impact?

I felt it, yeah. I always did. I’d had to, in a sense, sell the observation. So I had definitely given it some thought. But giving it some thought and the actual emotional impact are two different things.

In coming back to it now, I’ve really come to realize how timeless that image is. When we took it in 1990, the Cold War was still going on. It was still the Soviet Union and the United States with nuclear warheads pointed at each other. So the message at that point in time was, Let’s not screw up the home planet by nuking each other.

And today, it’s still every bit as relevant. Let’s not screw up our home world by cooking our atmosphere—climate change. In that regard, it’s really timeless. It’s the sense that we only have one home. Mars is really not that hospitable. And neither is the moon. We have one home world, and we really do need to take care of it.

I think people kind of know that conceptually, but actually seeing Earth—and I’m thinking about Earthrise as well—seeing the planet as a whole seems to really drive that point home in an emotional way.

Yes. And that image, Earthrise, oh my god it is incredibly important to how we see ourselves.

When you look at the Pale Blue Dot today, do you still have the same kinds of reactions that you did when you first saw it?

Yes. I still get chills down my back. It’s that whole, a picture is worth a thousand words—well maybe that particular one is worth a million.

We put up the images in JPL’s von Kármán auditorium, and they took up a whole stretch of wall space, and they were just sort of mounted, the wide angles connecting together, and then the narrow angles of the planets themselves. And the person who was in charge of that, he told me one time that he always had to replace the picture of Earth, because people would come up and they would touch it. Isn’t that cool? That’s where we live!

I wonder how many images of Earth he had to replace.

I don’t know! Wouldn’t that be fun to find out?

Or where all of the originals are.

Oh those, I can tell you. They’re in a box in my closet.

Are you serious?

Yeah, I am. Not the digital data, of course, that’s in the archive. But all those original hard copies that we pinned up, that we had laying around, those are all in a box in my closet.

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SlashGear

A Look At NASA's Groundbreaking Voyager 1 Mission - And Where The Probe Is Heading Next

A gencies such as NASA are responsible for giving us a more detailed picture of space, literally in the case of technology such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope (utilizing the tiniest SSDs ). The latter is currently orbiting the Sun one million miles from us, a fascinating case study in the way that we can bring the distant reaches of space (realms it's entirely unsafe and impractical for humans to venture to directly) to us.

Drones and similar machines, capable of exploring the most inhospitable environments imaginable, have been key to this. Humans have never been more than 248,655 miles into space (a feat achieved by Apollo 13 in 1970 on its journey 'around' the moon), but Voyager 1 has boldly gone far, far, far beyond that, offering us a privileged and unprecedented insight into the universe beyond our own.

This piece will explore the beginnings of the Voyager 1 project, its objectives, and how the mission has unfolded to date. It's also important to look at the future of Voyager 1 and where it's scheduled to go next.

Read more: 5 Of The Best Bug-Busting Gadgets To Keep Pests Out Of Your Home

The Concept Of Voyager 1

Jupiter and Saturn, the fifth- and sixth-furthest planets from the Sun, are approximately 601 million miles and one billion miles from the Earth respectively, at the furthest point in the planets' orbits. At their closest, these numbers shrink to a still-ludicrous 365 million miles and 746 million miles from our planet. With these being insurmountable journeys for even the most dedicated scientists, then, NASA needed an alternative way to get a closer look at these two gas giants.

Voyager 1, which set off on its journey on September 5, 1977, was designed with just that primary objective in mind: to reach both planets. A voyager in the truest sense of the word, it would gather remarkable information about those planets (and much more besides), and continue to provide such data for decades.

Voyager 1 was launched second, after Voyager 2, and is structurally just the same. The body of both probes consists largely of a 12-foot radio transmitter, and though they might look like rather humble craft, measuring at 28.2 feet long , these revolutionary probes have done some extraordinary work. Here's how it reached the first stop on its originally-planned adventure, Jupiter, and what it was able to learn on doing so.

When Voyager 1 Reached Jupiter

Monstrously large and difficult to miss as Jupiter may be, it wasn't until Voyager 1 that scientists were given an opportunity to study it up close and in painstaking detail, marking technological strides beyond Pioneer 10 and 11's own journeys earlier in the decade. The sheer length of the journey from Earth meant that it took the probe, capable of reaching speeds of more than 38,000 mph , almost a year and a half after launch to get within range to begin documenting the planet-gobbling gas giant .

From January to April 1979, Voyager's suite of scientific tools amassed readings about the planet as it passed by, and the snap-happy spacecraft collected around 19,000 images of it in the process. This bounty provided researchers a wealth of new information about Jupiter's composition, movement, atmosphere, and more.

A previously-unseen ring, rather less prominent than those sported by Saturn, was noted, theorized to have resulted from detritus left behind by numerous meteor impacts. The immense Great Red Spot, under the closest and most sophisticated watch in history, could be observed in terms of its impact on the wider planet's atmosphere, where winds swirl between and around each other.

A NASA statement, according to  Space , concluded that "possibly the most stunning of Voyager 1's discoveries was that Io has extremely active volcanoes," a unique feature in the solar system that results from the constant pressure of the moon's orbit of the planet. Even more revelations awaited when Voyager 1 reached Saturn.

Voyager 1's Study Of Saturn

It's no short hop from Jupiter to Saturn. In fact, it's a hop of around 403.3 million miles . This part of the journey, from the beginning of its Jupiter adventure to the beginning of its Saturn one, took around a year and a half to complete: It came into range of Saturn in August of 1980.

Voyager 1 noted some interesting similarities between the two gas giants. Truly monstrous storms raged here too, with the volatile and hydrogen-heavy conditions supporting winds of 1,100 mph . Voyager 1's in-depth case study provided a new understanding of the makeup of the planet, allowing science to look at even its most previously-well-documented elements anew.

Saturn, of course, is also ringed, a fact that makes its composition so iconic. What we did not know until the probe provided evidence, however, is that what we see isn't just one thick ring, but a complex structure of smaller rings (dubbed ringlets by NASA ), in layers.

Besides the two planets themselves, Voyager 1 had a particular interest in Saturn's moon Titan. From August to November 1980, this moon was also monitored by the probe, its atmosphere and relationship with Saturn investigated using ultraviolet and other technologies. With that, Voyager 1 had completed the journey it was primarily designed for, and an astonishing journey it was. The spacecraft was far from finished, however, as there were much further reaches yet to explore.

The Voyagers' Journey Beyond Saturn

Voyager 1 still had a surprising amount left in the metaphorical tank after its study of Saturn ended. The even-more-distant Uranus and Neptune didn't get the fly-by treatment as Jupiter and Saturn did, due to the logistics of the course it took to get the best look possible at Titan, but it passed by them nonetheless, and further still.

Its twin, Voyager 2, would investigate Uranus and Neptune more closely, discovering 11 new moons of the former up to February 1986 and observing Neptune three years later. Maintaining functionality of the spacecraft's instrumentation this far away required some complex work to keep NASA communication technology up to the task, but the work was a remarkable feat of human ingenuity. February 1998 marked an astonishing record for Voyager 1: still speeding away, it became the furthest-reaching man-made object ever.

It remained so, and continues to, with Guinness World Records officially declaring it to be the Most Remote Human-Made Object in October 2022. At the time, it was 23.631 billion km  from Earth. In fact, it's so distant that it comes somewhat closer and further from the planet as Earth orbits the Sun. Let's see where it's been on its great odyssey out of the Solar System, and where it may be heading.

The Most Incredible Leg Of Voyager 1's Journey, And Where It's Going Next

Having wrapped up its investigation of Saturn, it may have just become floating space junk, but that's far from the truth. In 2012, it exited the Heliosphere, essentially the area under the influence of the Sun's strongest magnetic field. As of that August, then, it has been passing through space outside of the Solar System itself, another first in human history.

As of February 6, 2024, NASA reports that Voyager 1, more than 46 years into its journey, is approximately 15,148,155,240 miles from us. Voyager 2, meanwhile, is a little behind at 12,677,967,494 miles. Both, however, are in the unprecedented territory of interstellar space. The Plasma Wave Subsystem, Low-Energy Charged Particles, Cosmic Ray Subsystem, and Magnetometer for both probes are still functional (as is Voyager 2's Plasma Science system), meaning that although their ultraviolet and radio functionalities are among the systems to have been deactivated to maintain fuel, they're still transmitting some information back to the planet.

NASA suggests that Voyager 1 will reach the beginnings of the Oort Cloud, an icy Solar System 'shell' half the distance to Alpha Centauri, in approximately 300 years. From there, it's on course towards a constellation called Ophiuchus. I How much longer its radioisotope thermoelectric generators will last remains a mystery, but Voyager 1 and 2 have had quite the extraordinary and pioneering journey to date.

Read the original article on SlashGear .

NASA space probe Voyager

voyager 1 earth photo wallpaper

Voyager 1, first craft in interstellar space, may have gone dark

Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, with two of its satellites, Io on the left (above Jupiter’s Great Red Spot) and Europa on the right, in March 1979. The image was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft.  (Space Frontiers)

When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, scientists hoped it could do what it was built to do and take up-close images of Jupiter and Saturn. It did that – and much more.

Voyager 1 discovered active volcanoes, moons and planetary rings, proving along the way that Earth and all of humanity could be squished into a single pixel in a photograph, a “pale blue dot,” as astronomer Carl Sagan called it. It stretched a four-year mission into the present day, embarking on the deepest journey ever into space.

Now, it may have bid its final farewell to that faraway dot.

Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object in space, hasn’t sent coherent data to Earth since November. NASA has been trying to diagnose what the Voyager mission’s project manager, Suzanne Dodd, called the “most serious issue” the robotic probe has faced since she took the job in 2010.

The spacecraft encountered a glitch in one of its computers that has eliminated its ability to send engineering and science data back to Earth.

Voyager 1 is one half of the Voyager mission. It has a twin spacecraft, Voyager 2.

Launched in 1977, they were primarily built for a four-year trip to Jupiter and Saturn.

The 1980s flybys yielded new insights about the so-called great red spot on Jupiter, the rings around Saturn and the many moons of each planet.

Voyager 2 also explored Uranus and Neptune, becoming in 1989 the only spacecraft to explore all four outer planets.

Voyager 1, meanwhile, had set a course for deep space, using its camera to photograph the planets it was leaving behind along the way. Voyager 2 would later begin its own trek into deep space.

Before it went offline, Voyager 1 had been studying an anomalous disturbance in the magnetic field and plasma particles in interstellar space.

“Nothing else is getting launched to go out there,” Dodd said. “So that’s why we’re spending the time and being careful about trying to recover this spacecraft – because the science is so valuable.”

Recovery means getting under the hood of a spacecraft more than 15 billion miles away, equipped with the technology of yesteryear. It takes 45 hours to exchange information with the craft.

Voyager 2 is still operational. NASA had already estimated that the nuclear-powered generators of both spacecrafts would likely die around 2025.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

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COMMENTS

  1. Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot

    PIA23645. Language. english. The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA's Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote: "Look again at that dot.

  2. Voyager

    Galleries of Images Voyager Took. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before starting their journey toward interstellar space. ... From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in ...

  3. 'Pale Blue Dot' Revisited

    The Pale Blue Dot view was created using the color images Voyager took of Earth. The popular name of this view is traced to the title of the 1994 book by Voyager imaging scientist Carl Sagan, who originated the idea of using Voyager's cameras to image the distant Earth and played a critical role in enabling the family portrait images to be taken.

  4. Solar System Portrait

    This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic.

  5. Voyager

    Each Voyager space probe carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that the spacecraft is ever found by intelligent life forms from other planetary systems. Examine the images and sounds of planet earth. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before starting their journey toward interstellar space.

  6. Pale Blue Dot at 30: Voyager 1's iconic photo of Earth from space

    On Feb. 14, 1990, NASA's Voyager 1 probe snapped a photo of Earth from 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away. ... Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team ...

  7. Pale Blue Dot Revisited

    Pale Blue Dot Revisited. Feb. 12, 2020. Context Image. For the 30th anniversary of one of the most iconic images taken by NASA's Voyager mission, a new version of the image known as "the Pale Blue Dot." Planet Earth is visible as a bright speck within the sunbeam just right of center and appears softly blue, as in the original version published ...

  8. Voyager

    Solar System Portrait. This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic.

  9. 'Pale Blue Dot' Images Turn 25

    This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed "Pale Blue Dot," is a part of the first ever "portrait" of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. › Full image and caption. These six narrow-angle color images were made from the first ever "portrait" of the solar system taken by Voyager 1, which was more than 4 billion miles from Earth and ...

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  11. Crescent Earth and Moon from Voyager 1

    Crescent Earth and Moon from Voyager 1. Crescent Earth and Moon from Voyager 1 This picture of a crescent-shaped Earth and Moon -- the first of its kind ever taken by a spacecraft -- was recorded Sept. 18, 1977, by Voyager 1 when it was 11.66 million kilometers (7.25 million miles) from Earth. NASA / JPL. Most NASA images are in the public domain.

  12. Pale Blue Dot

    Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from an unprecedented distance of approximately 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.. In the photograph, Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of ...

  13. Voyager 1: 1st portrait of Earth and moon 45 years ago today

    Here is the 1st-ever photo of the Earth and moon in a single frame. Voyager 1 took the photo on September 18, 1977, when it was 7.25 million miles (11.66 million km) from Earth.

  14. Voyager 1 Takes the First Image of the Earth-Moon System in a Single

    Sep 18, 1977. Image Article. Voyager 1 snapped this picture from a distance of 7.25 million miles. Voyager 1 snapped this picture from a distance of 7.25 million miles. It was the first to include both the Earth and the Moon in a single frame taken by a spacecraft. Voyager 1 snapped this picture from a distance of 7.25 million miles.

  15. 10 Things You Might Not Know About Voyager's Famous 'Pale Blue Dot' Photo

    Here are 10 things you might not know about Voyager 1's famous Pale Blue Dot photo. 1. Not in the Plan. Neither the " Family Portrait " nor the " Pale Blue Dot " photo was planned as part of the original Voyager mission. In fact, the Voyager team turned down several requests to take the images because of limited engineering resources ...

  16. NSSDCA Photo Gallery: Voyager Index

    Venus page. Earth page. Moon page. Jupiter page. Saturn page. Uranus page. Neptune page. NSSDCA Photo Gallery: Voyager Index - An index of pages in the NSSDCA Photo Gallery which contain images produced by the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.

  17. Voyager: 15 incredible images of our solar system (gallery)

    Voyager was the first spacecraft to achieve this and captured the iconic image on Sept. 18, 1977, by Voyager 1 when it was 7.25 million miles from Earth. The moon is at the top of the picture and ...

  18. 'Pale Blue Dot': Meet the scientist who first saw the iconic NASA

    On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft saw Earth from a distance of nearly four billion miles, capturing a view of our planet later described by scientist Carl Sagan as a "Pale Blue Dot."

  19. Voyager 1 Wallpapers

    Tons of awesome Voyager 1 wallpapers to download for free. You can also upload and share your favorite Voyager 1 wallpapers. HD wallpapers and background images

  20. Catalog Page for PIA23645

    From Voyager 1's vantage point — a distance of approximately 3.8 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) — Earth was separated from the Sun by only a few degrees. The close proximity of the inner planets to the Sun was a key factor preventing these images from being taken earlier in the mission, as our star was still close and bright enough to ...

  21. Voyager 1's Iconic 'Pale Blue Dot' Photo Is 30 Years Old ...

    Earth appears in the original "Pale Blue Dot" as a tiny blueish-white speck of a crescent a mere 0.12 pixel in size in an image that contains 640,000 pixels. It appears afloat in a great ...

  22. Voyager 1

    The final images taken by the Voyagers comprised a mosaic of 64 images taken by Voyager 1 on Feb. 14, 1990 at a distance of 40 AU of the Sun and all the planets of the solar system (although Mercury and Mars did not appear, the former because it was too close to the Sun and the latter because Mars was on the same side of the Sun as Voyager 1 so ...

  23. A Look At NASA's Groundbreaking Voyager 1 Mission

    From January to April 1979, Voyager's suite of scientific tools amassed readings about the planet as it passed by, and the snap-happy spacecraft collected around 19,000 images of it in the process ...

  24. Voyager 1, first craft in interstellar space, may have gone dark

    When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, scientists hoped it could do what it was built to do and take up-close images of Jupiter and Saturn. It did that - and much more. Voyager 1 discovered active ...