IT’S a pale blue speck in the unimaginable expanse of space, a cosmic grain of sand less than one pixel wide against a background of endless night.
Yet this photograph fundamentally changed humanity’s view of itself – because the so-called ‘Pale Blue Dot’ is in fact planet Earth seen from FOUR BILLION miles away.
The mind-blowing pic was the idea of scientist Carl Sagan who pressed NASA to turn around the Voyager I spacecraft as it sped at 35,700mph (62,000kmh) to the very edge of our solar system.
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| The mysterious blue dot is a tiny speck in the vast emptiness of space |
Sagan believed the resulting photograph would put wars, conflict and humanity’s troubles into cosmic perspective by showing just how tiny and fragile the planet we share is.
Now, as Voyager I is properly beyond the solar system and out in interstellar space there are renewed calls in many online space forums for the experiment to be repeated.
Voyager I is closer to 14 billion miles away from Earth today – effectively beyond the gravitational influence of the sun. Incredibly the satellite, launched in 1977, will fly by the next NEAREST star in 40,000 years.
The Sagan-inspired image of Earth as a speck less than 0.12 pixels in size, has become known as "the pale blue dot”.
He said: "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.”
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| The Pale Blue Dot is in fact planet Earth, photographed some 4 billion miles away in space |
Candy Hansen, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked on the Voyager imaging team alongside Sagan added: "I was struck by how special Earth was, as I saw it shining in a ray of sunlight.
"It also made me think about how vulnerable our tiny planet is."
The NASA spacecraft had already captured many incredible images of planets within the Solar System but as power continued to fall the Voyager team needed to disable its camera so it would have the power it needed to keep transmitting back to NASA.
NASA researcher Candice Hansen-Koharcheck said: "You know, I still get chills down my back because here was our planet, bathed in this ray of light, and it just looked incredibly special."
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| The voyager spacecraft is close to 14 billion miles away from Earth now |
In his 1994 book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space."
Sagan would wrote: “From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again 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. From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us."
Carl Sagan.
Carl Sagan believed the image could put humanity into a wider, cosmic perspective