Pale Blue Dot: The photo that changed the face of the world

On February 14, 1990, before people had even thought about taking selfies, a self-portrait of the planet Earth was taken by a spacecraft launched into space to study planets outside the solar system. It has become a symbol of the fragility of our planet in the face of the vastness of the universe.

The photo, taken by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of six billion kilometers as it approached the outskirts of our planetary system, was called the “pale blue dot” (English pale blue dot) by Cornell University professor and TV host Carl Sagan. .

In addition to being one of the most famous self-portraits in the world, “Pale Blue Dot” became Sagan’s trademark and was published as a book in 1994 with the subtitle “A Vision of Humanity’s Future in Space.” Quoting the little pixel, the author wrote: “Look at this spot again. Here. It’s. Our home. It’s us.”

What message did Carl Sagan want to convey with his “pale blue dot” photo?

As a member of the Voyager imaging team, It was Sagan’s idea for the probe to send back images of Earth and all neighboring planets. He knew that the photograph of our world would be nothing more than a speck of light when printed.

But the strategy was deliberate. According to a statement posted on NASA’s website, the Voyager 1 team “wanted humanity to see the vulnerability of Earth and that our world is just a small, fragile speck in the cosmic ocean.” According to Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute, the painting shows an Earth that is both breathtaking and fragile and “motivates us to take care of our home.”

Sagan, who died on December 20, 1996, played a key role in the North American space program. In addition Be the first to advise Apollo astronauts heading to the Moonprofessor of astronomy helped design and lead the following missions: Mariner 2 to Venus; Mariner 9, Viking 1 and Viking 2 to Mars; From Galileo to Jupiter; and the aforementioned Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to the outer solar system.

How was the “pale blue dot” image made?

On February 13, 1990, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent commands into space. Voyager 1 returns to Earth to take photos. The probe warmed up its cameras for three hours and the science platform was initially aimed at Neptune.

Later, photographs were taken of Uranus, Saturn, Mars, the Sun, and then Jupiter, Earth and Venus. The images of the “pale blue dot” set were captured on February 14 at 1:48 a.m. (Brasília time), 34 minutes before Voyager 1 shut down its cameras completely to save energy for the remainder of the long mission. .

The download was an epic in itself and lasted until May 1, 1990. Data transfer took four separate communication sessions between the space probe and NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna network.

Where is the Voyager 1 spacecraft today?

After definitively entering interstellar space in August 2012, Voyager 1 becomes the farthest man-made object of all time. It was 24 billion kilometers away from Earth for 46 years, 5 months and 18 days when this article was written.

The distance means it will take 22.5 hours for the mission’s ground controllers to reach Voyager 1. The engineering team must wait at least 45 hours to hear back from Voyager 1 and being able to identify whether a sent command has the intended result.

Engineers are currently working to fix a problem affecting one of the three onboard computers that make up the FDS, the English abbreviation for flight data system.

Although the spacecraft receives and executes commands sent from Earth, the FDS does not communicate with the telemetry modulation unit, preventing it from sending any scientific or engineering data to Earth.

What percentage of the universe do we know today?

When the “pale blue dot” image reached Earth in 1990, Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute, was optimistic that we had the technical resources to detect worlds orbiting other stars for the first time. “Could one of these be another pale blue dot that harbors life?” he explained at the time. she asked.

After 34 years, we have seen that things are not quite like that. Sarafina El-Badry Nance, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley in the US and an influential author and science communicator like Carl Sagan, maps the protrusions and irregularities in the afterglow of the Big Bang, stating: Recent research has shown that 70% of the universe consists of dark energy and 25% consists of dark matter..

If only 5% of the universe consists of ordinary matter, we realize that the remaining 95% is stuff we can’t see and don’t yet understand. Although we’ve come a long way since Copernicus and Kepler, and a long way since the pale blue dot, “we’re still just starting to play with toy models and try to understand the stars,” Nance concludes on the platform. BitThink.

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