Before the shutdown, the mission commanded the probe to take a series of 60 images designed to produce what they termed the Family Portrait of the Solar System. … the Voyager project planned to shut off the Voyager 1 spacecraft’s imaging cameras to conserve power because the probe – along with its sibling Voyager 2 – would not fly close enough to any other objects to take pictures. NASA said on February 12, 2020, that it has now updated the Pale Blue Dot image, using modern image-processing software and techniques. 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.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: It turned out to be one of the most memorable images ever taken from space. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, out near Saturn, took this iconic image of Earth 33 years ago. The blue glow of Earth occupies less than a single pixel so it’s not fully resolved. | In this image from Voyager 1 – acquired on February 14, 1990, from a distance slightly past the orbit of Saturn – planet Earth appears as a pale blue dot within the sunbeam, just right of center.

Sagan pale blue dot quote