“In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” 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. The photo’s legacy is that it has inspired the opposite response: a deep recognition of Earth’s importance, its fragility, its uniqueness. In the now-iconic image, a small, unobtrusive pinprick of light hovers amid a ray of scattered sunlight, appearing cosmically inconsequential. Thirty-four minutes after capturing Earth, Voyager’s cameras turned off forever. “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.” “It was really quite overwhelming to think about,” Hansen recalls.

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.Ī new season of COSMOS: POSSIBLE WORLDS returns to National Geographic March 9 at 8/7 Central. (Now, Hansen is the force behind JunoCam, which is riding aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft and returning ethereal, gorgeous pictures of Jupiter.)Īt the time, Hansen was part of the Voyager imaging team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Really, this was the last-ever opportunity,” says the Planetary Science Institute’s Candy Hansen, who helped plan the photo sequence. From its perch nearly four billion miles away, the spacecraft had one last chance to snap a photo of its home planet. But Voyager was hurtling toward the edge of the solar system, and its cameras were imminently shutting down.

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. On Valentine’s Day in 1990, Voyager methodically assembled a family portrait of the solar system’s many worlds. 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.

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

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