We are small but nice.
The Earth occupies a tiny place in the vast universe. NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft gave us a mind-bending view of our planet back on February 14, 1990, when it photographed distant Earth.
The earth appears as a tiny blur with sunbeams streaking across the frame. The spacecraft, launched in 1977, was 6 billion kilometers from the Sun at the time.
In honor of the 30th anniversary of the image, NASA has updated the image to be titled 'Pale Blue Dot'.
“State of the art software and image processing techniques were used to update the image,” NASA said in a statement Wednesday.
NASA shut down the Voyager 1 camera system to save power shortly after taking a series of photographs called 'Family Portrait of the Solar System'. All these years later, Voyager is still exploring the universe. He entered interstellar space in 2012.
The name 'Pale Blue Dot' comes from astronomer Carl Sagan and his 1994 book of the same name.
'It's here. This is home. This is us. It has everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, every person that has ever lived their lives, 'wrote Sagan.
It is worth a few minutes of contemplation all these years later.
Sources: Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech
