And while scientists have found over 4,000 exoplanets, they have gathered possible clues of habitability. The biggest ongoing quest in astronomy has been to find alien worlds out there that may host life. “Back then and now, it’s kind of the same message,” she adds. We really need to take care of this world.” “We don’t have another option, there’s no plan b. “If we screw up our planet, we’re screwing up ourselves,” Hansen says. Hansen remembers that one of the messages that resonated with her at the time was how alone we are, that it’s just us out there.
And today, as rising global temperatures threaten our planet, the image is still just as relevant. And the image of our lonely planet provided some perspective. “Once I figured it out where it was, to see it in that ray of light, it’s so incredibly special.” "It’s so incredibly special."Īt the time it was taken, there was political turmoil regarding the Soviet Union presidential elections. “I was sitting there and we had a little trouble finding it in the image,” Hansen recalls. This was the original image captured 30 years ago. Hansen, along with astrophysicist Carl Sagan who wrote a book inspired by the image titled A Pale Blue Dot, kept asking for the image of Earth until Voyager 1 was coming up on its encounter with Neptune when they secured extra funding for the additional resources.Īnd the result was worth it, the image showed a tiny speck all on its own, surrounded by nothing in the vast universe. We didn’t feel like we really had the resources to really do that type of engineering." NASA/JPL-CaltechĪmazingly enough, the Voyager twins are still operational until today, beaming down crucial data on the border that separates us from the rest of the cosmos.īut this image was never on the Voyager’s agenda.Ĭandice Hansen, a planetary scientist at NASA who was part of the team behind the original image, tells Inverse she was also one of the people who asked for the photo to be taken: "It was outside the realm of what we usually did with the spacecraft. This was the angle from which Voyager 1 took the iconic image.
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