Voyager’s Valentine

[n2doc]

FEBRUARY 14, 2011
by J. Major


Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune as seen by Voyager 1 in 1990

On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of traveling the outer solar system the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around to take a series of photos of the planets. The image above shows those photos, isolated from the original series and labeled left to right, top to bottom.

From that distance, over 4 billion miles from the Sun, the planets each appear as little more than a bright dot against the vastness of interplanetary space. And Voyager was still a long ways off from reaching the “edge” of our solar system, the bubble of energy emitted by the Sun in which all of the planets, asteroids and comets reside. In fact, Voyager 1 still has another five years to go before it crosses that boundary and truly enters interstellar space.



“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”

– Carl Sagan

http://lightsinthedark.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/from-the-litd-archives-voyagers-valentine/

[midnight]

1. Beautiful... I wonder why the pic of earth has that beam of light and

non of the others do?

[pokerfan]

3. a photographic artifact

The picture was taken using a narrow-angle camera at 32° above the ecliptic and it was created using blue, green, and violet filters. Narrow-angle cameras, as opposed to wide-angle cameras, are equipped to photograph specific details in an area of interest. The light band over Earth is an artifact of sunlight scattering in the camera's optics, resulting from the small angle between the Earth and the Sun. Earth takes up less than a single pixel—NASA says "only 0.12 pixel in size."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot#Photograph

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. 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. (Sagan)

[pokerfan]

2. Why does Voyager hate Mars?

I understand why Mercury might be problematic but there's simply no excuse for this rather outrageous snub of Mars. Perhaps it's a little payback for Pluto's demotion? :rofl:

[n2doc]

4. Maybe it was on the other side of the sun? n/t

[pokerfan]

5. I thought of that

but Mars was in conjunction with the Sun (from our POV) just a few days ago so if Mars was behind the Sun from V'Ger's POV, then Earth would have been in front of the Sun for V'Ger and presumably (I would think) equally (not allowing for inclination) difficult to photograph.

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ETA: Oh, oh oh! This image is twenty-one years old! Never mind! :banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

Mercury was too close to the sun to see, Mars showed only a thin crescent of sunlight, and Pluto was too dim, but Voyager was able to capture cameos of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and Venus from its unique vantage point. These images, later arranged in a large-scale mosaic, make up the only family portrait of our planets arrayed about the sun.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager-20100212.html