“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,” Carl Sagan wrote, inspired by a picture taken by the spacecraft Voyager 1 in 1990
Most distant image of our planet
The picture ‘Pale Blue Dot’ which shows the Earth as a dot—less than the size of a pixel—was taken on the astrophysicist’s suggestion. It is the most distant image of the Earth. A year from now the spacecraft New Horizons, which sent us photos of Pluto, will click away pictures of our planet, writes Marina Koren in The Atlantic. This could break the previous record
Taking the picture is a risky move as the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager—or lorri, which is the probe’s camera—should be pointed close enough to the sun “so that objects in the darkness are illuminated, but not so close that sunlight damages or destroys the camera,” the magazine’s senior associate editor adds
First picture of the Earth
The first picture of the Earth from space was taken in 1946—even before Sputnik happened. A camera was launched on a missile from the New Mexico desert by a group of scientists and soldiers, according to Smithsonian magazine. As the camera climbed up, it clicked pictures every second and a half. Within a few minutes, it fell back to the ground—at 150 m/s. While the camera was damaged, luckily, the film which was protected in a steel cassette wasn’t