Almost thirty years ago, on Feb. 14, 1990, our Voyager 1
spacecraft turned back toward its home for one last look. 40 astronomical units (almost 4 billion miles)
from the Sun, Voyager snapped the first-ever “family portrait” of our solar system.
One image in particular highlights
our own planet’s fragility in the vast cosmic arena that we call home. This
image of Earth, a tiny point of light, is contained in a camera artifact that
resembles a beam of sunlight.
The late Carl Sagan referred
to this image of Earth in the title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot. Sagan wrote: “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. To me, it
underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve
and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
We placed a message aboard
Voyager 1 and 2 — a kind of time capsule intended to communicate a story of our
world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph
record: a 12-inch
gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the
diversity of life and culture on Earth.
The Golden Record includes 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind
and thunder, birds, whales and other animals. Musical
selections from different cultures and eras were also added, as well as spoken greetings from
Earth-people in fifty-five languages and printed messages from President
Carter.
The Golden Record represents the whole of humanity, mounted to a feat of human engineering on a long voyage
through interstellar space.
You can listen to the sounds of Earth on the golden record here and take a moment to appreciate our pale blue dot.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
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