The Pale Blue Dot

On February fourteenth, nineteen ninety, a spacecraft about the size of a subcompact car was three point seven billion miles from Earth, traveling at roughly thirty-five thousand miles per hour, and NASA's Deep Space Network had just confirmed its position. Voyager one had been in flight for twelve years and five months. It had passed Jupiter in nineteen seventy-nine, Saturn in nineteen eighty, and had been moving outward ever since, heading into interstellar space. It still had power — but not much, and not for much longer in terms of useful instrument operation. The cameras, in particular, were drawing on a finite budget. Once turned off to conserve power, they would not be turned back on. Carl Sagan had been asking NASA to turn the camera around for years. Not to take a scientific photograph. To take a portrait. The opposition within NASA was real and not unreasonable. The cameras on Voyager one were optimized for targets much closer than Earth.