Because it was on a faster route to the mission's first encounter, at Jupiter, Voyager 1 overtook Voyager 2 on Dec. 5, 1977, just days after its twin - Voyager 2 - on Aug. Voyager 1 had captured images of six of the seven planets targeted as well as the Sun. It took until and four separate communications passes with NASA's Deep Space Network - for all the image data to finally arrive back on Earth. 14, 1990, just 34 minutes before Voyager 1 powered off its cameras forever. The Earth images were taken at 04:48 GMT on Feb. Then the spacecraft’s science platform was pointed at Neptune and the observations began.Īfter Neptune, it took images of Uranus, Saturn, Mars, the Sun, and then Jupiter, Earth and Venus.
13, 1990, Voyager 1 warmed up its cameras for three hours. This was precisely why Sagan and other members of the Voyager team felt the images were needed - they wanted humanity to see Earth’s vulnerability and that our home world is just a tiny, fragile speck in the cosmic ocean. He realized that because the spacecraft were so far away the images might not show much. He had the original idea in 1981 to use the cameras on one of the two Voyager spacecraft to image Earth. Sagan also was a member of the Voyager Imaging Team. In his role as a visiting scientist at JPL, Sagan helped design and manage the Mariner 2 mission to Venus the Mariner 9, Viking 1 and Viking 2 trips to Mars the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions to the outer solar system and the Galileo mission to Jupiter. He briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon. The prominent planetary scientist was a consultant and adviser to NASA beginning in the 1950s. Only three spacecraft have been capable of making such an observation from such a distance: Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and New Horizons. The family portrait remains the first and only time a spacecraft has attempted to photograph our home solar system. Members of the Voyager imaging team said in a 2019 research paper that the image of Earth had to be replaced often because so many people touched it. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory - which built and manages the Voyager probes - mounted the entire mosaic on a wall in its Theodore von Kármán Auditorium and it covered over 20 feet.
Like Earth, each planet appears as just a speck of light (Uranus and Neptune appear elongated due to spacecraft motion during their 15-second camera exposures).įinding a way to display the images and capture the sheer scale of Voyager’s accomplishment proved challenging. The images gave humans an awe-inspiring and unprecedented view of their home world and its neighbors. A few key members didn’t show up in the shot: Mars was obscured by scattered sunlight bouncing around in the camera, Mercury was too close to the Sun, and dwarf planet Pluto was too tiny, too far away and too dark to be detected. In addition to Earth, Voyager 1 captured images of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus. This data visualization uses actual spacecraft trajectory data to show the family portrait image from Voyager 1's perspective in February 1990.
0 kommentar(er)
