Blue Dot Mission: Beautiful Cove Captured From The Space Station
Blue Dot Mission: Beautiful Cove Captured From The Space Station. ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst took this image circling Earth on the International Space Station during his six-month Blue Dot mission.
Alexander commented: “The big picture. I begin to understand how flying into space will change humankind’s way of looking at Earth forever.”
Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day’s Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System. Blue Dot Mission: Beautiful Cove Captured From The Space Station as shown in the picture above shows its beautiful colors.
In the photograph, Earth’s apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera.
Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan. The phrase “Pale Blue Dot” was coined by Sagan himself in his reflections on the photograph’s significance, documented in his 1994 book of the same name
Voyager 1 was expected to work only through the Saturn encounter. When the spacecraft passed the planet in 1980, Sagan proposed the idea of the space probe taking one last picture of Earth. He acknowledged that such a picture would not have had much scientific value, as the Earth would appear too small for Voyager‘s cameras to make out any detail, but it would be meaningful as a perspective on humanity’s place in the universe.
