Voyager, the Outer Solar System
Though they’re not truly dead, the Voyager probes are on a one-way mission out of the solar system, and their last images were captured in 1990. The picture above was taken in February 1990, when Voyager 1—the farthest human-made object—was 3.7 billion miles from the Sun, just 34 days before the craft shut down its cameras to conserve energy for the long journey ahead. (The spacecraft is still chugging along, now 14.2 billion miles from the Sun and detecting all kinds of weird phenomenon.) This blurry image was Carl Sagan’s idea; he had suggested to NASA that one of the Voyager probes look back at Earth, revealing our world as a “pale blue dot” in the vastness of space. This unparalleled portrait of humanity was captured just half an hour before Voyager shut down its cameras. Worth it? Beyond the shadow of a doubt.
