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.

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