Background
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is a 722-kilogram (1,592 lb) robotic American space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, to study the outer solar system and eventually interstellar space. Operating for 35 years, 2 months and 24 days as of today (29 November 2012), the spacecraft receives routine commands and transmits data back to the Deep Space Network. It is the first probe to leave the solar system and is the farthest man-made object from Earth.
The spacecraft is currently in extended mission, tasked with locating and studying the boundaries of the Solar system, including the Kuiper belt, the heliosphere and interstellar space. The primary mission ended on November 20, 1980, after encountering the Jovian system in 1979 and the Saturnian system in 1980. It was the first space probe to provide detailed images of the two largest planets and their major moons.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft was initially expected to work only through the Saturn encounter. When the spacecraft passed Saturn in 1981, Sagan promoted the idea of the spacecraft taking one last picture of Earth. He pointed out that this picture would not be mainly scientific, as the Earth would appear too small for the Voyager's cameras to make out any detail, but such a picture might be useful as a perspective on our place in the cosmos. Though many in NASA's Voyager program were supportive, most were of the opinion that taking a picture of Earth close to the Sun risked damaging the spacecraft's video system. By the end of 1989, instrument calibrations delayed the photographs further. The technicians who devised and transmitted the radio commands to Voyager 1 were also being laid off or transferred to other jobs. Finally, then-NASA Administrator Richard Truly interceded to ensure that the photograph was taken. The Pale Blue Dot is a narrow-angle photograph. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has also published a composite image consisting of a portion of a wide-angle image containing the sun and the region of space where the Earth and Venus were at the time, inset with two narrow-angle pictures centered on each planet.
Read more about this topic: Pale Blue Dot
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