On February 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft showed where everything we’ve ever known and heard of is. Shining in the darkness of space, the “Pale Blue Dot”, that is, our Earth, posed to the vehicle from 6 billion kilometers away.
With the calendars now showing 33 years ahead, Pale Blue Dot got a sibling. The European Space Agency (ESA) imaged the Earth and the Moon together from a distance of millions of kilometers with the Mars Express spacecraft, which it launched into space 20 years ago. As well as moving.
Here is the view of the ending trio from a distance of millions of years:
The brightest round in the image you see above is our Earth. The faint gray dot we see spinning next to it is the Moon. Everything you experience, hear, see, and feel is on one of these faint spots—or partly on both.
The point at which we see this landscape is actually at the level of nothing in space – about 300 million kilometers away, near Mars. It’s not even close to the distance from which the Pale Blue Dot was filmed.
This short GIF is a combination of images taken on May 15, May 21, May 27, and June 2, 2023.
The image also has significance for ESA. Mars Express was the spacecraft used in ESA’s first planetary mission. The agency also wanted to recall Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot renderings on the spacecraft’s 20th launch anniversary:
“We were able to take this picture from the depths of space. If you look carefully at this picture, you will see a dot there. Look at that point again. This spot is our home. It is us. Everyone you love and know, heard of, living or dead, is in it.
The sum of all our joy and sorrow, thousands of contradictory religions, ideologies, and economic teachings; Every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every founder and destroyer of civilization, every king and farmer, every couple in love, every mother and father, every hopeful child, every inventor, every explorer, every moralist, every degenerate every politician, every star of fame, every “high leader”, every saint and sinner lived there; in that speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
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