Tales from Distant Lands

THE SPACECRAFT WAS LONG WAY FROM HOME, speeding away from the sun at 40,000 miles an hour, but in early February it was overtaken by an urgent message from earth. Obediently it turned its cameras back towards the now distant planets, it snapped 60 pictures,and stored them in digital form on its recorder.Then slowly in March , April and May it radioed the data back to earth. Each image comprised of 6,40,000 pixels . the space craft was 3.7 billion miles from earth , so far away that it took 5 and half hours for the pixels travelling at the speed of light to reach us.

Its true that all the above might sound quite inconsequential and remote, but for the sake of records, the spacecraft's name is Voyager 1 . This ship and its sister Voyager 2 , have explored 4 planets and more than 60 worlds. Both the ships were on an outbound trajectory away from the solar system and they were guaranteed to work only till they reach Saturn ( that was the agreed critical mission objective) . So while Voyager1 was travelling, it was suddenly agreed* upon that it would be a great idea to take one last look at earth from that distance. It was this thought which was urgently messaged to Voyager-1 and one of the pics taken there formed the cover pic of Carl Sagan's amazing literary work titled the " Pale Blue Dot" .

Yes, it might sound inconsequential, but these simple but profound images are triumphs of human engineering and one of the glorious gifts of the American space program.They will be in history books when much else about our time is forgotten ..

*From the outer solar system the earth lies very close from the sun, NASA was not very sure if they wanted to aim the camera so close to the sun and thus risk burning out the video con system and hence wanted to delay it until all the images from the Uranus and Neptune system were captured first ..and so they waited .. from 1981 at Saturn till 1986 at Uranus ..till 1989 near Neptune ..and at last the time came ( even then a few instrumental calibrations were there to be done first before that pic could be taken in 1990 ) ..The planets were at the right alignment and although many were supportive of the idea, a few project personnel opposed it .." Its not science" they said ..and then it was discovered that the technical personal who devised and transmit the data from Voyager who were in a cash strapped NASA were to be laid off immediately or transferred to other jobs. If the picture had to be taken, it had to be done right then, at the last minute , actually in the midst of Voyager's outbound encounter with Neptune. The then NASA administrator Admiral Richard Truly stepped in and made sure that these images were obtained. The space scientists led by Kandy Hanson of NASA's jet propulsion Lab and Caroline Pokov of the University of Arizona designed the command sequence and calculated the camera's exposure times. So here they are, telling the tale from such distant lands ( in fact its our own tale of miraculous survival and existence as one living race which we so obviously fail to see or acknowledge and which ironically becomes so clear from such obscurely distant places ) . Enjoy the following inimitable Narration by Carl on what he calls the pale blue dot !!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw