It was the late 20th Century when NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft swept past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, taking advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets.
That was when the craft dazzled us earthlings with never-before-imagined images.
Voyager 1 captured its famous Pale Blue Dot in 1990 at 3.75 billion miles from Earth, marking the furthest image capture of our planet.
27 years later, another space craft, New Horizons, which visited Pluto in 2015, has beat Voyagers’ record. It has captured an image from an even further distance from the Earth, at about 3.79 billion miles.
For several hours, the Wishing Well image, acquired with the Long Range Reconnaissance imager, was the new farthest image ever made from Earth.
New Horizons broke its own record just two hours later with images of Kuiper Belt objects 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85.
In December 2017, New Horizons broke the record for being at the furthest distance from the Earth of any previous spacecraft while acquiring images.
Check out: ScienceCasts: New Horizons Discoveries Keep Coming
Rod is a blogger, writer, filmmaker, photographer, daydreamer who likes to cook. Rod produces and directs the web series, CUPIC: Diary of an Investigator. He is also the editor, producer and administrator of STM Daily News, a part of the TNC Network.
