Solar System Family Portrait

Solar System Family Portrait

Image Credit:

Voyager Project,
NASA

Explanation:

In 1990, cruising four billion miles from the Sun, the
Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back to make this first ever
Solar System family portrait.

The complete portrait is a
60 frame mosaic
made from a vantage point 32 degrees above the
ecliptic plane.

In it, Voyager’s wide-angle camera frames sweep through the
inner Solar System at the left, linking up with
ice giant Neptune,
the Solar System’s outermost planet, at the far right.

Positions for Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune
are indicated by letters, while the Sun is the
bright spot near the center of the circle of frames.

The inset frames
for each of the planets are
from Voyager’s narrow-field camera.

Unseen in the portrait are Mercury, too close
to the Sun to be detected, and Mars, unfortunately hidden by sunlight
scattered in the camera’s optical system.

Closer to the Sun than Neptune at the time,
small, faint Pluto’s
position was not covered.

In 2024 Voyager 1,
NASA’s longest-running and most-distant spacecraft,
is some 15 billion miles away,
operating in interstellar space.