The Last Time NASA’s Voyager “Looked Back” At Our Solar System, This Is What It Saw

Before Voyager 1 encountered the mysterious 30,000–50,000 kelvin (54,000–90,000 degrees Fahrenheit) wall marking the boundary of our Solar System, it took one final set of images—a powerful farewell from a spacecraft that has spent decades exploring the cosmos.

If you’ve been keeping up with Voyager updates, you’ll know that NASA has been gradually shutting down instruments aboard the aging spacecraft to conserve power. This strategy helps squeeze as much science as possible out of the remaining operational payloads.

The most recent shutdown occurred in March, when the cosmic ray subsystem experiment on Voyager 1, along with the low-energy charged particle instruments on Voyager 2, were taken offline. Years earlier, NASA had already turned off one of the most power-hungry instruments—the cameras—which had once delivered stunning images of our planetary neighbors.

In 1989, fresh off its historic flyby of Neptune, Voyager 2 shut down both its wide and narrow-angle cameras. At the time, NASA engineers needed to redirect energy and memory to instruments better suited to studying solar wind and interstellar space.

One of Voyager 2’s final masterpieces was an image of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon—a haunting view of a distant world.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/USGS

Voyager 1 managed to hold onto its imaging capabilities a little longer. On February 14, 1990, from a staggering 6 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, it took its last photographs. For this parting gesture, the spacecraft turned its gaze back toward the inner Solar System and captured what would be called the “Solar System Family Portrait.”

“It is the only series of images that captures Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune arrayed about the Sun,” NASA explains. “The spacecraft will never fly close enough to any astronomical object to take images again.”

Family portrait of the Solar System, captured by Voyager 1
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This composite image, made of 60 stitched-together photographs, is missing a few familiar faces. Mercury was too close to the Sun, Pluto (still considered a planet at the time) was too far and faint, and Mars was hidden due to scattered sunlight within the camera.

Still, one image from that set became legendary: the Pale Blue Dot.

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us,” wrote astronomer Carl Sagan in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. “On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world,” he added. “To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot—the only home we’ve ever known.”

The Pale Blue Dot: The iconic image of Earth from 6 billion kilometers away.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

It was a breathtaking and emotional finale. And despite technological advances, that family portrait has never been recreated.

“Only three spacecraft have been capable of making such an observation from such a distance: Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and New Horizons,” NASA notes. “It remains the first and only time—so far—a spacecraft has attempted to photograph our home solar system.”

Could NASA ever turn those cameras back on for another look?

Unlikely.

“Mission managers removed the software from both spacecraft that controls the camera,” NASA states. “The computers on the ground that understand the software and analyze the images do not exist anymore. The cameras and their heaters have also been exposed for years to the very cold conditions at the deep reaches of our solar system. Even if mission managers recreated the computers on the ground, reloaded the software onto the spacecraft and were able to turn the cameras back on, it is not clear that they would work.”

Despite this, the Voyager missions are still scientifically active. They continue to send back valuable data, including the first detection of the 30,000–50,000 kelvin wall—a fascinating and poorly understood region at the very edge of our Solar System.

Even in their twilight, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 continue to rewrite the story of humanity’s quest for knowledge—and remind us how small, yet significant, our “pale blue dot” truly is.