When the spacecraft passed the planet in 1980, Sagan proposed the idea of the space probe taking one last picture of Earth. Voyager 1 was expected to work only through the Saturn encounter. Operating for 44 years, 2 months and 12 days as of 17 November 2021, it receives routine commands and transmits data back to the Deep Space Network.

Its mission has been extended and continues to this day, with the aim of investigating the boundaries of the Solar System, including the Kuiper belt, the heliosphere and interstellar space. The spacecraft, still travelling at 64,000 km/h (40,000 mph), is the most distant human-made object from Earth and the first one to leave the Solar System. The phrase 'Pale Blue Dot' was coined by Sagan in his reflections on the photograph's significance, documented in his 1994 book of the same name. Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan.

In the photograph, Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera. Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers ( 3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day's Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System. Seen from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot within deep space: the blueish-white speck almost halfway up the rightmost band of light.

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