Voyager 1

About Voyager 1

The Voyager 1 spacecraft is a 722-kilogram robotic space probe of the outer solar system and beyond, launched September 5, 1977, and currently operational. It visited Jupiter and Saturn and was the first probe to provide detailed images of the moons of these planets.

Voyager 1 is the farthest manmade object from Earth, traveling away from both the Earth and the Sun at a relatively faster speed than any other probe. Though its sister-craft, Voyager 2, was launched one month earlier, Voyager 2 will never pass Voyager 1. Neither will the New Horizons mission to Pluto, despite being launched from Earth at a faster speed than both Voyager craft, since during its flight Voyager 1 benefited from a number of gravity assisted speed boosts.

As of May 9, 2008, Voyager 1 is over 15.89 terameters (15.89×1012 meters, or 15.89×109 km, 106.26 AU, 14.72 light-hours, or 9.87 billion miles) from the Sun, and has thus entered the heliosheath, the termination shock region between the solar system and interstellar space, a vast area where the Sun's influence gives way to the other bodies in the galaxy. If Voyager 1 is still functioning when it finally passes the heliopause, scientists will get their first direct measurements of the conditions in the interstellar medium. At this distance, signals from Voyager 1 take more than fourteen hours to reach its control center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a joint project of NASA and Caltech in Pasadena, California. Voyager 1 is on a hyperbolic trajectory and has achieved escape velocity, meaning that its orbit will not return to the inner solar system. Along with Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 2, and New Horizons, Voyager 1 is an interstellar probe.