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| Engineers working on NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft: Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech |
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is now almost one light day or 15 billion miles distant from Earth, travelling at a speed of 11 miles or 18 kilometres per second. Both Voyager 1 and its sister probe Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 on missions to explore the Solar System and outer planets. A light year isn't a length of time, but a measurement of the distance light travels in one year, 6 trillion or 6,000,000,000,000 miles. It's a convenient measurement used for huge astronomical distances, so the numbers don't become really long. Our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is just over 4 light years away or 24 trillion miles, but that's still a tiny distance in the scale of the Cosmos. Our nearest galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is at a distance of 2.5 million light years.
𝘛𝘩𝘦
𝘍𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘵, a documentary directed by film maker Emer Reynolds
and an Emmy Award winner, tells the epic story of Voyager 1 & 2 from
the perspective of those involved. Worth checking out on your favourite
streaming service
Voyager - Fast Facts - Info on the probes