ng journey Artist’s concept shows plasma flows around NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft as it approaches interstellar space. The heliopause is the boundary between the bubble of charged particles around our sun - known as the heliosphere and interstellar space. Its location is still a mystery and it is not clear what should be expected once the spacecraft reaches interstellar space. Graphic: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL
instruments onboard both spacecraft are now dead, a handful of others are still active, and the Voyagers continue to send valuable information back to Earth - some 35 years after they left. Voyager 1 has travelled the farthest, because it was launched from Earth on a different trajectory than Voyager 2. Voyager 1 is
Saturn
Saturn www.RocketSTEM.org
currently more than 11 billion miles away from Earth, speeding through the cosmos at over 38,000 miles-perhour. The distance Voyager 1 has covered is so vast that astronomers do not actually measure it in miles, but in Astronomical Units, or AU. One AU is the average distance between the Earth and Sun, about 93 million miles. Voyager 1 is currently more
than 123 AU from Earth, or 123 times further from Earth than Earth is from the Sun, and clearing over 3 AU every Earth year (365 days). At these distances, radio signals from Voyager 1 take over seventeen hours to reach controllers here on Earth, and the round-trip light time from the sun is over thirty-four hours. Voyager 1 crossed an area
(Visited by Voyager 1 and 2)
Mimas
Dione
Rings
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