http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20121203.html
This spacecraft is such an incredible feat of engineering. 35 years, 11 billion miles, and still sending us viable data. I put the voyager mission right up there with Hubble as the most important and greatest achievements by NASA.
It also puts things in perspective. For 35 years this craft has been traveling over 38,0000 mph (11 miles per second), and is only just now out of our tiny, insignificant solar system. It is difficult to grasp the length of time it would take it to move out of our relatively ordinary galaxy, let alone reach the hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the universe.
It is understandably difficult for people to comprehend these vast distances. Voyager 1 made another amazing contribution to space exploration when it took the famous pale blue dot photograph of earth from saturn, made famous by Carl Sagan. It's easy to ignore numbers and figures, but no one can deny how small they feel when the earth is seen as a tiny point of light from a place as close to us as Saturn.
This spacecraft is such an incredible feat of engineering. 35 years, 11 billion miles, and still sending us viable data. I put the voyager mission right up there with Hubble as the most important and greatest achievements by NASA.
It also puts things in perspective. For 35 years this craft has been traveling over 38,0000 mph (11 miles per second), and is only just now out of our tiny, insignificant solar system. It is difficult to grasp the length of time it would take it to move out of our relatively ordinary galaxy, let alone reach the hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the universe.
It is understandably difficult for people to comprehend these vast distances. Voyager 1 made another amazing contribution to space exploration when it took the famous pale blue dot photograph of earth from saturn, made famous by Carl Sagan. It's easy to ignore numbers and figures, but no one can deny how small they feel when the earth is seen as a tiny point of light from a place as close to us as Saturn.
