KTALnews.com (KTAL/KMSS) – Originally launched in 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 is currently about 15 billion miles away from Earth, making it the farthest human-made object (that we know of) in the universe.
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Voyager 1 continues to send and receive data using a fraction of the power of modern smartphones while moving at about 38,000 miles per hour through interstellar space. The fact that it has survived the harsh conditions of space for nearly 50 years is nothing short of remarkable.
The spacecraft may be able to continue sending signals to Earth until 2036, at which point its power will run out. It could continue drifting through space for possibly billions of years, carrying a golden record containing pictures, greetings in different languages, and hours of music and natural sounds from Earth.
The record serves as a sort of message in a bottle for any other intelligent life form that may come into contact with the spacecraft, so that they might understand where it came from and who humans are as a species.
At its current speed of 38,000 miles per hour, it travels about 900 million miles per year, crossing about 1 million miles of space every 16 hours. It is expected to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, a shell of icy objects that creates a boundary around our solar system, and take another 30,000 years to fully clear it.
Whether it will eventually run into another intelligent civilization seems to be in the hands of the cosmos.
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