Voyager: 8 Billion Miles and Counting

Voyager: 8 Billion Miles and Counting

This has nothing to do with billions of dollars, but with something that makes even trillions of dollars utterly trivial.

Thirty years ago, the Voyager space probes set off to visit distant planets. As they finally leave the Solar System, Steve Connor @ The Independent, UK looks back at what we've learned. I liked the opening sentences: "Of all the spectacular images sent back to Earth from the two Voyager spacecraft – which celebrate their 30th anniversaries this month – perhaps the most poignant was taken on 14 February 1990, when Voyager 1 turned its camera around to where it had come from and captured a picture of our home planet from a distance of more than four billion miles. The image became known as The Pale Blue Dot – the Earth floating as a single point in the enormity of space."

Well, that's what we are in the big picture - a small, floating inconsequential dot that would have already disappeared from the Voyager's radar by now.

The article on the current status of the Voyager (it is still traveling, now out of the solar system) is quite interesting...full article here

Just one last bit of factoid from the report: "It will take 40,000 years before the two space probes skim past the nearest interplanetary system..." Utterly overwhelming and mind boggling