• Question: how far away from earth has a man made object travelled?

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      There’s a man made space craft called Voyager 1 which has travelled further than any other man made object. It’s travelled almost 20 billion km! It’s almost three times further from the Sun than Pluto is. It’s main aim was to look at Jupiter and Saturn, but when it finished that it started heading out of the Solar System to see what it’s like in between the stars.

    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      After Voyager one visited the outer planets, it used a “gravitational slingshot”, to be shot out of the solar system. Our solar system does have a relatively well defined unique edge to it. The edge is the distance where the solar wind stops, and the rest of the galaxy begins. Voyager crossed that boundary in 2012. Interestingly, people put “a golden record” on Voyager, with information about us and Earth, in case it was ever picked up by an alien civilisation.

    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Voyager has travelled out of the solar system as Nate and Sam said. The voyager craft were my favourite when I was at school as Voyager 2 had just visited Uranus and Neptune and was sending back these amazing pictures of them – the first time we’d ever seen these planets up close (this was before the hubble space telescope!).

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      As the guys have said, Voyager 1 has left the solar system so that’s the furthest a man-made object has actually travelled! What an achievement it was as well; as Sarah has said, it sent back so many images of places we’d never seen before!

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 26 Jun 2014:

      Voyager 1 is now leaving the solar system – it has travelled 122 times further away than the distance between the Sun and the Earth (that is over 11 billion miles!).

      Voyager 1 was launched the year I was born, 1977, so it took it over 37 years to get that far. Imagine that a light beam would take only 16 hours to travel the same distance! That’s how slow our space probes are compared to light.

      Although formally Voyager 1 is now lost in interstellar space, it would take it a looooong time to reach even the nearest star: At its current speed it would take it over 19,000 years (!!!) to get to the nearest star (it takes 4 years for light).

Comments