Voyager 1 will soon become the first human-made object to reach a distance of one light-day from Earth, crossing a threshold of more than 16 billion miles in interstellar space.
The robotic space probe was launched in 1977 and continues to relay space-related data back to a team of NASA scientists daily. On Wednesday, the spacecraft will hit the milestone of traveling at least 16 billion miles, which equals one light-day, or the distance light travels in 24 hours.
The probe completed its Saturn flyby in 1980 to end its primary planetary mission. It is currently traveling at roughly 36,000 miles per hour in interstellar space.
AP News said that the spacecraft is closing in on the landmark distance 49 years after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. When Voyager 1 reaches the milestone, its radio signals will take precisely 24 hours traveling at the speed of light to reach Earth.
Voyager 1 and its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2, each carry an identical Golden Record, which is a gold-plated disc containing music and sounds selected to represent life on Earth. Curated by astronomer Carl Sagan and his colleagues, the tracklist includes Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, a Peruvian wedding song, and traditional music from Senegal, Australia, and Georgia.
In 1990, the spacecraft also took the well-known “Pale Blue Dot” photograph of our planet. “All of us — everyone on Earth — have been touched by these missions,” the Planetary Society’s Bill Nye said in a statement.
To celebrate the milestone, NASA organized public events. AP News reported that NASA urged people to use a phone or flashlight to create a wave of golden light after sunset, using Morse code to spell the letters V-G-R into the night sky.
Both probes are kept active by a skeleton team of NASA engineers who send commands roughly once a week, and more frequently if a probe encounters trouble. Communication with Voyager 1 was briefly cut off last October, and researchers have yet to determine the cause.
Joe Westlake, a space physicist and director of NASA’s heliophysics division, explained how the Voyager spacecraft continue to make scientific discoveries about the galaxy beyond our solar system nearly 50 years later.
“It’s a national treasure. Really extraordinary,” said Suzanne Dodd to The Associated Press, characterizing Voyager 1 as a stellar-drifting terrestrial envoy that simultaneously inspires awe back home.
NASA expects it to take 18,000 years for Voyager 1 to travel a full light-year, and double that before it nears another star. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 is expected to hit the one light-day mark from Earth in 2035.
