Jason E. Andersen

There is a very important birthday coming up tomorrow. It’s not mine, although my birthday is very important. No, this week marks the birthday of the Voyager space mission.

Bonus Fun Fact: The Voyager mission began 45 years ago with the launch of Voyager 2 on August 20th, 1977. The launch of Voyager 1 followed on September 5th. Both spacecraft were designed to last 5 years, long enough for them to conduct flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. The twin probes went on to Uranus and Neptune and are now travelling through the blackness of interstellar space. Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object and, at the time I’m typing this, is currently 14,594,742,108 miles from Earth.

You can check the status of the Voyager mission on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

Bonus Bonus Fun Fact: The famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photo was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 from a little over four billion miles away from Earth. Voyager 1 transmitted the photo data back via radio. Travelling at the speed of light, the transmission took about five and a half hours to reach home. For comparison, light travelling from the Sun to Earth takes an average of 8 minutes and 20 seconds.

Bonus Bonus Bonus Fun Fact: Over the last couple of days, there has been a geomagnetic storm hitting Earth. This has caused the northern lights to be seen at lower latitudes than normal. Check outside tonight and through the weekend to see if you can spot them!