Knowledge

Where exactly is Voyager 1?

This is a topic of great interest to me, especially since Voyager 1 is the most remote craft we have ever sent forth.

After 40 years of travel, it has reached the light distance of only 20 hours. In evaluating this result, it tends to place a large damper on our ultimate ability to reach anywhere that is significantly outside the solar system.

This graphic (which represents a logarithmic scale, based on AU) was created in 2013, and so Voyager is ever so slightly more to the right. Voyager is estimated to reach the Oort cloud in about 300 more years.

It will be many generations of us to come and go, before Voyager, then dark and cold, reaches the Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri neighborhood.

We have to work on the next generation (or two) of propulsion, otherwise we are restricted to the Solar System.

Update: As of 2 March 2021, Voyager 1 has traveled a distance of 21 light hours 5 light minutes and 35 light seconds away from the Earth; its velocity (with respect to the Sun) is 38,026.77 miles per hour (16.995 km/s).

This (the white circle) is where Voyager 1 is now, courtesy of the New Horizons spacecraft, which itself is 50 AU from Earth. Courtesy of NASA

Related Posts

If an astronaut working on the International Space Station were somehow cut loose from his tether, would he fall back to Earth or orbit around it?

If an astronaut outside the ISS has his or her tether broken, they do not fall to the Earth. Before the tether was broken, the astronaut was in orbit at…

Escape velocity is supposed to be 24,000 mph, but our rockets never achieve this speed. How does that work?

Imagine you are sitting on a skateboard at the bottom of your drive and you need to get to the top. You could push off your garage door…

Can humans live on the side of a tidally-locked planet where neither day nor night exist?

Humans with their technology developed on Earth could live on a tidally locked planet where neither day nor night exists. We used to think that such planets become…

How did NASA make the shuttle safer after Columbia?

The problem was not just the piece of foam that struck the wing, it was a failure of imagination — NASA had seen foam fall before and decided…

Why do US Air Force fighters like the F-22 and F-15 place the engines right next to each other while Russian fighters like Su-27 always have a gap between the engines?

The United States has this thing where we learn from our mistakes. One of those mistakes was spacing twin engines as far apart as we did in the…

Is Mars too small to have a permanent atmosphere?

No, it is not. It used to have a thick atmosphere, perhaps thicker than Earth’s. It had that atmosphere for a couple of billion years and had oceans….