37. Voyager 1

Voyager 1 left Earth over 40 years ago on a search for extraterrestrial life. But, it is not just searching for life. It is also going to do flybuys of other exoplanets and stars like Rigel (a star) and Kepler-32 (an exoplanet).

Voyager 1 is the furthest man made object from Earth. Unbelievably, it has made it out of the solar system and it is still sending signal back to Earth from deep dark space! Everyone is surprised that is still sending back signals! This is because voyager 1 is 141 astronomical units (A.U) fro Earth. An AU is the distance from Earth to the sun. In other words that is roughly 13.2 billion miles or 21.2 billion kilometers. That is way more than the distance of the sun to Uranus!

An interesting fact is that Voyager 1 launched 16 days (or 2 weeks and 2 days) after Voyager 2. That is really confusing! This does not mean one is ahead of the other. They are taking different paths. Voyager 2 is going toward the other galaxies, Voyager 1 is going towards other stars and planets in the regions of the galaxy.

If you were wondering, Voyager 1 is not going at the speed of light or lightspeed. That is a star wars myth. Light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second (186,000 miles per second). This explains why it can go around the earth 4 times in a second. Voyager 1 travels at an average speed of 48,280 kilometres per second (30,000 miles per second). That is really fast, but it is nothing compared to the speed of light!

Voyager 1 and 2 were launched from the same rocket, but not at the same time. they both launched from the Ariane 5 rocket in 1979. This rocket can load 2 satellites at its full capacity.

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog. Make sure to check out my youtube channel for any cool videos about space. Until next time, Give me Space!