Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
10 days ago
- #space exploration
- #interstellar space
- #Voyager 1
- Voyager 1 will become the first human-made object to be one light-day away from Earth in late 2026.
- Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and has entered interstellar space, currently about 169.5 AU from Earth.
- Signals from Earth take nearly 24 hours to reach Voyager 1 at its current position.
- Voyager 1 will pass through the Oort Cloud, possibly beginning around 1,000 AU from the Sun, in a few centuries.
- It will take Voyager 1 about 40,000 years to get closer to the star Gliese 445 than to our Sun.
- Voyager 1's closest stellar encounter in the near future will be with TYC 3135-52-1 in about 303,000 years.
- The spacecraft is expected to drift through space for an extremely long time, with a collision with a star unlikely for about 10^20 years.