GoKawiilRight now, more than 15 billion miles from Earth, a 48-year-old spacecraft is hurtling through interstellar space at 38,000 miles per hour.
It is the farthest human-made object in the universe.
It is sending back scientific data that no other instrument in existence can collect.
And it is doing all of this on 69 kilobytes of memory and an 8-track tape recorder.
The phone in your pocket has roughly one million times more memory than the computer running Voyager 1.
A single low-resolution photograph taken on that same phone contains more data than Voyager 1’s entire onboard storage.
And yet here it is, still functioning, still transmitting, still making discoveries in a region of space no spacecraft has ever reached before, almost half a century after it left Earth on a mission originally designed to last five years.
Voyager 1 is, by any measure, the most improbable success story in the history of human exploration.
How Voyager 1 Was Built and What It Was Designed to Do
Voyager 1 launched on September 5, 1977, from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket.
... continue reading