What is the farthest spaceship from Earth?
Voyager One is the farthest spacecraft from Earth. On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 took a series of photographs of the sun and planets with a camera facing the sun, marking the first time in history that a "portrait" of the solar system was painted from an external perspective. At the time, Voyager One was about 4 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away. Read more about this.
What is the farthest spacecraft from Earth?
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The most distant artificial object now is the Voyager One spacecraft, which is nearly 23 billion kilometers from Earth as of November 2021. In 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched at intervals of 16 days. Both spacecraft pass by Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager II also flew over Uranus and Neptune. Two travelers (I and II) are still traveling in space, flying between the stars. In 2012, Voyager One crossed the heliospheric top, officially becoming the first Earth spacecraft to leave the solar system. Earlier this year, it sent back a subtle monotonous hum heard in space.
The origin of Voyager
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the solar system's four giant planets formed a rare arrangement that made it possible to travel through them all at once, about once every 176 years. It was in this context that the two Voyager spacecraft came into being, and they could eject from one planet to another through the gravitational slingshot effect.
Space's official website provides charts of Voyager spacecraft travel information.
Voyager began photographing Jupiter in January 1979 and reached its vicinity in early April of the same year. Voyager 2 picked up the baton at the end of April, and their encounter lasted until August. Together, the two spacecraft took more than 33,000 photographs of Jupiter and its five major moons.
Next, the travelers will head farther into the deeper space. When they were launched, no spacecraft could fly as far as Saturn, which is 10 times the distance from the Sun and Earth. Thus, the four-year journey to Saturn was a major leap forward in human exploration of deep space, with two spacecraft arriving on Saturn nine months apart in November 1980 and August 1981. Voyager 1 then began to leave the solar system, with Voyager 2 visiting Uranus in January 1986 and neptune in August 1989.
The furthest spaceship continues to fly
Ed Stone, a project scientist on Voyager, told EarthSky magazine a few years ago that:
"The spacecraft we built have enough redundancy (backup systems) so that they can continue to travel far."
"And they're moving on! It's been 44 years."
Voyager 1's trajectory in Earth's skies between 1977 and 2030. From Tomrun/Wikipedia/Oxford Dictionary
In 2017, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to describe their future along Voyager's path. About 40,000 years later, both spacecraft have stopped working for a long time, and Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years of Gliese 445 in the constellation Camel. Voyager 2, which is now nearly 19 billion kilometers from Earth, will pass about 40,000 light-years from Andromeda's Ross 248 star.
Big picture: Artist's concept of the path of voyager 1 and voyager 2 through the solar system into interstellar space. Images taken via NASA/ESA/and Z.Levay (STScI). Read more about this picture.
Note: Voyager 1 and its twin satellite, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977, 16 days apart. Voyager 1 is now the farthest spacecraft from Earth
Related knowledge
Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study interstellar space beyond the outer solar system and the heliosphere. Voyager 1 was launched 16 days later than its twin satellite, Voyager 2, and as of November 17, 2021 (UTC), Voyager 1 has been operating for 44 years, 2 months, and 12 days, still maintaining contact with the Deep Space Exploration Network, receiving routine instructions and transmitting data to Earth. Data such as its real-time distance and speed are provided by NASA and JPL. As of November 9, 2021, it is 155.26 AU (23.227 billion kilometers) from Earth, making it the most distant artificial celestial body.
The probe flew over Jupiter, Saturn and Titan (Saturn's largest moon). NASA was faced with the choice of whether to fly to Pluto or Titan, and in the end they chose Titan with a dense atmosphere. The field trip to Pluto waited until the New Horizons probe launched in 2006 to send back the iconic images of Pluto on July 14, 2015) Voyager 1 studied the atmospheres, magnetic fields and planetary rings of two gas giants, and was the first to transmit detailed images of their satellites.
As part of the plan, Voyager 1's additional mission is to locate and study the regions and boundaries of the heliosphere and to explore the interstellar medium. It crossed the heliospheric top of the heliosphere on August 25, 2012, into interstellar space, becoming the first spacecraft to do so. Two years later, Voyager 1 began to withstand the "shock wave" of the Sun's third coronal mass ejection until December 15, 2014, which proved that it was indeed in interstellar space.
To further test Voyager 1's reliability, the Voyager team tested the spacecraft's Ballistic Modified Maneuver (TCM) thruster (the first re-ignited thruster since 1980) in late 2017, which extended the mission by 2 to 3 years. Voyager 1's overdue service is expected to continue into 2025, when its radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) will not be able to provide sufficient power for the scientific instruments in operation.
Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977, and its orbit determined that it would take longer to reach Jupiter and Saturn, but it would be more conducive to visiting Uranus and Neptune. It is currently the only spacecraft that has skimmed over these two ice giants. In addition, Voyager 2 ranks fourth out of five spacecraft that exceed the speed of the third universe, meaning it is able to leave the solar system.
Voyager 2 successfully completed its main missions to jupiter, earth, Uranus and Neptune in 1979, 1981, 1986 and 1989. The spacecraft is currently on a long-term mission to study interstellar space. As of November 17, 2021, it has been operating for 44 years and 2 months and 27 days, 129.08 AU (19.310 billion kilometers) from Earth.
The probe entered interstellar space on November 5, 2018, about 122 AU from the Sun, and moved relative to the star at a speed of 15.341 km/s. Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere to fly into the interstellar medium (ISM) of an outer space region outside the solar system, joining Voyager 1, which arrived in the interstellar medium as early as 2012. Voyager 2 has begun the first direct measurement of the density and temperature of interstellar plasma.
Voyager 2 maintains contact with Earth through NASA's deep space exploration network. In 2020, the maintenance of the Deep Space Exploration Network cut off contact with it for up to 8 months. It was reconnected on November 2, 2020, when the probe network transmitted a series of instructions to Voyager 2 for it to execute, and finally received a successful communication message from it. On February 12, 2021, it took us a year to complete the antenna upgrade before our communication with the probe was fully restored. The DSS43 communication antenna, which is solely responsible for communicating with the detector, is located near Canberra, Australia.
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