Terryl
07-14-2012, 02:30 AM
The fastest spacecraft today is Voyager 1.
It was launched on September 5th 1977, and today is still working.
It is currently 120.566 AU from the Earth, an AU is the unit of measurement for our orbit from the Sun, this is averaged out at 93 million miles.
So this places Voyager 1 at 11,274,483,000 Miles from us, and this is growing every second, by 38,128 miles per hour, or 10.59 miles per second, for you metric type people, this is 17.045 kilometers per second or 61362 kilometers per hour.
Now that's cranking it out.
It takes the radio signal from Voyager 1, 16.7 hours to reach us, and only the Arecibo radio telescope, the VLA in New Mexico and a very few others are big enough to receive the extremely weak signal from any of the voyager space craft.
Voyager 1 has enough fuel left in it's small reactor to last till sometime in the year 2020, after that it will fall silent.
But in 40000 years it will pass by the star AC+79 3888 at about 1.6 light years, thus making it our first interstellar space craft.
Have a good trip Voyager and be safe.
It was launched on September 5th 1977, and today is still working.
It is currently 120.566 AU from the Earth, an AU is the unit of measurement for our orbit from the Sun, this is averaged out at 93 million miles.
So this places Voyager 1 at 11,274,483,000 Miles from us, and this is growing every second, by 38,128 miles per hour, or 10.59 miles per second, for you metric type people, this is 17.045 kilometers per second or 61362 kilometers per hour.
Now that's cranking it out.
It takes the radio signal from Voyager 1, 16.7 hours to reach us, and only the Arecibo radio telescope, the VLA in New Mexico and a very few others are big enough to receive the extremely weak signal from any of the voyager space craft.
Voyager 1 has enough fuel left in it's small reactor to last till sometime in the year 2020, after that it will fall silent.
But in 40000 years it will pass by the star AC+79 3888 at about 1.6 light years, thus making it our first interstellar space craft.
Have a good trip Voyager and be safe.