Voyager I Enters Interstellar space :)

[ngauger]

10 BILLION miles away. WOW. I cannot even fathom how far that really is, it took over 30 years to get there. They know it made interstellar space by the content of the "nothingness" it is flying through. So... how fast is it going? And since there is no resistance from any atmospheres etc. I imagine that, in theory, it will keep going into perpetuity until it is either a.) intercepted by a life form or b.) hits something?

The article says it's 11.6 Million miles away and traveling at 11 Miles Per Second

I also am amazed that 1970 technology is still communicating over 10 billion miles. Is it the lack of weather that preserves the equipment so long?

It has a tiny nuclear reactor inside - it's supposed to run out of power around 2025, but yeah - the lack of weather definitely has a lot to do with it's speed... It has no resistance... unless something (or someone) else reacts to it or as you say it gets caught in a gravity field of a planet or star and crashes.

Kind of like the footprints and rover on the moon? One more question, they say that when you look at the night sky you are actually seeing the past. Light can only travel at 299,792,458 meters per second, so when you see something happen in the sky, you are seeing something that already happened, how long ago it happened depends on how far away the object is from the earth. Does this go for the Voyager probe as well? In other words, how long does the signal take to get from the probe to the earth? We just recently learned that Voyager made interstellar space, but how long ago did it actually happen?

It happened last august, but since it was something scientists never experienced there were disagreements as to how to "Prove" it... Now - most of the scientific community agree.. it's in interstellar space...

The function of light is the same - yes, if you could see Voyager - it would be something that happened 14 hours ago... This is what made it so difficult to communicate with the Mars rovers.. You send a command, a few hours later - the rover acknowledges it - executes it - reports it and a few hours later you see if you were correct or not

Using light speed as an example I calculated over 14 hours travel time from the probe to earth, don't know how long a radio signal would take, but that is a lot faster than I thought. 10 BILLION miles, I figured it would take much longer for light to travel that far.