Aug 15 2006
From The Space Library
NASA’s Voyager 1 achieved a milestone during its passage out of the solar system when it reached a distance of 100 Astronomical Units (AUs)—nearly 9.3 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) from the Sun. An AU is the average distance between Earth and the Sun, measuring approximately 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). Voyager 1 was already the most distant human-made object from Earth when it reached 100 AUs from the Sun. NASA had launched Voyager 1 and its twin spacecraft Voyager 2 in 1977 to explore Jupiter and Saturn and had continued to extend the operations of the two spacecraft. In the Voyagers’ current mission—the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM)—the spacecraft would explore the environment of the outer solar system and, eventually, that of interstellar space.
Von Puttkamer, “Space Flight 2006”; NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “Voyager: Mission Overview,” http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/mission.html (accessed 14 September 2010).
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