Week of November 8-14, 2026
On Sept. 5, 1977, a robot spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Its five-year mission: to boldly go where no craft had gone before ... to the mysterious outer worlds of our solar system.
A year and a half later, Voyager I arrived at Jupiter. There it found active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io, discovered a thin ring and two new moons around the planet, and photographed swirling storm systems in the Jovian atmosphere.
In 1980, it encountered Saturn, discovered five new moons and a new ring around the planet, and found that the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is similar to that of the Earth at the time that life was forming.
With its main mission completed, Voyager I continued outward into deep interplanetary space while exploring cosmic rays and magnetic fields. Then, in 1990, from a distance of 3.7 billion miles, it turned its cameras back toward its home planet and photographed our world as a tiny "pale blue dot" surrounded by the vastness of the cosmos.
But Voyager I wasn't done making history. On Aug. 25, 2012, it became the first human-created spacecraft to cross the heliopause, the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space.
And today, nearly half a century after its launch, Voyager I is on the brink of yet another stunning milestone.
On Nov. 18, at 5:16:07 a.m. EST (2:16:07 a.m. PST), the Voyager I spacecraft will reach a distance of 16,094,799,096 miles from Earth, a distance that light requires one full day to cross. To put this into perspective, consider that the light from the sun takes about 8.3 minutes to reach us. Light from Neptune, the farthest known planet in our solar system, takes about 4.3 hours to get here.
Yet from this incredible distance, Voyager I continues to communicate with science teams on Earth via its radio transmitter of barely 23 watts — about the same power as the light bulb in your refrigerator — as it continues its journey to the stars.
Of course we can't see the Voyager I spacecraft, but we can certainly look to where it's headed. Go outdoors shortly after dark and gaze low in the western sky. There you'll spot parts of the summertime constellations of Hercules and Ophiuchus. It is between these two star groupings that Voyager I lies on its interstellar journey.
So what's next for Voyager? We just don't know. It will almost certainly run out of power in the next decade or so and will finally go silent. But onboard it carries a message from Earth in the form of a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record that contains sounds, scientific data, music and greetings in multiple languages to represent its home planet to any intelligent life forms that may one day find it.
Even at its blinding speed of 10.5 miles per second, it would take more than 76,000 years to reach the nearest star beyond our sun, assuming it were even going in that direction. Perhaps, one day, our descendants will venture outward with even faster interstellar craft, intercept Voyager I, and return it to Earth.
What astonishing tales it would be able to tell!
Visit Dennis Mammana at dennismammana.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
The Voyager I spacecraft travels at a blinding speed of 10.5 miles per second.
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