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It is carrying the ashes of the astronomer who discovered Pluto. Nice touch.

I don't know if any of the Voyager probes carried human DNA so this could be the furthest any part of a human has traveled.

Looked up Voyager 1 details, in just 38,000 years it will meet a star.... Not long to wait then.

You would think it was traveling really slow but in the time I was on the site it had travelled 500km.

Absolutely mindblowing distances.

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It is carrying the ashes of the astronomer who discovered Pluto. Nice touch.

I don't know if any of the Voyager probes carried human DNA so this could be the furthest any part of a human has traveled.

Looked up Voyager 1 details, in just 38,000 years it will meet a star.... Not long to wait then.

You would think it was traveling really slow but in the time I was on the site it had travelled 500km.

Absolutely mindblowing distances.

New Horizons is the fastest one ever, Earth to Pluto in only 9 years I think. I was wondering if it might catch up with one of the Voyagers.

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Provided Voyager 1 does not collide with anything and is not retrieved, the New Horizons space probe will never pass it, despite being launched from Earth at a faster speed than either Voyager spacecraft. New Horizons is traveling at about 15 km/s, 2 km/s slower than Voyager 1, and is still slowing down. When New Horizons reaches the same distance from the Sun as Voyager 1 is now, its speed will be about 13 km/s (8 mi/s).[79]

Guessing it's to do with slingshot effects or trajectory?

15km/s - hard to image how fast that is and still absolutely laughable in terms of useful speed required for actual space travel.

Definitely worth the money to send these probes out though. Incredible to think that every planet has now been flown by or explored.

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Here's a graph of Voyager 2's speed, including sling shots. I don't understand the slowing down after each sling shot, I thought space was supposed to be a vacuum, but I suppose the planet creating the sling shot would have a gravitational drag on the spacecraft after it left? Might have answered my own question there..

qiWvW.png

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New Horizons phones home safely.

Hooray! 16 months to send all the data back. Must still be using dial up.

NASA wish they had dial up speeds for communicating with New Horizons. Dial up can get you 56 kbit\s. New Horizons will be sending its data back at 1kbit\s. It takes 42 minutes to send back a single image - http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/01300800-talking-to-pluto-is-hard.html

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Here's a graph of Voyager 2's speed, including sling shots. I don't understand the slowing down after each sling shot, I thought space was supposed to be a vacuum, but I suppose the planet creating the sling shot would have a gravitational drag on the spacecraft after it left? Might have answered my own question there..

qiWvW.png

Pretty much, it slows down losing energy climbing back out of the gravity well, but obviously still with a net gain by going down into the well in the first place.

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