September 5, 2007 marks 30 years of space travel for our most distant spacecraft. Voyager 1 reached 9,648,812,870 miles from Earth on the 30th anniversary of its launch on September 5, 1977 from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket.
There are actually four man-made objects rapidly emerging from our solar system and they were all launched in the 1970s at the height of the cold war. We were thinking about bomb shelters and how to survive WWII at that time. Following the space program was our most positive news. Pioneer 10 was launched on March 2, 1972, followed by Pioneer 11 on April 5, 1973. Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977 and all three were passed by Voyager 1 traveling approximately 38,306 miles per hour.
Pioneer 10 is the second farthest man-made object in space, traveling at approximately 27,665 miles per hour in the opposite direction of the other three. It is heading in the opposite direction to the movement of the Sun through our galaxy. At the end of this year (2007), Pioneer 10 will be 8,849,392,731 miles from Earth. Pioneer 10 has been traveling the longest (35 years) and was the first to leave our solar system on June 13, 1983 when it passed beyond the orbit of Pluto. Pioneer 10 was the most distant man-made object until February 17, 1998, when Voyager 1 took over the title. Pioneer 10 will reach the red star Albebaran in about 2 million years. Albebaran is 71 light years distant in the constellation of Taurus.
The last telemetry data received from Pioneer 10 was on April 27, 2002. The last very weak signal was received on January 22, 2003. Your radioisotope power source has decayed and may not have enough power to send us any more transmissions. .
1 AU = 149597870 kilometers = 92955806 miles = 499 light seconds. One light year equals AU 63,240.
For more information on the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, visit the NASA website.