A st er oid belt Kuiper belt 0 bn Kilometers CASSINI GALILEO Sun Earth Mars Jupiter Uranus Neptune Pluto 1 5432 6 7 8 9 10 NEW HORIZONS Saturn SPACE THE FINAL FRONTIER Machines are part of our lives even outside the human habitat The machine that s farther away from the Earth than any other is the Voyager 1 spacecra Since its launch on September 5 1977 Voyager 1 has traveled more than 21 billion kilometers 13 billion miles and every year the distance grows by another 540 million kilometers 335 million miles On its flight the machine weighing 825 5 kilograms 1 820 pounds was accelerated to a speed of up to 62 140 km h 38 612 miles by the gravity of Jupiter and Saturn and propelled to the edge of our solar system It has since reached interstellar space Voyager 1 is now so far away from the Earth that the transmission of a control signal takes 19 hours and 32 minutes in spite of data transmission at the speed of light Three radionuclide bat teries that produce electricity from the decay of radioac tive material supply the scienti c instruments the naviga tion and the communication systems with power The batteries will continue to supply su cient electricity until about 2025 before the last instruments and communica tion systems have to be shut o Of the originally eleven scienti c instruments three are still active for exploring magnetic elds charged particles and the solar wind Five systems have been deactivated two are defective and one is damaged 7 6

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