Post by @isotope239@mastodon.online
Voyager 1 is about to reach a distance no spacecraft has reached before: On November 18, NASA’s veteran explorer will become the first human-made object one light-day from Earth, roughly 16.1 billion miles away. At that distance, a radio message takes 24 hours to reach it and another 24 hours for a reply to return. The milestone follows an October communications scare, when NASA lost the probe’s signal for 48 hours before contact returned on its own, without troubleshooting commands from Earth.
@kibcol1049 That is absolutely amazing. I can't even put that sort of distance into perspective. The only way I can deal with stars is to imagine them as little light holes poked in the dome over our heads. To actually try to conceive a distance like that is beyond me!
@isotope239 @kibcol1049 Definitely an impossible distance for a person to traverse under their own power, and so far beyond that, that we are incapable of visualizing the scale of the space between us and it.
No one is capable of visualizing it.
The people in the operations room can actually conceive of the distance. Not because they have better imaginations, but because the people who sat in their chairs when Voyager launched have long since (I presume) retired. I am sure they also consider that by the time they retire, Voyager will still be out there in "empty" space, not even close to anything we know of.