Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is the most distant object humans have ever built. In the mid 2020s, roughly how many kilometres from Earth is it?
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Answer
About 26 billion km
A radio command sent to Voyager 1 now needs about a full day to arrive, and the reply takes another day to come back.
How to estimate it
Probes that escape the solar system travel at around 15 km/s, half of Earth's 30 km/s orbital speed. Voyager has been flying for nearly 50 years, and a year is about 30 million seconds: 50 × 30 million = 1.5 billion seconds. Multiply by 15 km/s and you get roughly 22 billion km. The real distance is about 26 billion km.
Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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