How far has a space probe gone into space?

Answer 1

This is the probe Voyager 1, which was launched on 5th July 1977 on NASA's second mission to study Jupiter, as well as to study Saturn.

It arrived in Jupiter's orbital system in September 1979 and took a number of photographs and observations of the planet, before progressing on to Saturn which it reached in August 1980. It's Saturn research programme took four months, before ending in the December of that year.

Since then it has flown onwards and outwards, and is now way into interstellar space- two other probes, Voyager 2 and Pioneer 10, are also outside of our Solar System now, but Voyager 1 has overtaken both of them and is travelling much faster. It remains fully functional, and is still beaming back data to NASA mission control on Earth- scientists there are currently using it to look for the Heliopause, the point at which the solar wind transitions into the Interstellar Medium. The little probe is travelling at about 28,000 mph and is currently twice as far away from our Sun as Pluto, the outermost planet in the Solar System. She will continue to function until 2020, when the last of her onboard scientific instruments will be shut down- ten years later, her batteries will have run down to the point whereby they will have hardly any power in them.

She is not heading towards any specific destination, but if she survives for 40,000 years, she will then pass within 1.6 light years of the star AC+79 3888, which is in the constellation Camelopardalis, 17.6 light years from Earth.

Pioneer 10, meanwhile, is carrying an engraved plaque bolted to it's outside, showing images of a naked man and woman with their hands raised in greeting as well as mathematical symbols showing where the probe came from. It also contains an LP record with a number of different sounds from Earth on it, as well as children saying 'Hello' in a number of different languages. The idea is that in the event of the probe ever being discovered by an intelligent alien race, they might get some idea of who we are, what we look and sound like, approximately where our planet is, and what our civilisation is (or was) like. But in reality, the odds of this happening are so remote they aren't worth considering- in all probability Pioneer 10 and Voyagers 1 and 2 will not last for thousands, or even hundreds, of years. The likelihood is that they will collide with asteroids or interstellar matter of some sort and be smashed into tiny fragments. If they DO make it to other stars, they will probably either hurtle straight into the star and atomise, or be drawn into the orbit of a planet orbiting the star and burn up in that planet's atmosphere.