They have spent the best part of half a century travelling farther from Earth than any other man-made objects.
But the two Voyager spacecraft are now entering their final phase, with NASA eyeing a potential timeline for their powering-down.
Voyager 1 is currently 14.5 billion miles (23.3bn km) from Earth, a distance which takes 20 light hours and 33 minutes to travel, while Voyager 2 is 12 billion miles and 18 hours’ light distance from us.
It means it takes
The UK government yesterday announced a raft of new measures designed to drive sustainability in space and help clear up the millions of shards of debris clogging up near-Earth orbit.
The measures include an ‘Active Debris Removal’ programme, which involves launching a new spacecraft to physically collect and destroy pieces of space junk floating around the Earth.
The project, which will receive £5 million in funding from the UK government, is set to launch in 2026.
It is not a
NASA’s asteroid-orbiting Psyche spacecraft has moved a step closer to lift-off, after being unveiled to the media ahead of its launch this summer.
Engineers are putting the final touches on the probe, which is set to blast into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August on its journey to a metal-rich asteroid of the same name.
The spacecraft will fly by Mars for a gravity assist in May 2023 and, in early 2026, orbit around asteroid 16 Psyche in the
NASA has begun building the SUV-sized Europa Clipper spacecraft that will investigate Jupiter’s icy, ocean moon following its launch in October 2024.
The US space agency has announced that Clipper is now being put together at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, Southern California.
The Clipper mission aims to find out if Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, hosts conditions suitable for life using ‘a sophisticated suite of science instruments’.
Europa, an icy moon with a hidden subsurface ocean, has
