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Operations and other mysteries: the subtle business of making technology
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blogs > andrew > science > space > voyager-speed
Wed, 11 Jun 2008
Voyager and the speed limit
As often happens, an IRC channel veered off-topic and onto an interesting one instead. We got to talking about clocks and frames of reference and while we were chatting back and forth someone claimed that we hadn’t made anything that had reached relativistic speed yet (or, at least nothing on the scale of the questions you get on your average physics exam about the spacecraft doing 0.9c). That may be true, but that had me wondering just how fast the fastest thing was.
That would be Voyager 1, launched 5 September 1977. It’s now about 15.9 billion km out, and is booking along at about 17 km/s which is 0.000056c. That’s pretty fast! Still going to take a while to get to the next stop, though.
Image Credit: NASA/Walt Feimer.
Finding the speed number led me to a JPL page on the NASA site about the Voyager missions. Quite interesting reading, especially about the choice of trajectories they had which allowed them to have Voyager 2 reach not just Jupiter and Saturn but also Uranus and Neptune in “12 years rather than 30”.
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/factsheet.html
AfC
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