The most distant man-made object from Earth

As NASA's robotic space probe Voyager 1 prepared for launch in August of 1977 on a mission to locate and study the boundaries of our solar system, researchers could only imagined the scope of the project's success.Moving at a speed of 10.5 miles per second, the equivalent of more than 38,000 miles per hour, Voyager 1 is now the most distant man-made object from Earth, and last week, after a 33-year journey, it has reached the outer limits of our solar system.

In a series of messages and sounds of Earth intended as greetings for any extraterrestrial beings the spacecraft might encounter during its decades-long sojourn through outer space, NASA launched Voyager carrying 12-inch gold-plated copper discs.Containing greetings in 60 languages with samples of music and natural sounds of Earth's natural world, technician John Casani displays the "Sounds of Earth" recording before its installation on the Voyager spacecraft.

Voyager 1 captured this iconic image of a crescent-shaped Earth and moon on September 18, 1977. This was the first time Earth and its moon were photographed together in a single image, captured by Voyager 1 when it was 7.25 million miles from Earth.

By February 1990, when these images were taken, Voyager 1 was farther from the sun than Pluto, and approximately 4 billion miles from Earth. These pictures were the first ever taken of our solar system's planets from beyond their orbit.

One of the most famous images ever snapped by Voyager 1, taken on June 6, 1990, was dubbed the "pale blue dot," depicting Earth on a scale never before seen. Of the "pale blue dot," astronomer Carl Sagan said:

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

A picture of Jupiter's Great Red Spot taken by Voyager 1 in February 1979.

From Voyager's great distance, more than 4 billion miles from Earth, our planet is a mere point of light. Look closely for the tiny white speck in the right-most strip of color: that's us !!!