Seen from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot within deep space: the blueish-white speck almost halfway up the rightmost band of light.
Posted on 01/22/2022 9:04:46 PM PST by zeestephen
At 3.7 billion miles, I will guess this photo was taken by a Voyager space craft or the New Horizons space craft?
Where would the sun be located if this photo was significantly enlarged?
"In the photograph, Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera.[1]"
Amazimgly...chips I helped build in my youth are probably on both those Voyager space craft. It is my belief that they have left our solar system and are now streaking outward in deep space.
It has already passed through the Kuiper Belt, which ends at about 50 AU.
The Oort Cloud is next, but it does not have a uniform shape.
It will take Voyager some where between 600 to 60,000 more years to reach the Oort Cloud.
The electrical out put of the radio-isotope generator on Voyager 1 is expected to decline to a level in 2025 that can no longer support the scientific instruments.
The closest star to our Solar System is Proxima Centauri, which is more than 25 trillion miles (4.2 light years) away.
Voyager 1 will travel that far in 60,000 years, but its flight path will miss Proxima by about 12 trillion miles.
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