🚀 Voyager 1 is now about 23 light‑hours from Earth—over 25 billion kilometers away, or nearly six times the distance from the Sun to Pluto—and still racing into the darkness of interstellar space. Launched in 1977, it sits about 167 times farther from us than the Sun, moving at a blistering 17 kilometers per second. Even at light speed, a signal from Earth takes over 23 hours to reach it—and another 23 hours for a reply. When something goes wrong, NASA’s fix is a test of patience and precision. Engineers beam carefully crafted commands through the Deep Space Network’s massive antennas, wait nearly a day for the signal to arrive, then another day to see if it worked. Sometimes the solution means waking up hardware unused for decades or rewriting software from scratch—while billions of kilometers away. Its computer? A mere 69 kilobytes of memory—less than a single image on your phone. And yet, this aging probe has survived for almost half a century, outlasting countless newer technologies. Voyager 1’s original mission was to study Jupiter and Saturn. Instead, it has become a lone messenger from humanity, carrying our story into the stars. By the early 2030s, its power will fade, but the spacecraft will keep drifting for millions of years, long after every human alive today is gone.