Voyager 1 takes a picture of Earth & Moon
SEP 18, 2015
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031053
On this day in 1977, 13 days after its launch, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft took an image of Earth and the Moon together. By December Voyager 1 had entered the asteroid belt. By January 1979 it had reached Jupiter. Now Voyager 1 is traveling in the region of space where the Sun’s magnetic field no longer predominates. Although astronomers refer to that zone as interstellar space, keep in mind that Voyager 1 is just 1/10 of the way to the Oort Cloud of icy planetesimals, whose inner edge is 1000 AU from the Sun. Gravitationally speaking, Voyager 1 remains in the Solar System.
Date in History: 18 September 1977
© 2015 American Institute of Physics
