[FreeSpaceFreak]

Well, depending on your definition of "humanity"... Voyager 1 has reached the edge of Solar influence, and will venture into interstellar space soon. It is likely to remain the single most distant man-made object for quite a while to come.
Amazingly, it's still sending back data; it takes the signal 16 hours to travel one-way now. NASA is doing a pretty good job with it

[Pred the Penguin]

How does it manage not to get.... hit?
Or is it just very improbable for something like that to happen?

[headdie]

Good stuff, It's nice to have an indication of where the edge of the system is and will be fascinating to see what voyager will encounter beyond the boundary.  I wonder how far away voyager will be able to go before we are unable to receive data from it?

[Androgeos Exeunt]

How does it manage not to get.... hit?
Or is it just very improbable for something like that to happen?

Maths and Science?

[Bobboau]

How does it manage not to get.... hit?
Or is it just very improbable for something like that to happen?

it's called space cause there's lots of it.

[Wobble73]

How does it manage not to get.... hit?
Or is it just very improbable for something like that to happen?

it's called space cause there's lots of it.

Actually I'd imagine that it's getting hit all the time, just not by anything large enough to affect it. (Micro meteors, solar winds etc.)

[newman]

Yea, even if it was passing through a relatively dense asteroid fields, the distances between each asteroid are still vast, meaning it's chances of getting hit by something large enough to destroy or damage it aren't all that big. Asteroid fields don't exactly look like you see them in The Empire Strikes Back, there's still a lot more empty space than rocks out there, be it the Kuiper Belt or the Oort cloud..

I wonder how far away voyager will be able to go before we are unable to receive data from it?

Good question. IIRC it was estimated it will run out of enough power for the onboard instruments to operate some time before 2020. A more interesting question, I wonder if and when we'll ever overtake it - a 40,000 year wait for it to get to another star system sucks

[Grizzly]

Isn't Voyager 1 running on it's (weaker) backup transmitter after the primary one went down only very shortly after it's launch?

[Colonol Dekker]

One step closer to achieving its destiny as a bird of prey target.

[T-LoW]

And then they try again and again, and after some tries they launch Voyager 6 - and we all know what's gonna happen with it...

[Nuke]

How does it manage not to get.... hit?
Or is it just very improbable for something like that to happen?

put it this way, if you were standing on an asteroid in the asteroid belt, you would be pretty hard pressed to find other asteroids with the naked eye, most you would see would be a little dot the size of a pixel.

Isn't Voyager 1 running on it's (weaker) backup transmitter after the primary one went down only very shortly after it's launch?

wasnt that galileo?

[Topgun]

Its still in the heliosphere.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

This is one of those things that's been announced several times over the years.  I don't know if it's because they can only estimate, the boundary gets redefined, or what.  Really it's old news.

[Mobius]

The booundaries also change depending on the Sun's activity, too.

[newman]

The heliosphere's boundaries are next to impossible to define exactly. Space inside our solar system contains small amounts of dust and gas. Solar winds interact with that gas and the area inside which this happens is considered "under the sun's influence", and therefore inside our solar system. Of course, that area does change over time so the borders are vague to put it mildly. We might consider building a fence or something, because this is ridiculous.

[watsisname]

I view it similarly to the problem of deciding where earth's atmosphere ends and space begins.  The fact is that there is no real boundary to space and even if you try to define it as some function of density of particles, that boundary will shift over time as the atmosphere fluctuates.

In short, calling it a boundary is stupid.

[Nuke]

i say we call it a fuzz zone

[Topgun]

i say we call it a fuzz zone

this. In fact, fuzz should be a scientific term.

[watsisname]

Galaxies and nebulae are just fuzzy objects in my book.

[Colonol Dekker]

Nebulae are giant space farts.