A remnant of humankind floating through space for eons to come, marking the beginnings of its attempts to explore the universe. It will continue to travel out into the Milky Way even when it can no longer send signals back to Earth - according to NASA's estimations, for example, Voyager 2 will be within 1.7 light-years (9.7 trillion miles) of the star Ross 248 in about 40,000 years. In August 2012, the spacecraft entered interstellar space the space between the stars - and has been delivering data about this uncharted territory ever since. Remarkably, NASA states that Voyager 2 has enough fuel to keep running until about 2025, at which point the probe will be roughly 11.4 billion miles (18.4 billion kilometers) away from Earth. Today, Voyager 1, at a distance of 130 astronomical units, is the farthest human-made object from Earth, and it still regularly communicates with our planet.

Carl was born in New York City on November 9, 1934.

He was a consultant and adviser to NASA beginning in the 1950s - he briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon. Voyager 2 is the only human spacecraft to have flown past Neptune, making its data invaluable even today. Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996) played a leading role in the American space program from its very beginning. The spacecraft discovered five new moons and four rings around what is now considered the most distant planet from the sun in our solar system - Pluto hadn't been disqualified at the time. After Uranus, Voyager 2 then went on to make its closest flyby of Neptune on August 25, 1989, flying roughly 3,000 miles above the planet's surface. Sagan, part of Voyager’s imaging team, is credited with the idea of having Voyager 1 take images of Earth and its sibling planets.

Carl sagan voyager 1