Scientists at JPL have a bit of a mystery on their hands at the moment, Voyager 1 (pictured above), a spacecraft launched in 1977 and currently 14.5 billion miles from Earth has started sending back telemetry data that is simply impossible. No one knows why this is the case and in all other respects the craft is operating normally. It's amazing to think that this little tin can of a spaceship is so far away now that it takes roughly two days for messages (travelling at the speed of light) to make the round trip from home. Let's hope that this current glitch (there have been several past glitches) won't incapacitate this stoic craft and the uber brains at JPL/NASA can figure it out and fix it remotely.
Voyager is now travelling through interstellar space meaning it's left the region of influence of our Sun and is truly in Star Trek territory! The distances involved are staggering, our Sun exerts it's influence out to a zone called the Heliosheath which is around 3.25 billion miles thick, that's pretty thick, still not as thick as Nadine Dorries of course but certainly not a distance you'd want to sit on a flight for, it makes you wonder if we'll ever find little green men, statistically there should be tons of them out there but the distances are so great that we'll probably destroy our planet (or Putin will) long before their EM transmissions ever reach us.
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