A giant threshold in the 49-year journey. New record from Voyager 1, which showed the location of the Earth to aliens

The Voyager 1 probe, launched into space by the US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1977, is preparing to become the first man-made vehicle to reach a distance of one light day from Earth.

The US space agency announced that the robotic spacecraft will exceed this historical threshold on Wednesday at 13.16 Turkish time.

A light day, which expresses the distance light travels in 24 hours, corresponds to approximately 26 billion kilometers.

Proceeding at a speed of approximately 61 thousand kilometers per hour in the vacuum of space, Voyager 1 already holds the title of the man-made object that has traveled farthest from Earth.

Astrophysicist Alan Cummings, a researcher at the Caltech Space Radiation Laboratory, has been working in the Voyager program since 1973.

"I see this as an engineering milestone that symbolizes the amazing lifespan of Voyager 1 and the engineering achievement of being able to communicate with it at this distance," Cummings told Reuters.

To measure huge distances in space, the concept of light year, which refers to the distance of approximately 9.5 trillion kilometers that a photon travels in a year, is generally used.

The Alpha Centauri system, which consists of three stars and is the closest stars to our solar system, is located approximately 4.24 light-years away from Earth.

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched 49 years ago to study planets in the outer solar system.

Voyager 1 was launched into space on the Titan IIIE-Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 5, 1977, 16 days after its twin, and surpassed Voyager 2 within a few months.

Cummings said Voyager 1 sent back a lot of new information about Jupiter, Saturn and the moons of these planets.

The vehicle discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and the previously undetected moons Thebe and Metis, and a G-ring with five new moons around Saturn.

Voyager 2 followed a different route to visit Uranus and Neptune after the launch in 1977.

Cummings stated that Voyager 2 will reach a distance of one light day from Earth nine years later, in November 2035.

In 2012, Voyager 1 crossed the outer boundary of the heliosphere, the bubble of particles and magnetic fields produced by the Sun, into interstellar space and continued collecting data.

The vehicle became the first spacecraft to report the energy spectrum of low-energy galactic cosmic rays, which cannot be observed inside the heliosphere due to the propulsion of the solar wind.

Cummings, an expert on cosmic rays, stated that these data are the holy grail of low-energy cosmic ray physics.

Voyager 2 also stepped into interstellar space in 2018.

Cummings, who joined the program at the age of 29 and is now 82 years old, explained that he joined the team by chance.

Cummings stated that the balloon cosmic ray experiment he conducted for his doctoral thesis at Caltech failed to land in Northern Canada and went one and a half times around the world, and said that the balloon was captured by the Soviet Union and crashed when it landed without a parachute.

Stating that he received a job offer in the Voyager Cosmic Ray Subsystem project in 1973 after the experiment was terminated, Cummings said, "Losing the balloon was lucky for me because the Voyager mission formed the backbone of my career. I have been working on this project and analyzing its data for 53 years."