THE FARTHEST—Voyager In Space will celebrate the magnificent Voyager probes, the men and women who built them, and the vision that propelled them farther than anyone could ever have hoped. Originally approved to travel only to Saturn and Jupiter, the spacecraft took advantage of a once-in-176-year planetary alignment and used gravity-assisted slingshot trajectories to extend the missions, with Voyager 2 also visiting Uranus and Neptune. The two spacecraft, equipped with less computing power than a cell phone, sent back unprecedented images and data from all four outer planets and their many spectacular moons.

Four decades later, Voyager 1 has traveled more than 12 billion miles and Voyager 2 more than 10 billion, and both nuclear-powered spacecraft continue to send back data. In 2012, Voyager 1, which is traveling at more than 320 million miles per year, became the first human-made object to enter interstellar space—leaving our solar system behind and ushering humanity into the interstellar age. Voyager 2 is expected to join it in interstellar space in the next few years, and billions of years from now, when our sun has flamed out and burned Earth to a cinder, the Voyagers and their Golden Records will still be sailing on—perhaps the only evidence that humanity ever existed.

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