On September 12, 2013, NASA officially announced that Voyager 1 had left the solar system and begun it’s journey into interstellar space. Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977 to study the outer Solar System and interstellar medium. As of August 2013, it is 125 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun. One AU is equivalent to the average distance of the Earth to the Sun, roughly 145.5 billion miles. Voyager is currently the furthest man-made object from Earth.
As a throwback to the year Voyager 1 was launched, we found NASA’s Highlights of the 1977 Aeronautics and Space Report. The report outlines some of NASA’s projects at the time, including the Space Shuttle, Voyagers, Landsat, Spacelab, HEAO-1 and energy research.