IN BRIEF (Page 8)

United States

40 years since Voyager launches

Forty years after blasting off, Earth's most distant ambassadors the twin Voyager spacecraft are still going strong. This Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of NASA's launch of Voyager 2, now almost 17.7 billion kilometers distant. It left Cape Canaveral, Florida on Aug 20, 1977, to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 1 followed a few weeks later and is ahead of Voyager 2. It's humanity's farthest spacecraft at 20.9 billion km away and is the world's only craft to reach interstellar space, or the space between stars.