As recent as 100 years ago, immigrants traveled by ship from Europe, across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. Then, many of them rode the train or stage coach west to what is now North Dakota.

Those were long and daunting trips. If you read the diaries of anyone who was on one of those ships from Liverpool, Le Havre or Olso, it was a harrowing experience.

There’s a totally different kind of traveler now and although they don’t have any people aboard, they have traveled through some mind-boggling space.

The Voyager 1 and 2, unmanned spacecrafts were launched the year I was a senior in high school, 1977. That was 49 years ago and both are still transmitting data back to Earth.

Voyager 1 is now the farthest human-made object in space. It keeps running with its remaining active science instruments, which include a magnotometer and a plasma wave subsystem. Voyager 2 is also operating outside the solar system, communicating data through its own surviving instrument systems.

They are both nuclear powered spacecraft and each loses about 4 watts of power every year.

When we think about radio and TV signals being transmitted, there are a number of obstacles such as the horizon, buildings, mountains, trees. The farther you are away from a radio or TV signal, the more likely it is that one of those obstacles will disrupt the signal.

Now think of the Voyager spacecraft. Voyager 1 transmits on the S-band, which is a satellite signal on 2114.68 megahertz. Voyager 2 transmits on the S-band as well on 2113.31 megahertz. So both are transmitting on precise FM frequencies.

But that isn’t even the astounding part of this. Consider the distance and the obstacles.

For Voyager 1, it takes a signal transmitted from the spacecraft 23.5 hours to reach earth. That’s a day, just to receive the signal. And when you consider the distance, 16 billion miles, can anyone even comprehend a distance like that?

For Voyager 2 it’s nearly the same. It takes 19.5 hours for a signal to reach earth from approximately 13 billion miles out in space.

Now think about the obstacles and they aren’t trees or buildings. Extreme distance, extreme signal weakness, severe hardware aging and interstellar noise are just a few of the hiccups the Voyager twins have to get signals back to NASA.

There’s also the “mountains.” The asteroid belt lies between Mars and Jupiter. Thousands of asteroids made of rock spin around the sun just like we do. And if the transmitted signal hits one of those asteroids, it will bounce off into space. So, it’s also a matter of logistics.

I recently read some articles about the two Sputnik rockets that launched in 1957 and all the questions that arose from those two events. There was also a lot of speculation at the time of how the United States would be able to send a rocket into orbit.

Today, we have two traveling in deep space and they are continuing to function. It’s just a bizarre marvel of science that this is happening.

In 2022, the Mars rover Perseverance and its helicopter Ingenuity kept me entertained through Covid. Ingenuity flew 129 minutes equaling 10.5 miles and has since stopped functioning. Perseverance remains active on the Martian surface, but there have been times its solar batteries have waned because of the dust on the surface of Mars.

But Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 keep going. What will they discover next?