“As objects travel faster and faster, they get heavier and heavier – the heavier they get, the harder it is to achieve acceleration, so you never get to the speed of light,” says Roger Rassool, a physicist at the University of Melbourne, Australia. “A photon actually has no mass,” he says.

The speed of sound is variable and depends on the properties of the substance through which the wave is travelling. In solids, the speed of transverse (or shear) waves depends on the shear deformation under shear stress (called the shear modulus), and the density of the medium.

The 8 fastest man-made objects ever

• NASA X-43 – 7,000 mph. An X-43A artist concept drawing. (
• Space Shuttles, 17,500 mph. The Space Shuttle Columbia on lift-off. (
• Apollo 10 Capsule – 24,791 mph.
• Stardust – 28,856 mph.
• Voyager 1 – 38,610 mph.
• An iron manhole cover – 125,000 mph.
• Helios Satellites – 157,078 mph.

The Voyagers’ journey will continue indefinitely, but we will no longer travel with them. “It’s cooling off, the spacecraft is getting colder all the time and the power is dropping,” Ed Stone, the mission’s project scientist and a physicist at Caltech, said during a news conference held Oct.

After Voyager 1 took its last image (the “Solar System Family Portrait” in 1990), the cameras were turned off to save power and memory for the instruments expected to detect the new charged particle environment of interstellar space. Mission managers removed the software from both spacecraft that controls the camera.

Note: Because Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 1 is speeding away from the inner solar system, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain times of year….Instrument Status.

20 hours

NASA said that the successful call to Voyager 2 is just one indication that the dish will be fully back online as planned in February 2021. Both Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 have traveled well beyond their original destinations. The spacecraft were built to last five years and conduct close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn.

five years

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still functioning today, making them the longest-running and most-distant space mission in history. Though they are each taking different paths, both spacecraft are still screaming their way out of the solar system. And they still have a long way to go.