Voyager 1 turns 35, will soon be the first man-made object to leave the solar system

Thirty-five years ago, NASA launched a spacecraft known as Voyager 1 into the skies over Florida. That space-traveling appliance has now traveled farther than any other man-made device -- some 11.3 billion miles or 121 times the distance between Earth and the sun. It is now hurtling through the boundary of our heliosphere (the farthest reaches of our sun's winds) at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour. Soon, nobody quite knows when, it will break into interstellar space, the first creation of life here on Earth to do so.

Less than two weeks after Voyager 1 launched in 1977, it was already 7.25 million miles away. (The moon, for comparison, is just 238,900 miles from Earth.) As it moved rapidly away, it captured this image of our planet from above Mt. Everest, on the nighttime side of the day's horizon.

Read more at The Atlantic.