Amazing accomplishment. Voyager 1 is currently 18 billion kilometers from the sun. It was launched in 1977 and it's plutonium power source is expected to allow it to continue communicating with earth until 2025. It takes 17 hours to send a command or receive a response from the spacecraft (lightspeed).
http://www.nature.com/news/voyager-1-has...ce-1.13735
A selection from the golden record onboard V1
Quote:Question: How fast are the Voyager computers?
Answer:Not very fast compared to today’s standards... A typical instruction takes 80 microseconds, that is about 8,000 instructions per second. To put this in perspective, a 2013 top-of-the-line smartphone runs at 1.5 GHz with four or more processors yielding over 14 billion instructions per second. http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html
![[Image: voyager1-16122010.jpg]](http://i457.photobucket.com/albums/qq300/tony8304/misc/voyager1-16122010.jpg)
V1 looking back (2010).
http://www.space.com/22781-voyager-1-int...video.html
Score one for the rocket scientists.