NASA's Voyager 1 probe poised to achieve mega-distance milestone

NASA's Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, is on the verge of achieving a remarkable milestone - becoming the first human-made object to travel a light-day, a distance equal to the distance light travels in a day, which is approximately 16 billion miles (26 billion km). According to NASA, the spacecraft, which has been traveling at nearly 38,000 miles per hour through the vacuum of space, will reach that point from Earth on Wednesday at 5:16 AM ET (1016 GMT).

Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object, has already traversed beyond our solar system, entering interstellar space in 2012. The spacecraft, which has been operational for 53 years, continues to send back valuable data, carrying a Golden Record with images and sounds representing Earth's culture in the hopes of communicating with any extraterrestrial life that might encounter it.