NASA built this thing thirty-six years ago (in 1977) and it still works. Amazing.

Thirty-six years after it rocketed away from Earth, the plutonium-powered spacecraft has escaped the sun’s influence and is now cruising 11 1/2 billion miles away in interstellar space, or the vast, cold emptiness between the stars, NASA said Thursday.

And just in case it encounters intelligent life out there, it is carrying a gold-plated, 1970s-era phonograph record with multicultural greetings from Earth, photos and songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” along with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Louis Armstrong.

At this point in its journey, it takes seventeen hours for the Voyager signal to get back to Earth. My (very) rough math:

11,500,000,000 m / 186,000 mps = 61,827 seconds = 1,030 minutes = 17.17 hours

Cool.