• Question: what is the furthest anyone has ever travelled in space?????????

    Asked by jaamazing to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      The furthest a person has gone is to the Moon. Well technically the people who didn’t land on the Moon in the Apollo missions (each mission had 3 people – 2 of which landed on the Moon) went round the back of the Moon – so that’s the furthest away from us.

      The most distant man-made objects are the Voyager probes. These were launched in the 1970s to visit the outer planets – and most of the best pictures of Jupiter and Saturn you have seen will come from these missions. They are still going, and still sending back signals. Voyager 1 is the most distant of the two and (via Google and NASA) I see it’s 17,916,000,000km (or 33 light hours) from Earth at its last report.

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Like Karen says, the furthest any person has ever been was the orbit of the moon. Quite a few people have been in circumlunar (round the moon) flight, maybe 30.

      When the lunar module went down to the surface of the moon, they left one of the astronauts in orbit, meaning he would have been the loneliest (and furthest away from anyone else) person in existence!

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      If you mean the furthest distance from Earth then it was when many of the Apollo astronauts travelled around the back of the Moon and came back to Earth, which is about 310,000 km away from the centre of the Earth. (That happened before they landed on the Moon, because they wanted to be sure they could go that far and get back.)

      But some astronauts (the Russian word is cosmonauts) have spent over a year in space, inside space-stations like the International Space Station or Mir. They will have travelled much more than 310,000 km in space, but just going round and round the Earth.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      People haven’t travelled very far – one of the big problems in sending people into space is the time it takes for messages to travel backwards and forwards, and this increases the further away you get.

      I guess the furthest anyone has been away is when one of the lunar landers went round the far side of the moon, which is only about 400,000 km away.
      But the furthest distance travelled was by a Russian astronaut who stayed on the Mir space station for over a year, and went round the earth over 7000 times, for a distance of about 300,765,000 km

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