When I finally sold my old Daihatsu Fourtrak it had over 250,000 miles on the clock – roughly the distance from the earth to the moon. But this impressive mileage pales into insignificance compared to NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft. So far,this remarkable machine has clocked up a staggering 12 billion miles and is still going strong! After a journey of 36 years, Voyager has finally reached the final frontier (as they use to say on Star Trek) and left our solar system to journey on across interstellar space. On the way it has visited Jupiter; providing us with some startling new information about its moons, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

About the size of my old Daihatsu and weighing 3/4 of a ton, Voyager was built to last. It’s powered by nuclear batteries which won’t run out until the 2020’s or beyond. However, radio messages from its transmitter now take 17 hours, travelling at light speed to reach us.

It’s a fascinating thought that barring a catastrophic collision in the vast emptiness of interstellar space, Voyager 1 could still be clocking up the miles long after the men who built it, indeed the whole of mankind has become extinct. In the event that Voyager may one day come into contact with an alien civilisation, it carries a gold phonograph record containing music and speech along with the sounds and images of earth.

I just hope the aliens can dig up an old record player to play it on!