Apparently Voyager 2 recently stopped making coherent sense in its transmissions back to earth recently. For those that don't know wtf Voyager 2 is, it's one of two probes (Voyager 1 and 2, imagine that) that were launched to study the planets back in the 70s.

Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program

Voyager 1 is the man-made object most distant from earth at ~16.9 billion kilometers (10.5 billion miles) from Earth, well past Pluto and into the heliosphere.

At any rate, radio transmissions currently take around 13 hours to travel in one direction, but they think that something happened to a memory module that's causing data corruption.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/201 ... mpaign=rss

I just think it's awesome that we've got probes that far out. In the next few years, the probes are supposed to cross the termination shock into true interstellar space. Basically the sun creates a bubble around the solar system via its solar wind.. the termination shock is where the solar wind beats up against galactic dust or whatever.

*edit*
bleh, ok, according to wikipedia, they crossed the termination shock in 2004, but have not yet crossed the heliopause.

Wow, that's actually fascinating. I didn't know we had shit so far out there.

Jeez, kinda embarrassing that it's malfunctioning. Okay, it was built in the 70's but you'd think a simple (and ultra expensive) radio signal transmission system would be pretty reliable.

I wonder if it's ever returned any valuable data.

Also, I was surprised to read it takes less than a day for the signal to arrive to Earth.

Awesome. I am surprised its still up there, i would've thought that space debris had demolished and killed it by now, unless they made it in a shark like form and fitted a friggin auto-aiming laser to its head