On September 5, 1977,
Voyager 1
, built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was launched from Cape Canaveral atop a Titan IIIE rocket. It’s still going, almost forty-seven years later and some 15 billion miles away: humanity’s “most distant emissary,” as a British writer recently put it, continuing its mission “to boldly go” where no human artifact has gone before (to vary the most famous split infinitive in television history).