[Suzy]

Thanks Tony. You prompted me to go and do some further reading on the Voyagers at the NASA site here. I came across a very interesting page of "Did You Know" s.
There's plenty more very interesting reading on the supplied link other than the tid bits I've given below.

A total of 11,000 workyears was devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the great pyramid at Giza to King Cheops.

A total of five trillion bits of scientific data had been returned to Earth by both Voyager spacecraft at the completion of the Neptune encounter. This represents enough bits to fill more than seven thousand music CDs.

The electronics and heaters aboard each nearly one-ton Voyager spacecraft can operate on only 400 watts of power, or roughly one-fourth that used by an average residential home in the western United States.

The tape recorder aboard each Voyager has been designed to record and playback a great deal of scientific data. The tape head should not begin to wear out until the tape has been moved back and forth through a distance comparable to that across the United States. Imagine playing a two-hour video cassette on your home VCR once a day for the next 33 years, without a failure.

Through the ages, astronomers have argued without agreeing on where the solar system ends. One opinion is that the boundary is where the Sun’s gravity no longer dominates – a point beyond the planets and beyond the Oort Cloud. This boundary is roughly about halfway to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. Traveling at speeds of over 35,000 miles per hour, it will take the Voyagers nearly 40,000 years, and they will have traveled a distance of about two light years to reach this rather indistinct boundary.

And if you have a look at this page on the NASA site, it even shows the running clock of km's as they travel. Wow, it's so amazing to see it tick over so fast, it made me feel really connected to the Voyagers!

And who could forget that very famous picture, "The Pale Blue Dot". When Voyager 1 was leaving our solar system,
Carl Sagen asked NASA to point Voyager at our Earth. What a stunning, memorable picture that was- there sat Earth so incredibly tiny, sitting on the large bright rays of our sun.