• Question: What is the furthest distance from earth that a human has travelled?

    Asked by 383radg37 to Ajay, Kate, Kuntal, Pip, Reka on 7 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Pip Millington

      Pip Millington answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the USA carried out the Apollo programme of sending manned missions to the Moon.

      The crew of Apollo 13 never made it to the Moon’s surface because of an oxygen tank explosion. In order to get back to Earth they needed to take an unplanned detour around the Moon using the Moon’s gravity to help them take the right course. To date, the crew of Apollo 13 are the only people to have seen the “dark side of the moon” and were 248,655 miles away from Earth at their furthest point.

      If you remove the stipulation of being alive, the astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto, has travelled past Pluto already and is heading out of the solar system as a small sample of his ashes are contained within the spacecraft New Horizons, which at the time of writing is about 93,000,000 miles away from Earth!

    • Photo: Kuntal Singh

      Kuntal Singh answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      This is a really good question. I didn’t know the answer to it but did a quick google search on this. Apparently, the farthest we have ever been away from Earth was 400171 km. This was achieved in 1970 during NASA’s Apollo 13 mission. Pip’s answer (below) has already given you a nice explanation of why this journey was taken so I will tell you a fun exercise to do. You can find out what time the International Space Station will be flying over your area. Search for it.

Comments