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The Voyager 2 spacecraft was launched 5 days before I was born, almost 42 years ago. Her twin sister, Voyager 1, launched 16 days later, but it was still named "1" because it would be the first one to reach Jupiter and Saturn. <thread> 
They had to be launched at that precise moment to be able to take advantadge of the alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
The Voyagers have travelled over 18.000.000.000 km since then, way further from Earth than any other human device has ever been. Our own journeys back on Earth may have been less breathtaking, but we've also come a long way.
I was starting to walk when they reached Jupiter. I wasn't in a hurry and they were on a tight schedule.
My sister was born while Voyager 2 was approaching Saturn and Voyager 2 was just leaving it behind.
I was on 5th grade when Voyager 2 sent us the first close-up pictures we ever saw of Uranus and its moons. I think it was about this time that my parents got me Cosmos, the beautiful book that Carl Sagan wrote based on his TV series.
One of the things that impacted me more about the book was the description of the Voyager missions, the inmensity of it, and the beautiful pictures of Jupiter and its moons.
The other thing about the Voyagers that caught my attention as a kid was the Golden Record. We didn't expect these spaceships to keep sending us data for so long, but we knew they would reach interstellar space. What if they were found by an alien ship?
The Golden Records were created to represent life on Earth and human culture. Carl Sagan chaired the comitee that decided which images and sounds would be included, like these "Greetings to the Universe in 55 Languages" soundcloud.com/nasa/sets/gold…
By the time Voyager 2 reached Neptune I was already in high school. I remember hearing about the "Pale Blue Dot" picture in the news.
This beautiful picture is also a bit sad: it was the last picture that Voyager 2 took before its camera was disconnected. It would never again come near anything worth taking pictures of.
A few years later I started studying a Physics degree, at least in part thanks to Sagan's Cosmos and the Voyager sisters. Meanwhile, Voyager 1 surpassed Voyager 10's distance and became the human-made object farthest from Earth.
A few more years went by, big changes were coming for all of us. In 2005 Voyager 1 crossed the Termination Shock, the beginning of the end of the heliosphere. By that time I was planning to move to Amsterdam with the woman of my life.
While Voyager 1 was travelling across the heliosheath we did move to Amsterdam. A couple of years later Voyager 2 followed her sister into the final region of the heliosphere, and shortly after that our first daughter was born. Big changes indeed.
We moved back to Barcelona with our baby daughter and found a beautiful house for our family. A few months after moving in, our son was born. On my birthday that same year, and 35 years after leaving our planet, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space.
8 months ago, Voyager 2 left the heliosphere and became the second human-made object in interstellar space. Those two marvelous pieces of engineering have crossed our solar system, going so much further than we expected them to go. And they're still going.
The fact that we still receive data from them, that we can still send them commands, when we're still studying the data they sent us 30 years ago, is simply mindblowing.
Now the amazing teams of people that work in the Voyager programs are planning to disconnect some more instruments and subsytems to extend their lives a bit more. nasa.gov/feature/jpl/a-…
The Voyager sisters have shown us so much about the Universe, and there's so much more we can learn from them. I expect to be around for at least another 42 years, and it would be nice to keep hearing from you now and then. Long live @NASAVoyager!
