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The original was posted on /r/space by /u/Piskoro on 2025-07-09 19:20:10+00:00.
Everybody probably knows that Voyager 1 is the farthest such object today, at 166 AU and rising from the Sun. But that wasn't always the case and at some point it gets fuzzy and I'll get to it.
Since the late 18th century that record was held by manned and unmanned balloons up to 15.2 km in 1893, then by the artillery shells of the Paris Gun in 1918 at 42.3 km, then V-2 rockets since 1942 at 84.5 km, in 1944 reaching space at 174 km, then a bunch of American-launched suborbital rockets first at 184 km in 1946 ending at Farside rockets reaching at least 3200 km in 1957, then Vanguard 1 satellite with an apogee of 3969 km,
Then the record was taken on January 2nd of 1959 by the Luna 1 probe which two days later performed a lunar flyby and entered heliocentric orbit, it probably reached roughly 2 AU after two years of slowly outpacing the Earth when it was at conjunction with the Sun. The other objects that left the Earth-Moon sphere of influence at the time, Pioneer 4, Ranger 3, and Venera 1 were too slow to catch up to its distance from the Earth in time.
But now we're entering a fog, maybe one of them beat the record shortly after, once they reached conjunction with the Sun. Or maybe one of the other objects, sent to heliocentric orbit after it, did. That being Pioneers 5-9, Ranger 5, Mariners 2-9, S-IVBs of Apollos 8-12 plus LM Snoopy, Luna 6, Venera 2, Marses 1-3, Zonds 2 & 3. Especially those headed for Mars might've taken the record, there was plenty of time for the orbits to align for it before...
Pioneer 10 in 1972, which was the first to leave the inner Solar System and reach the orbits of all the outer planets from Jupiter to Neptune. Then it was eventually outpaced by Voyager 1 in February 1998 in its distance from the Sun (though I have a hard time checking when it was farther from the Earth specifically, since the Earth is faster than either of them there might be some funny shenanigans happening here).
So if anybody has the knowledge, skills, and/or resources to fill in this timeline, you're more than welcome. This is my query for you. Plenty of the objects I mentioned have some of their orbital parameters easily findable, even if I don't know which way they're oriented, though some might be more difficult to figure out.